India, arguably, does not have an election season. The nation has an election cycle with polls of all sorts taking place periodically. Thus, the general election, whose results were declared in early June, was followed by a set of by-elections for 13 assembly seats across seven states. The factors at play in these polls may have differed from those that shaped the parliamentary poll results but there is one notable convergence: the poll winds seemingly continue to blow against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party that had performed well below its expectations in the Lok Sabha polls too. The data gleaned from the bypolls would bear out this inference. INDIA, the Opposition block, won 10 of the 13 seats while the BJP won two. Two states, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal, delivered blows to the BJP’s aspirations in particular. In Himachal Pradesh, the Congress won two of the three seats that were up for grabs; in Bengal, the Trinamool Congress blanked out the BJP in all four poll constituencies; the BJP’s Matua bastion was also breached. Even in Amarwara in Madhya Pradesh, a state that is now a BJP citadel, the saffron party squeezed through after trailing the Congress candidate in several rounds. The Congress also dealt a double blow to the BJP in Uttarakhand while the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Aam Aadmi Party, both constituents of INDIA, tasted success in Tamil Nadu and Punjab, respectively.

The Opposition, especially the Congress, would undoubtedly be buoyed by the results. The charge that India’s Grand Old Party comes out second best to the BJP in direct battles no longer holds after the Lok Sabha and these assembly elections. The outcome of the byelections also shows that the issues that the Opposition had raised during the general election — livelihood concerns, inequality, a festering agrarian crisis, poverty and so on — continue to draw a response from the ground. Perhaps there is now a case for INDIA to chalk out a common electoral strategy and facilitate cooperation among members of the alliance before the next round of crucial assembly elections commences in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Jammu and Kashmir and Haryana. As for the BJP, its principal concern must rest with the apparent impotency of its time-tested strategy to politicise faith. What the nation expects from the ruling regime instead is the resolution of monumental social and economic challenges.