With Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi > announcing the election schedule for West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry, the campaign for a most intriguing cluster of Assembly elections can be said to have begun. Taken together, these four States and one Union Territory do not carry spectacular weight for the ruling BJP at the Centre. The party would obviously be anxious to build upon its Lok Sabha showing in Assam, and wrest power in the State from the Congress, which has ruled since 2001. The BJP has > named Sarbananda Sonowal as its chief ministerial candidate, as part of a strategy to give its campaign focus and avoid exposing Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the kind of direct political face-off that its adversaries exploited in the Bihar Assembly elections. The BJP has also finalised a > tie-up with the Asom Gana Parishad and the > Bodoland People’s Front . For the BJP, Assam has long been a cherished prize, and it has always seen itself to be in with a chance, given the State’s ethnic and communal fault lines. But the coming election has more significance as it would test the party’s capacity to claim the terrain marked on its 2014 general election victory map. After the stumbles in the Delhi and Bihar elections, Assam would in part determine whether the ‘Modi wave’ of two years ago was just a singular event, or whether it is a realistic indicator of the party’s potential to extend its geographical reach that demands of the Prime Minister to be a constant campaigner.
The BJP’s ambitions will obviously be limited in the other poll-bound States. Yet, it is in these face-offs that implications for its government at the Centre and its prospects in future Assembly elections may be found. The 2014 ‘ > Modi wave ’ gathered momentum in large measure because of a scattered opposition to the BJP. Its > Bihar setback in 2015 was on account of the coming together of parties opposed to the BJP. The alliances that are being formed for the elections are not as natural as Bihar’s, and should they succeed in forging a durable understanding, the prospects of large chunks of the anti-BJP vote getting pooled would grow. That there is a > demand for an informal understanding between the Left parties and the Congress in West Bengal even as they stare down each other in Kerala may indicate, first, opposition unity against the Trinamool Congress — but such arrangements would foreshadow greater anti-BJP consolidation among parties in Parliament and outside. That the BJP, which during different periods shared power at the Centre with both the DMK and the AIADMK, now has no leading regional party with it in Tamil Nadu hints at the > uncertain prospects it faces in finding more support in the Rajya Sabha. The learning is for the Narendra Modi government to absorb: that the polarising strategy of the Sangh Parivar and even some of the Union Ministers will make the task of governing India increasingly difficult.
