Jharkhand and Maharashtra Assembly election results present two utterly contrasting pictures. The BJP's desperate attempt to capture Jharkhand by riding on an unmitigated anti-Muslim hate campaign met with a spectacular defeat, but in Maharashtra the party managed to reverse the Lok Sabha results on a scale that defies any easy explanation. Alongside these two Assembly elections, there were also a good number of by-polls including two Lok Sabha constituencies and as many as forty-eight Assembly constituencies spread over fourteen states. The Congress managed to retain the two Lok Sabha seats (the Nanded seat in Maharashtra by a very narrow margin though), but the BJP/NDA managed to partially improve its strength in the Assembly by-polls. We must also note that the BJP/NDA gains in UP have been won through administrative heavy-handedness and virtual disenfranchisement of large sections of Muslim voters.
In many ways the November outcome and the Haryana and J&K results preceding it can be seen as an early reality check since the denting of the BJP's majority in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The Sangh-BJP establishment had drawn up elaborate plans to win this mini round and its plans worked in Haryana and Maharashtra. In both these states, the BJP success has been scripted by the strategic combination of OBC consolidation and communal polarisation complemented by a clever local fragmentation of opposition votes and huge application of money power. The Lok Sabha elections had come as a warning bell for the BJP/NDA in Haryana and especially in Maharashtra and the BJP made the fullest use of the post-parliamentary poll interregnum outsmarting and outpacing the INDIA coalition campaign.
We must also note that the BJP's poll strategy was only an extension of the Operation Lotus campaign orchestrated by the Modi government to dethrone the Uddhav Thackeray government in 2022. The BJP could not possibly have won the Maharashtra elections in 2024 without first usurping power in June 2022 through making a complete mockery of the fundamental principles of parliamentary democracy. While there is a lot of discussion now about the impact of the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana launched just four months before the announcement of the elections and the meticulous micromanagement done by the RSS, we cannot ignore the pivotal role that Adani played in calling the shots in Maharashtra. Also Maharashtra has never witnessed the brazen use of cash on such an astounding scale, the ECI itself admitting to confiscation of cash worth nearly 1,000 crore in these elections, nearly seven times more than the previous election figure.
But the strategy that worked for the BJP in Haryana and Maharashtra failed spectacularly in Jharkhand. The Modi government had deployed a very similar strategy in Jharkhand complete with the obstructionist role of the Governor's office and the politics of vendetta and persecution that saw Hemant Soren being sent to jail ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. The crossing over of former CM Champai Soren to the BJP pointed to a deeper conspiracy to destabilise the Hemant Soren government before the Assembly elections by engineering large scale defections. Before defeating the BJP's hate campaign in the election, the Hemant Soren government had to withstand this destabilisation design. From the politics of vendetta and destabilisation to hate campaigns and social engineering, all the BJP’s core strategies failed or backfired and the party has had to suffer a comprehensive defeat in Jharkhand.
Champai Soren has been the only BJP candidate to win from a ST reserved constituency out of the total of Jharkhand's 28 constituencies reserved for the state's indigenous people. The BJP also lost in a big way in Godda-Deoghar region and in parts of Palamu and North Chhotanagpur divisions. Most reassuring has been the emphatic rejection of the BJP's hate agenda in Jharkhand which revolved around a sinister attempt to pit Adivasis against Muslims by scaring the Adivasi population about losing their land, livelihood and daughters to so-called ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’. With the newly formed Jharkhand Loktantrik Krantikari Morcha led by Jairam Mahato effectively replacing the BJP ally All Jharkhand Students Union, the BJP found itself virtually bereft of any alliance worth its name. In contrast, the INDIA coalition parties comprising the JMM, Congress, RJD and CPI(ML) complemented each other and put up a formidable social and political barrier to the BJP's hate-filled divisive agenda.
The unification of the erstwhile Marxist Coordination Committee with the CPI(ML) and the coming together of the legacies of Comrade AK Roy and the CPI(ML) movement played a significant role in pushing the BJP back in the Dhanbad-Bokaro region. Contesting for the first time as part of a coalition in Jharkhand Assembly elections, CPI(ML) fielded only four candidates in these elections with the JMM even forcing a 'friendly contest' in one of these four seats. The loss of the party's traditional Bagodar seat notwithstanding, the regaining of the Dhanbad district seats Nirsa and Sindri, the latter after a string of five successive defeats, has the potential of re-energising a Left revival in Jharkhand and playing a bigger role in resisting corporate plunder and communal hate.
The Left also picked up two seats in Maharashtra with the CPI(M) retaining the Dahanu (ST) seat in Palghar district and the Peasants and Workers Party winning the Sangole seat in Solapur district contesting outside of the MVA alliance. The by-polls in West Bengal held up the prospect of a broader unity of the Left with the CPI(M) supporting the CPI(ML) in the industrial area seat of Naihati in the North 24 Parganas district adjacent to Kolkata. There are no signs yet of the Left recovering its lost electoral ground, but with the BJP votes declining the Left must persist in the attempt to forge a broader unity and build agitations on the burning issues facing the people.
The November results have come right before the impending winter session of the Lok Sabha and just on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of India and the fourth anniversary of the historic farmers' movement. The indictment of the Adani group by the US Department of Justice has further exposed the Adani group and the corrupt Modi-Adani nexus. The Left and the INDIA coalition must take the Maharashtra poll debacle in their stride and intensify the battle to save India's democracy from the continuing fascist assault and defend the rights and interests of the people in the face of India's deepening economic crisis.
