The Indian National Congress (simply called the Congress), India’s oldest political party, was the largest party in the 2018 Rajasthan legislature election with just one seat short of a simple majority and formed a government with the support of independents and smaller parties. Thus, he had managed to wrest power from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which secured a landslide victory in 2013. This victory was one of three major ones won by Congress in 2018 with assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh as well. he won, a tremendous performance by a party that was totally decimated by the BJP in the 2014 General Election and subsequent caucuses. However, the party’s persistence with its old guards alienated promising young leaders, and as in Madhya Pradesh for Jyotiraditya Scindia in March this year, dissent also grew in Rajasthan with its dynamic leader Sachin Pilot erupting into open revolt on July 12, 2020 after a series of reported attempts by Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot to sideline him, claiming the support of Congress 19-21 lawmakers, reducing the ruling coalition to almost a minority. dramas that were witnessed in the last five years, basically engineered by the BJP’s takeover tactics.
Interestingly, in this crisis in Rajasthan, the young rebel leader Sachin Pilot had not joined the BJP immediately like Scindia and canceled two press conferences planned by him in the last two days. The Congress party, in bonhomie with the old Gehlot guard, sacked Pilot from the posts of Senior Deputy Minister and Head of State Congress along with two ministers and their supportive legislators. However, Pilot had made no move against it and he reportedly said that he was being slandered by spreading the rumor that he would join the BJP; Pilot further said that he was still a congressman and that he was still with the Gandhi family in the party high command. Meanwhile, the Rajasthan Congress petitioned the speaker of the assembly for the disqualification of all dissenting lawmakers which, if passed, would prevent them from voting on a likely no-confidence motion in the near future, favoring the Chief Minister to demonstrate a majority of it. Interestingly too, the BJP had not actively played its cards, particularly in view of the Rajasthan Chief Minister’s allegations that the BJP had been stealing Congressional MLAs in collusion with Pilot, as was done in Madhya Pradesh with Scindia.
Regardless of how the Rajasthan drama ultimately turns out, it is being seen as one of the absolute political thrillers enacted by the BJP in its indomitable bid to conquer as many Indian states as possible. In the historic 2014 General Election, for the first time since 1984, the BJP emerged as the only party to win an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, with a tally of 282 seats out of 545, which rose further. to 336 after accommodating their allies in the government formed by the National Democratic Alliance. The Congress party lost the election by pathetic numbers largely due to corruption scams in its ten-year rule prior to 2014, and many political commentators predicted its removal from Indian politics as a result. As if to justify this prediction, the BJP went on to win almost every state assembly election up to 2017, including landslides in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, thus earning itself an invincible label. Though he failed to win a majority in Bihar in 2015, he enacted a thriller in 2017 by forming a government in alliance with Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (Secular). Subsequently, in state elections in which it again failed to win a majority, the party crafted alliances with regional parties to oust the Congress, even when the latter was the largest party at various times, such as in the states of Goa, Manipur and Meghalaya. In other states like Nagaland and Mizoram, he brought the regional parties into the NDA helping them win. In 2016, the BJP won a landslide victory in Assam; in Tripura in 2018 when he seized power in a state ruled by the left for decades. Thus, in 2018, it directly or indirectly established its authority in the entire northeast of India, a traditional stronghold of Congress in addition to its absolute dominance in the north, center and west of India with the sole exception of Punjab. In the south, Karnataka bounced back from a Congress coalition government in 2019 through another political drama after the BJP failed to form a government in the 2018 assembly elections despite being the largest party.
The location of the first very dramatic and lengthy political thriller was Arunachal Pradesh, another state in northeast India. Congress won the 2014 assembly election here and during late 2015 to late 2016 a lot of drama ensued with unpredictable twists and turns until a BJP government was finally established. As usual, the mess began with dissent within Congress and with a proactive Governor things turned explosive: assembly session in a hotel; intervention of the Supreme Court; president’s rule; suicide of a former Chief Minister; removal of the Governor and reigns of four Chief Ministers during the term with the fourth first being sworn in as CM of Congress and then defecting to the BJP with all its legislators to become CM of the BJP. In the 2019 assembly elections, the BJP achieved a landslide victory in the state.
The NDA government, empowered by a large majority, pursued an aggressive Hindu nationalist policy since 2014 that gave rise to extreme Hindu conservatism that created an atmosphere of intolerance and fear even on petty issues like food. As mainstream and fringe Hindu organizations and forces became active, lynching incidents began to occur in various parts of the country fueled mainly by rumors on social media. Although such incidents were not wholly directed against any particular minority community, tensions rose over issues such as beef consumption and certain religious practices. The opposition and many in the intelligentsia branded the rule ‘fascist’, and slowly events began to dent the sheer popularity the BJP enjoyed. This was reflected in the state assembly elections in 2018 when a struggling Congress convincingly won Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan forming governments there. In the political thrillers that followed again, Madhya Pradesh rallied in March 2020 by winning over a disillusioned Jyotiraditya Scindia, and then the drama shifted to Rajasthan; Chhattisgarh remains safe with the Congress. The BJP was also outwitted in the 2019 Maharashtra assembly elections when ally Shiv Sena left the BJP and allied with the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) to form a government. The controversial decisions on Jammu and Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act also generated opposition, both on the public and political fronts.
However, at the national level, the BJP-led government still has full authority by winning the 2019 general election with even more seats than in 2014. People and experts feel that there is no alternative to the BJP at the national level so far, and bold measures and policies, particularly foreign policies, pursued by the NDA are supported by the majority despite the economic downturn since the last two years. For Congress, they must learn to respect and depend on the leaders of the new generation if they are to be a force in national politics. The BJP’s fascination with bold action, authority, expansion of power, drama, sensation and unpredictability is insatiable, particularly with crucial elections scheduled for Bihar in 2020 and in West Bengal and Assam next year.