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New
Delhi: Manipur, India's most disturbed state after
Kashmir, will Saturday elect a new 60-member assembly to mark the
start of make-or-break elections in five states.
The staggered exercise, which ends with the vote in Goa and Uttar
Pradesh March 3, will be this year's first major test for
political parties. Along with Uttarakhand and Punjab, a grand
total of 137 million voters will be eligible to exercise their
franchise in the five states.
It will be an acid test in particular for Congress general
secretary Rahul Gandhi, who is on an aggressive campaign trail in
Uttar Pradesh in a bid to cut to size its ruling Bahujan Samaj
Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party.
"If the Congress does well in Uttar Pradesh and other states, the
UPA government will get a boost," Nisar-ul Haq, a professor at the
Jamia Milia University here, told IANS. "The reform process will
resume."
If the Congress fares badly, it will jostle the central government
and raise questions about Rahul Gandhi's leadership qualities.
The elections will be equally significant for the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), the Akali Dal and smaller political formations in Goa
and Manipur.
The Congress now rules only Manipur and Goa among the five states.
It is the main opposition party in Punjab and Uttarakhand. In
Uttar Pradesh, where it finished a pathetic fourth in 2007, it
wants to revive itself.
Pundits say that an overall poor showing will hurt the Congress,
which has been hit hard by corruption scandals, rising food prices
and uneasy ties with its key allies.
In contrast to 2009 when its victory in the Lok Sabha elections
gave it newfound confidence, the Congress now rules only three
major states on its own - Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Assam
besides Haryana.
In contrast, the BJP, which rules Uttarakhand among the poll-bound
states, is in an aggressive mood. But it has not recovered
politically in a major way in Uttar Pradesh, where its ballooning
growth of the late 1980s and 1990s, on the strength of the Ayodhya
campaign, has been reversed.
Naturally, the BSP and the Samajwadi Party appear to be in close
contest in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state accounting
for 111 million of the overall 137 million voters.
Uttar Pradesh, which has a 403-seat legislative assembly, is the
only state that will see staggered elections, spread over seven
phases, from Feb 8 to March 3.
Punjab, ruled by the Akali Dal-BJP combine, will vote Jan 30 for a
117-member assembly along with Uttarakhand, which has a 70-seat
house. Goa will see balloting March 3 for a 40-member assembly.
The outcome of the state elections, any which way, will not affect
the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. But a poor result
would make the Congress more vulnerable to its assertive allies.
The BSP and the Samajwadi Party have uneasy ties with the
Congress. While propping up the Congress-led United Progressive
Alliance (UPA) on paper, neither will accommodate the Congress in
Uttar Pradesh.
Uttar Pradesh is thus the most important battleground: each of the
four major contestants will like to prove its worth.
The BSP wants to hold on to power, the Samajwadi Party would like
to regain office, the BJP is unhappy being a distant third and the
Congress does not want to be an also-ran any more.
The Congress, some analysts say, would like to grab enough seats
so as to play a kingmaker's role in the event of a hung verdict.
The Uttar Pradesh outcome will sow the seeds of Indian politics
tomorrow.
(M.R. Narayan Swamy can be contacted at narayan.swamy@ians.in)
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