Is BJP A Bad Loser ?

 BY R.K.MISRA

Coming events cast their shadows ahead.

The BJP is a bad loser - at least on the face of it. 

Simply put, the party held  three of the four seats from Gujarat in the Rajya Sabha which are up for re-election on March 26. Now it possesses numbers only to win two seats but chose to put up a third candidate at the last minute giving indications of its ‘unethical’  intentions to either poach or induce intentional disqualification of Congress votes. The BJP has a history of such machinations in the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.The likelihood of postponement of polls in view of the carona outbreak will hardly make a difference for need has long given way to greed.

And true to form the dice began to roll when five Congress legislators resigned in the run up to voting day.

That some such thing was in the offing had been in the air in the corridors of power  here for some time. The speculation had gained in intensity after  leader Jyotiraditya Scindia switched horses for a Rajya Sabha  seat as part of a deal to destabilise the  Kamal Nath- led Congress government in MP.

After the announcement of the Rajya Sabha elections, initially things went by the rule book as the ruling BJP and the Opposition Congress announced  two candidates each. The BJP cleared the names of  Abhay Bhardwaj and Ramila Bara and  the Congress of Shaktisinh Gohil and Bharat Solanki. Both are old warhorses of their respective stables.

Abhay comes from RSS stock, is a brahmin  and a veteran lawyer who represented the 69  accused in the Gulbarg Society massacre in Ahmedabad  during the 2002 riots and  got most of them acquitted. Ramila Bara is a tribal leader who was an officer in the secretariat and quit to join the BJP. She is the chairperson of the State Tribal development Corporation.

Shaktisinh Gohil is an important  Congress leader, its in-charge for Bihar, party’s national spokesperson and a former state minister. Bharat Solanki is the son of veteran Congress leader  and four times Gujarat chief minister Madhavsinh Solanki, a former union minister and state party chief.

The  bid to throw a spanner  into the Congress works came when the BJP pitched the name of  Narhari Amin as its third candidate in the fray. Amin is a former Congress  deputy chief minister who switched over  to the BJP after he was denied a ticket by the Congress before the 2012 Assembly polls and except for a purely ornamental  post has remained sidelined.

Belonging to the patidar community, his nomination is intended to sow dissensions within the Congress ranks, more so since the patels had sought a nomination for a member of their own community but  both candidates whose names were finalized are kshatriya. In fact, soon after speculation began that Rajiv Shukla may be fielded from Gujarat, sources made it known that Solanki was not averse to doing a Scindia if his claims for the Rajya Sabha were disregarded. His nomination may have quelled such a bid but Amin’s is a recipe designed for turmoil.

As for the technicalities,  before the elections were announced: the BJP had 103 seats, the Congress 73, the Bhartiya Tribal Party(BTP) 2,  NCP1  and independent 1 in a state assembly comprising 182 seats where two seats are lying vacant. Broadly ,the Congress needed 74 votes to win two seats and the BJP 111 to win three seats. The independent, dalit leader Jignesh Mevani has made it known that he will vote Congress which met it’s requirement to get its two leaders elected. If the remaining 3 chose to vote alongside the BJP it made for 106 votes, still five short to get it’s three candidates elected at the cost of one of the Congress. And thus the BJP needed to poach or induce this number of  Congress legislators to throw away their votes wherein lies the unethicality of the ruling party’s bid.

Five Congress legislators- Mangal Gavit, Pradyumansinh Jadeja, Soma Patel, JV Kakadia and Pravin Maru- have quit their seats and in turn been suspended from the party. Congress opposition leaders term it ‘big ticket sales’ by the BJP and sheer commonsense does not rule out inducements in this poll time play.

The Congress strength in the State Assembly thus stands whittled down to 68 which would not be enough to get both their candidates elected. Independent dalit legislator Jignesh Mevani has announced support to the Congress but  NCP legislator kandhal Jadeja, son of one time ‘godmother’, Santokben is determined to vote BJP  even disregarding  party whip by Shankersinh Vaghela to vote Congress.

There are one of two options, either withdraw one of two candidates or cobble the numbers . For the moment ,it has shifted its remaining stock to the safety of Congress- ruled neighbouring Rajasthan.

This is not new to the BJP. It had tried similar messy tactics in the 2017 Rajya Sabha elections to scuttle Congress leader Ahmed Patel’s re-nomination bid   and failed by a whisker,  thanks mainly due to the voting by two congress turncoats-Raghavji Patel and Bholabhai Gohel- being declared invalid and Tribal leader Chottu Vasava pitching in for Patel. A spate of induced resignations from the Congress in the run up to the Rajya Sabha polls had led to the expulsion of  14 congress legislators.

Efforts are on to persuade BTP leader Vasava whose party has two votes but he may not oblige as he is  bitter at the Congress betrayal which put up a candidate against him in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

The Election Commission  had made  BJP s task of winning both  Rajya Sabha seats from Gujarat easier last year by the simple expedient of issuing separate notifications for it thus enabling union external affairs minister S. Jaishanker and Jugaji Thakor to sail through easily.

The BJP is relying on a variety of disruptive  arrows from a quiver full to win three of the four seats.It may win too but does not realise that it is losing in the long run !