Can Tripura influence results in MP or Rajasthan?

Election results in the three states in the North-East have once again exploded the media-created myth around TINA (There is no alternative). The reality is that in a democracy, there is always scope for an alternative. And if there is indeed none, the people would throw up an alternative.

Nothing exemplifies it better than the results in Tripura, where Manik Sarkar, considered as one of the most honest and upright as well as the poorest of all the chief ministers of India, could not ensure victory of the Left Front.

The politics in these three states needs to be analysed in a different way as unlike elsewhere in the country, especially in neighbouring Assam, the population of Muslims is insignificant, even though Tripura and Meghalaya have borders with Bangladesh.

The better performance of the Bharatiya Janata Party in these states
has possibly less to do with its own contributions and a lot more to do with the voters’ yearning for a change. Benefits of the same-party rule in the states and the Centre, trumpeted tirelessly by the BJP, may also have played a role to push the BJP forward.

The irony of the situation is that even as the edifice of the BJP appears to be crumbling in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, where it has been in power for the last 15 years, and had just managed to survive in Gujarat, its strongest bastion, the saffron party is doing relatively well in the North-East, especially Tripura, where it played the tribal card. As there is very few Bengali Muslims in that state a senior BJP leader, Himanta Biswa Sarma, threatened that Manik Sarkar would be sent to Bangladesh once his party comes to power. Now that the BJP has won let us see whether it fulfils its promise or it proves as another ‘jumla’.

No doubt the BJP is elated after the results but so far the next year’s parliamentary election are concerned the verdict may not have any big impact as the three states have only five Lok Sabha seats––two each in Meghalaya and Tripura and one in Nagaland.

The better performance of the BJP has little to do with the hard-core Hindutva ideology, especially in largely Christian dominated Nagaland and Meghalaya, and more to do with its alliances with regional parties as well as its better organisation and finances.

Though the BJP leaders and a section of the media are trying to project it as a big victory of the saffron party over the Congress yet the truth is that the latter did not have much at stake, barring in Meghalaya, where it is however set to lose power despite emerging as the single largest party.

The far bigger losers are the Left Front and regional parties. In Tripura, where the fight has often been straight, the incumbency factor went against the Left. The BJP, which had no base at all till a couple of years back, won over the MLAs of Trinamool Congress and the Congress there and tied up with the IPFT.

It would be, however hasty for the BJP to blow the victory out of proportion. The Atal Bihari Vajpayee led BJP had also famously gone overboard in celebrating BJP victories in state Assembly elections in December 2003 in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and announced an early Lok Sabha poll in January 2004.

Elections are again due in these three very states later this year. If the anti-incumbency factor can throw out of power a chief minister with as impeccable a character as Sarkar, why cannot the same happen to the three BJP chief ministers? If the BJP can come to power from zero in Tripura, the Congress can take solace from the fact that it is still a force to reckon with in the three states.

With the Left’s minuscule presence in MP. Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, the decimation of the Left in Tripura is unlikely to have much of an impact in these three states, where Congress is in a stronger position than in Tripura, Meghalaya and in Nagaland.

But will the euphoria of defeating the CPI(M) in Tripura embolden the BJP to advance the Lok Sabha election and hold it along with assembly elections in MP, Rajasthan and Chhatisgarh? And if it does, will 2004 repeat itself?