Low voter turnout led to by poll loss: Amit Shah

Gorakhpur was vacated by Adityanath and Phulpur by his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya, following their election to the Uttar Pradesh state legislative council.

The 2019 Parliament election is nearly twelve months away, but every passing month brings either new challenges or opportunities for our politicians.

Thursday’s edition of Mudda, APN’s daily current affairs show, discussed the issue.

When asked about the Congress celebrating the BJP’s loss, Shah said, “If after losing their deposit in both seats, a party celebrates, I have nothing to say”. The humiliating aspect was that Gorakhpur had earlier been held many times by Uttar Pradesh chief-minister Yogi Adityanath who quit as M.P. a year ago soon after the BJP’s victory in U.P. Assembly polls to become the State’s chief-minister. While Samajwadi Party won in UP, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led grand alliance emerged victorious in Bihar.

Govind Pant Raju, however, thinks this does hint at the challenges that the BJP will face before the 2019 elections. “They should find out why the workers are happy over the party’s defeat”, he said. They lost the seats though it was a secured win. In spite of establishing their presence at Sonia Gandhi’s dinner, (Mamata sending a representative) both these leaders have made no bones about how they want the ant -BJP front to look like. Internal turf in the party has already started showing its effects. She said it was important to remember, “The election of 2014 when people across the board voted development instead of division”.

The victor polled 3,42,796 votes while BJP candidate got 2,83,183 votes. We can’t reveal our roadmap now.

Like people of Uttar Pradesh, people of Tripura would also find it hard to digest the communists and it might take years for the communists to make a come back in Tripura where they ruled for 25 years at one go.

For BJP Mumbai secretary Vivekanand Gupta to cite the loss as a “huge setback’ is akin to stretching things all the way from Mumbai to the Varanasi ghats”. This political model of forging a single anti-BJP formation was successfully tested in Bihar in 2015 when the RJD, JD (U) and the Congress joined hands to defeat the BJP. But they could jointly try to unseat Modi-their common enemy and could hog the limelight then.

In October 2017, the Lok Sabha constituency of Punjab’s Gurdaspur went to polls after the death of BJP MP and former actor Vinod Khanna.

AbhijeetAdsul, too, expressed displeasure with the BJP. If it is forced to form a coalition to make up for lost numbers in 2019, chances are that Modi may not emerge as its prime ministerial candidate. He does not let his ministers speak.

Obviously, the BJP’s vulnerability when the elections are fought on the local issues is quite evident.