THE loss of the State of Jharkhand in the legislative elections is going to weigh heavy on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which could not retain the grip on electoral politics. Superior performance of the three-party alliance of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), Congress, and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has snatched the State away from the BJP, as was predicted by almost all exit polls. This loss within a couple of months after the party failed to form Government in Maharashtra, now adds up to the overall loss of the party’s electoral influence in as many as five States in a year shows that the country’s biggest political party will have to start looking inward for reasons for its continued tough times, particularly when it has scored a landslide victory in the Lok Sabha elections just a few months ago. 

 

There is little doubt that the party leadership will get into a huddle immediately to analyse the causes of the setback in Jharkhand. It must have already found reasons for the setback also in Maharashtra where its political coup floundered for obvious reasons and it had to sit on the Opposition benches after having fallen prey to dirty tricks of its own partner Shiv Sena whose leader Mr. Uddhav Thackeray has now become Chief Minister. The developments in Jharkhand, obviously, have only added to the BJP’s concern about its own primacy.

 

Political observers believe that the BJP suffered in Jharkhand because of internal politics that saw Chief Minister Mr. Raghubar Das pitting himself against an extremely popular leader like Mr. Arjun Munda. They also suspect that Mr. Raghubar Das could not assess the tribal aspiration as he was himself a non-tribal and could not connect with the electorate well.

 

Another factor that led to the debacle was the alliance the JMM, Congress, and the RJD formed, limiting the BJP’s chance still further as there was no party with which it could form a lobby. Of course, Jharkhand has been a State with swinging political fortunes and uncertain electoral outcomes. The BJP’s think-tank could not fathom those uncertainties.

 

These local reasons must have affected the BJP’s electoral prospects all right, but there is a need to assess what actually went wrong from top to bottom -- that is from the electoral strategy to campaign pitch. The BJP’s top leadership will have to take a good second look at the party’s overall ways and means and assess what actually might have caused the decline.

 

As the central ruling party, the BJP naturally has an advantage as well as a disadvantage. As more and more Opposition parties are operating in an alliance mode and putting up joint front, the BJP is beginning to sense a lot of heat as well as isolation. These factors have affected its electoral prospects in some sectors of the electoral arena.

However, it is necessary to separate the BJP’s losses in five States -- Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh in one segment; and Maharashtra and Jharkhand in another. In the first segment, what worked against the BJP was the anti-incumbency factor, while in Maharashtra and Jharkhand isolation caused the defeat. The BJP’s leadership will have to evolve altogether different strategies to tackle these two different challenges.

 

It is quite possible that the current anti-CAA protests affected the party’s prospects in Jharkhand to some extent as they actually forced an immediate change in the national political narrative even as the State went to polls. The counter-campaign of the BJP will certainly offer an effective answer to the anti-CAA protests. But it will have to come up with a superior response to the Opposition strategy of forming alliances, no matter how strange, and isolate the BJP in the electoral battles. The BJP’s leadership will have to take into consideration these factors as well.