A day after the Maharashtra Legislative Council elections, Saturday is another big results day as votes are counted for 13 Assembly bypolls in seven states.
Although the election results will not matter much in the larger context of national politics, their importance lies in the optics of it all. For the BJP and its allies, a victory will strengthen what it has been saying since June 4: it won the Lok Sabha elections and not the Opposition, even though it performed better than what several people expected. For the Opposition, a victory in most of these bypolls will give it a major boost going into the Budget Session and firmly establish that the parliamentary poll results were not something one-off.
Then there are the local narratives: can Kamal Nath swing things around with a win in Amarwara in his former stronghold Chhindwara; can the Trinamool Congress (TMC) continue its dominant run in West Bengal by winning the four bypolls, three of which are in seats the BJP won in 2021 and led in the parliamentary polls this time around; will Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu’s wife Kamlesh Thakur win; And can Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann lead the AAP on the path to recovery by helping it win Jalandhar West?
Maharashtra MLC polls
For the Opposition, especially the Congress, a good showing in the Assembly bypolls will come as a much-required relief after how the Maharashtra Legislative Council elections turned out.
The ruling Mahayuti alliance in the western state, which suffered a major setback in the Lok Sabha polls, not only managed to keep its flock together but also secured more than the minimum five additional votes it needed from the Opposition, winning all nine of the 11 MLC seats that it contested.
Not only were the results a setback for the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) — which was riding high on recent Lok Sabha results, in which it had won 31 out of the 48 seats in the state — they have also, for now, put to rest rumors about some MLAs of the Ajit Pawar-led NCP and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena being in touch with the MVA to cross over ahead of the Assembly elections later this year.
How the after-effects of the MLC polls play out in Maharashtra politics and what effect they have, if any, will be among the things to watch out for in the days and weeks to come. At present, things are on a knife-edge in Maharashtra, with the difference between the Mahayuti and the MVA a mere 0.3 percentage points. As the MLC polls show, state politics is again starting to heat up after a month of lull since the Lok Sabha election results and there is more to come.
Key BJP meeting in Rajasthan
The Rajasthan BJP’s working committee will meet in Jaipur on Saturday. Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Chief Minister Bhajan Lal Sharma, and BJP national general secretary Dushyant Gautam will be among the top leaders present at the meeting. All party MPs from the state, ministers, and more than 8,000 party workers are expected to attend the meeting, according to state president CP Joshi.
In one of the sessions, four MPs from the state who have become Central ministers will be honoured. In another, the blueprint of the BJP’s action plan for the coming bypolls in the state will be discussed.
In context: The meeting comes in the backdrop of the setback that the party suffered in the Lok Sabha elections in the state, losing parliamentary seats for the first time in a decade. Of Rajasthan’s 25 Lok Sabha seats, the Congress-led alliance managed to win 11. It had drawn a blank in the last two parliamentary elections.
Last week, state minister Kirodi Lal Meena announced his resignation from the government. Although it has not been accepted yet and there is talk of Meena’s unhappiness, it nevertheless marks the sidelining of several old BJP hands in the state, the most prominent among whom is former CM Vasundhara Raje.
Illustrating the problems that the party faces, a senior BJP leader recently told Hamza Khan, “There is no general secretary (Organisation), no state in-charge, the state president is also an MP, and the CM is a first-time MLA. … The feedback system is broken too. Earlier, we had inputs from the RSS as well.”
Also happening today:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in Mumbai, where he will unveil and launch infrastructure projects in Maharashtra worth more than Rs 29,400 crore.
Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia is in Guwahati on his first visit to the North East since taking charge of the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region. Scindia is also scheduled to travel to Shillong to meet Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma on Saturday.
— With PTI inputs