BJP
cannot afford to rest on its laurel
Maharashtra and Haryana prepare to go to the polls next
month. The Lok Sabha election this year
saw Bharatiya Janata Party wave sweeping through the two States. The Congress won just one of the 10 Lok
Sabha seats in Haryana, and in Maharashtra, in alliance with the Nationalist
Congress Party a total of only six of 48 seats.
Both the Prithviraj Chavan government in Maharashtra and
the Bhupinder Singh Hooda government in Haryana have little to show for their
years in power. In Maharashtra, BJP wants the leadership of the alliance
with the Shiv Sena since the national
party performed much better than the regional ally in the Lok Sabha polls. But the
chief ministership is likely to go to the Shiv Sena in the event of the
alliance coming to power. The Sena supremo, Uddhav Thackeray, is likely to
stake his claim instead of attempting to wield power through ‘remote control’
as his father Bal Thackeray did. In
Haryana, the BJP seems to be in a better position because it does not need an
ally to come to power over there.
The BJP can't afford to rest on its laurel; it has to
keep on winning the Assembly polls also, especially in the up-coming elections
in Haryana and Maharastra. For this to happen, the BJP needs to do a lot of
ground-work. It has to project reliable leaders as Chief Ministerial candidates
in the two states whom all sections of people can trust, and keep away leaders
who are notorious for their speeches and actions which usually cause communal
disharmony.
In Maharashtra, the Congress-NCP-alliance is likely to
face some problem because of large scale corruption committed by the leaders of
both party. The Union election was won by Modi to a
large extent aided by the public anger against the performance of the UPA
government. Assembly elections are fought on different parameters and hence
neither the voting percentage is to be conceived as a defeat for the ruling
party at the centre nor the upswing for the opposition parties. Each has to be
viewed in its own domain and on merits. Indian electorates have become very
wise and they decide on the basis of what will serve their best interest. So
whichever party wins it would be good only if they are able to govern in close
coordination and harmony with the centre and the centre too reciprocates
appropriately.
While there is no doubt that the Modi wave continues to
sweep the two election-bound states of Maharashtra and Haryana, the Indian electorate has definitely matured
over the years and does view the two elections - LS and Assembly - from two
different angles.
The assembly elections are always fought on the lines of
performance of the state government, corruption, alliance etc. Central
government has little scope to influence the outcome of the state elections.
UPA's approach was legislative: RTI,
RTE, NREGA etc, with lax monitoring of execution. UPA's approach was of dream
budget and sleeping for rest of the year. Even radical reforms will happen
after setting the governance machine right, including governance of banks and
public sector. Price rise continues to be concern. Subsidies continue to be a
concern. Corruption, NPAs and crony capitalism needs to be addressed. Public
sector should be revived, selling off non-performing ones. A new economic model
that is neither socialistic nor capitalistic is needed.
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