Gleaning insights from by-elections, unless they are held at the fag end of a regime’s tenure, is fraught with risks of over-interpretation. In three of the four Assembly constituencies and in the lone Lok Sabha seat for which by-elections were held, the ruling party in the State won, except in Bihar, where the RJD managed to wrest a seat. Ordinarily, the expectation is for ruling parties to fare better in by-elections. There are reasons for this — there is little incentive for Opposition parties to mobilise their voters in full strength if there is no chance of attaining power and ruling parties tend to get adherents to vote with a promise of development schemes in the constituency. This might not be the case when elections are held in the late term for a regime — these are litmus tests for its popularity as regular polls beckon. But except for Chhattisgarh, the bypolls in Bihar, Maharashtra, West Bengal were held in States where governments had barely reached or crossed their midterm since regular elections. In that sense, the Congress party, whose recent electoral performances have indicated its distress, will take solace from the Khariagarh result in Chhattisgarh. Its candidate, Yashoda Verma, won handily with a 53% vote share, wresting the seat from the Janata Congress Chhattisgarh (J) and also garnering votes that were more than 12 percentage points higher than the BJP’s candidate. Despite its facile win in the 2018 Assembly elections, the party’s poor performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha election in the State and internal rumblings within the government indicated that its position was relatively fragile. But the by-election wins in Chhattisgarh and in Kolhapur (North) in Maharashtra, where it marginally increased its vote share from 2019, will give a lot of confidence to the beleaguered grand old party.
In West Bengal, turncoat candidate Babul Supriyo, once a Union Minister in the BJP government at the Centre, won comfortably from Ballygunge as a Trinamool Congress candidate, with the BJP relegated to the third position behind the CPI(M). Actor Shatrughan Sinha had an easier triumph in the Asansol Lok Sabha constituency that was vacated by Mr. Supriyo as the Trinamool continued to consolidate the successes of the party. The bypolls suggest that the Trinamool has managed to weather the BJP’s challenge and also benefited from a fragmented Opposition space. Bihar had witnessed a close Assembly election in 2020, in terms of voteshares, with the ruling NDA winning 37.26% of the votes, marginally ahead of the RJD-led grand alliance’s 37.23%. The RJD’s win in Bochahan indicates that, notwithstanding the BJP’s dominance in the Hindi heartland, there are still quite a few pockets of resistance.
