Swore to remove the Indian National Congress from India’s political stage: BJP

With the three large states in the Hindi heartland Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh going out of their hold, the BJP’s slogan of ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ suffers a setback.

Very few slogans have had a game-changing effect in elections in the last 70-odd years of our democratic experiment. Indira Gandhi’s ‘Garibi hatao’ was one such slogan. In 2014, BJP’s ace campaigner Narendra Modi enthralled his audience with another such powerful slogan,‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ or an India free of Congress. Neither political analysts nor the Congress party took it seriously.

But an overwhelming majority of the voters seemed to have taken a fancy for the slogan and punished the Congress with 44 seats in Lok Sabha, lowest ever for the more than a century old party.

The Congress’ slide continued further and at one stage, the Congress is believed to have represented less than six per cent of the population and ruled over just two states, Karnataka and Mizoram. The BJP, on the other hand, had a free run in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Assam. Incidentally, all these were states ruled by the Congress.States like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh are the ones where the Congress has been a no-show for quite some time now.

Electoral arithmetic clearly proves that the BJP’s best chances of winning are in those states where the Congress is powerful and or is in direct contest with the BJP. As for the Congress, the best bet for winning, as in the case of recently concluded elections, is in BJP-ruled states. It has drawn little or no support in Telangana in its fight against the regional party TRS and has lost to another regional party MNF in Mizoram. Strange as it may appear, both the Congress and the BJP stand to gain only when they are pitted against one another. Both parties seem to draw a blank when they are faced with regional parties.

The unwelcome fallout of ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ for the BJP would be to have a direct contest with regional parties sporting regional identity and endowed with strong local leadership.It is more or less the same with the Congress too.BJP strategists may like to deliberate on this and reframe their slogan to something better than eliminating the Congress.