The battlelines were drawn in both Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal a while ago, but Tuesday’s by-election results have made this much clear: both Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee are winners.
There was some speculation that the Bahujan Samajwadi Party was losing its cachet but having won 8 of the 11 seats in Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati is on top once again.
In West Bengal, it appears that the rout of the Left Front in the assembly elections of 2011 is a foregone conclusion. The Mamata factor is sweeping through the state, the Trinamool Congress having won seven of the 10 seats and its ally, the Congress, one seat.
The losers are also equally obvious. The Samajwadi Party must be licking its wounds as it has suffered substantially. Not only did it lose its seats but it also lost the prestige battle.
In a worrying turn of events for the party’s prospects, Raj Babbar, who recently quit the SP and joined the Congress, defeated Mulayam Singh Yadav’s daughter-in-law by over 85000 votes.
Even worse, the Samajwadi Party lost in Etawah, Mulayam’s home constituency. It now has two rivals — the BSP and the Congress to fight — and both seem to be on the rise, Mayawati especially so.
Of the other two big losers, a major one is the CPM which did not even manage one seat and lost very badly the seat held by former transport minister Subhas Chakravarty, who passed away earlier this year. His widow lost to the Trinamool candidate.
The Left Front’s Forward Bloc managed to win just one seat. Mamata Banerjee has shown once again that she has galvanised a groundswell of opinion in her favour, which must make the CPM very nervous indeed. In Kerala too the CPM lost to the Congress.
The BJP barely registered on the voter’s consciousness anywhere, with a total of just one in Himachal Pradesh and one in Rajasthan. The Congress, by contrast, opened its account in all the six states that went for by-elections, proving that it is a factor all over the country.
The swing towards the UPA, evident since this year’s Lok Sabha elections, suggests that the inclusive nature of theCongress’s politics is getting better resonance with the electorate than divisive and exclusionary politics. Its aam aadmi slant and progressive policies seem to be going down well withvoters so far.
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