Many experts say that the slogan is merely a footnote of the BJP’s poll campaign and now ‘looks more like a boast’.
NEW DELHI: With the formation of a coalition government in Haryana and the chance to form a government in Maharashtra seeming to slip away, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s “Congress-mukt Bharat project”, to rid India of the Congress, now “looks more like a boast”, say experts.
The first setback for the BJP’s popular slogan came last year when the party couldn’t win the Assembly elections held in November-December in three major North Indian states—Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. These states are part of the “Hindi heartland” and the BJP, despite being a party of the Hindi heartland, failed to capture the imagination of the electorates in this belt. Similar signals came from the Gujarat and Karnataka Assembly polls that were held two months prior to the Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan Assembly elections. Aided by experts, The Sunday Guardian did the math and found that the “Congress-mukt Bharat” slogan just looks like a war cry of the BJP and nothing else.
As per the calculations, there were 29 states and two UTs of Delhi and Puducherry as on 20 October which together elects 4,120 Members of Legislative Assemblies (MLAs). Out of this, the BJP has 1,321 MLAs which accounts for 32% and the Congress has 833 MLAs (20%). The rest 48% is divided between other political parties.
According to political experts, if the results of Assembly polls held between September 2018 and October 2019 are studied, it shows that “Congress-mukt Bharat” is merely a slogan.
Bijendra Jha, assistant professor at Delhi University told The Sunday Guardian: “BJP just managed to cross the majority mark in the 182-seat Gujarat Assembly; in Karnataka, the party could not reach the half-way mark, in Chhattisgarh, the Congress won a stunning victory against the Raman Singh-led BJP government as it bagged 68 out of 90 seats; in Madhya Pradesh, Congress’ Kamal Nath formed the government and in Rajasthan, Congress won a comfortable majority—what other evidence is needed to prove that Congress-mukt Bharat is nothing more than a footnote of the BJP’s poll campaign.”
“No doubt that today the BJP has a clear hegemony in party politics of the country, but the scope, as I see, is limited only to the national level and on the state level, you can see a clear pattern of the Congress’ revival. The slogan-‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ may have other political meanings and if it is to denote electoral defeats, the slogan looks like a boast,” Jha added.
M.P. Singh, a senior Delhi University professor and political commentator, told The Sunday Guardian: “If you take Assembly polls as a point of reference, you will clearly see where this debate is headed. Especially after the Karnataka and Gujarat Assembly polls, though the BJP formed the government in both states, the performance of the Congress had been impressive. Last year, Congress defeated BJP in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and formed governments in all the three states. Very recently, the Assembly poll results in Haryana, where the BJP formed a coalition government with the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP), show the decline of the BJP’s popularity in the state where it won all the seats in the recently concluded Lok Sabha polls. The story of Maharashtra is also not different—here the BJP is far from forming a government and the Congress-NCP allies have emerged as key contestants. In such a scenario, I don’t see the country turning into a Congress-mukt Bharat.”