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It is hard to draw definitive conclusions from a batch of by-elections scattered across India. On the other hand, thirty-one assembly seats and a single Lok Sabha constituency constitute numbers greater than any opinion poll so it is silly to ignore them altogether.
The consensus is that the two clear winners are Mamata (Banerjee) and Mayawati. But picking the losers is more difficult. Did these by-elections indicate the terminal decline of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the CPI-M, or the Samajwadi Party? Or even of dynastic politics?
That last one probably needs some explanation. The Samajwadi Party put up Mulayam Singh Yadav's daughter-in-law, Dimple Yadav, as its candidate for the Firozabad Lok Sabha seat. The by-election came up because the sitting MP, her husband Akhilesh Yadav, preferred to sit for Kannauj. (He won both seats in the general election earlier this year.) Dimple Yadav lost by over 85,000 votes.
The Salumber seat in the Rajasthan assembly was vacant because the sitting MLA, Raghuveer Singh Meena, was elected to the Lok Sabha as the MP from Udaipur. The Congress gave the ticket to his wife, Basanti Devi. Her husband had won the Vidhan Sabha seat by a margin of over 65,000 votes; Basanti Devi just about crawled to victory, defeating the BJP's Amritlal Meena by a miserable 3,098 votes.
Meanwhile, the Left Front, which got hammered elsewhere in its bastions of Kerala and West Bengal, somehow wrested the Goalpokhar assembly seat in Bengal from the Congress. Goalpokhar's sitting MLA was Deepa Dasmunsi, the former Union Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi's wife; she was elected to the Lok Sabha from Raiganj. Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, the former MP, fell severely ill in 2008. However, much to the Congress's consternation, Goalpokhar fell to the Forward Bloc's Ali Imran Ramz.
I am not quite sure what to make of the results from Rajasthan. The Ashok Gehlot ministry has been in office for less than a year, not enough time to build up a head of anti-incumbency. However, the drop in the Congress votes in Salumber, coupled with an outright BJP victory in Todabheem, indicates that the voter dislikes being taken for granted. And, of course, the BJP stopped its internal squabbles long enough for Vasundhara Raje to make an eleventh-hour campaign in Todabheem, just enough to pull off a narrow 8,227 vote margin victory.
The Samajwadi Party's loss in Firozabad and the Congress loss in Goalpokhar, however, may be the more interesting tales. After the results came out a miffed Akhilesh Yadav blamed his wife's loss on a secret understanding between the BJP and the Congress. There was indeed an undercurrent of conspiracy, but the BJP no longer commands enough votes in Uttar Pradesh to pull off any such thing.
I would contend that the results in Goalpokhar and in Firozabad are the results of machinations by Mamata Banerjee and Mayawati respectively. Both ladies were out to prove a point -- and both seem to have succeeded.
The Trinamool Congress chief believes that Deepa Dasmunsi had a hand in the Siliguri debacle. (The Congress and the CPI-M joined hands in Siliguri to deny the mayor's post to the Trinamool Congress.) Correct or incorrect, there are enough people in the Trinamool Congress who blame Deepa Dasmunsi. The by-election gave Mamata Banerjee a wonderful opportunity to show everyone who the boss is -- even in northern Bengal, away from her stronghold of Kolkata. (Deepa Dasmunsi would be well advised to mend bridges with Mamata Banerjee if she wants to retain her Lok Sabha seat!)
As a bonus, the Forward Bloc victory set the cat amongst the Left Front mice. The smaller parties have long chafed about the CPI-M's 'Big Brother' attitude. Was Mamata Banerjee signalling that she would be more accommodating if some Left Front partners came over? By the way, the Forward Bloc started out as a splinter group of the Congress - back when Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose fell out with the Gandhian 'Old Guard'.
The Congress victories in the three assembly seats in Kerala tell a tale of Marxist decline pure and simple. There was a time when an 'apostate' like A P Abdullakutty would have been wiped out after being expelled from the CPI-M. That he is now the newly-elected MLA for Cannanore says volumes.
Some of the same calculations that inspired Mamata Banerjee seem to have motivated the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Mayawati has a fifteen-year-old history of animosity against the Samajwadi Party, and the opportunity of giving Mulayam Singh Yadav a public humiliation in Firozabad was just too good to pass up.
In the general election, just six months ago, Akhilesh Yadav beat the Bahujan Samaj Party's Professor S P Singh Baghel. That was back when Mayawati thought that she had a shot at prime minister with the Left Front's backing.
Now that there is no such chance she instructed her voters to throw their weight behind Raj Babbar. (One MP more in the Lok Sabha hardly makes a difference to her just now.) The result was not only that Dimple Yadav lost but that she was beaten by somebody who had himself been kicked out of the Samajwadi Party.
Akhilesh Yadav was right in speaking of a secret arrangement, but it was entirely Mayawati's doing. And, of course, there is no guarantee that she will do the same come 2014; the Congress can expect no favours when the Bahujan Samaj Party chief once again has an eye on prime ministership.
The results of these 31 assembly by-elections and the sole Lok Sabha by-poll are, as I said earlier, mixed. But the BJP and the Samajwadi Party seem to be on a downward slope in the crucial (to them particularly) state of Uttar Pradesh, and the Left Front seems to be on its way out in Kerala and in West Bengal. The Congress has had mixed results, being handed out a lesson in Rajasthan and in West Bengal while winning in Uttar Pradesh thanks to the BSP's calculated support.
When written in Roman numerals the year 2000 is represented as 'MM'. As the first decade of the 2000s draws to a close, the only clear winners of this latest round seem to be the other 'MM' -- Mamata and Mayawati.