How BJP Could Have Won Jharkhand

BJP is still smarting from the Jharkhand electoral defeat, coming as it does in the thick of pan-Indian protests against the Citizenship amendment act (CAA). The Jharkhand loss was also delivered shortly after the party failed to form the government along with its former ally Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. In hindsight, the BJP probably realises that had it played its cards with less complacency and greater acumen, it could easily have retained Jharkhand.

Here's how BJP could have won Jharkhand:

• The party leadership underestimated the scale of anger and resentment against the incumbent chief minister, especially in tribal areas. All that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to do was to assure the people of the state that there would be a change of guard as far as the chief minister is concerned, according to many political observers.

• In view of the complete isolation of tribals, who constitute 36% of the state's population, PM Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah in their rallies should have sought to win them over. They should have reassured them of undoing the perceived injustice of the Raghubar Das government which tried to amend the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act and Santhal Pargana Tenancy Act which protected the rights of tribals over their land and had been in force from the British era.

• While Raghubar Das claims his agenda was the development and that tribal rights would be protected, his assurances found no takers. The BJP could not effectively counter the propaganda campaign of the opposition that the ruling party was helping corporate houses steal tribal land.

Alliance with AJSU

• In choosing to fight the election on its own instead of going for an alliance with its partner AJSU, the BJP paid a heavy price for its complacency. The combined vote share of BJP-AJSU was 41.5% compared to 35.4% of the JMM-Congress-RJD combine. The numbers indicate that the BJP could have cobbled together a government along with AJSU. The fact that BJP with 33.37% of the vote share could not form a government, while the JMM with 18.72% could install its own chief minister, tells its own story.

Dissidence

• The BJP high command refused to take cognizance of widespread dissidence in its ranks. Alarm bells should have gone off when a senior party loyalist like Saryu Rai decided to take on chief minister Raghubar Das from Jamshedpur East. As it turned out, he defeated him by a convincing majority of over 15,000 votes. Significantly, many BJP workers took to the streets to celebrate his victory.

All these factors illustrate how BJP failed to retain Jharkhand, the fifth state in over a year where it could not retain power.