India’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a political party which until now almost exclusively held seats around the capital city of Delhi, has swept the election in Punjab state, prompting analysts to suggest that the subcontinent’s electoral landscape could be changing.
The governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won four of the five state elections in India this week, but the AAP’s triumph in Punjab – a state of more than 27 million people – is judged likely to give the party and its supporters confidence that they can make a real impact in Indian politics in the future.
The AAP has styled itself as an anti-corruption party, and is breaking the mould of traditional Indian politics.
The party’s leadership has hailed its win in Punjab as proof that the AAP is fast becoming the new main opposition party to the ruling BJP. Since the BJP’s win in the 2014 national elections, the main opposition has been the Indian National Congress (INC), a liberation-era party, which ruled India for most of the 20th century.
However since their national loss, the INC has struggled to regain lost ground across the country and is seeing its strongholds eroded by new smaller parties such as the AAP.
For decades Punjab state has swung between the INC and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) a Sikh-interests party. The emergence of the AAP in the state suggests that India’s electoral landscape could be changing.
The BJP stormed to wins in Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Manipur, and Uttarakhand.
In Goa the BJP won 20 of the 40 seats in the state’s legislative assembly, up from 13 in the previous election. In Manipur the party secured a majority of 32 seats in the 60-seat state legislature, up from 28, while in Uttarakhand it suffered something of a reverse, but still held on to its majority. In that state it managed to get 47 seats (down from the 57 it managed previously), out of 70 up for grabs.
The state election which most India watchers had their eyes on was that in Uttar Pradesh, the world’s largest sub-national division in terms of population, where over 200 million people live. The state has a large Muslim minority (about 20% of the state’s people follow Islam) and the election here was largely seen as a referendum on the BJP’s governance.
Here the BJP won 255 out of 403 seats. Although this was a decline compared to the previous election, it managed to increase its popular vote.
In the fifth state election, held in Punjab, the AAP, which had previously only seen real success in the Indian capital of Delhi, saw its seat share leap from 20 to 72, and it now holds a comfortable majority in the 117-seat legislative body for the state. Its win came at the expense of the ‘Grand Old Party’ of Indian politics, the Indian National Congress, which is increasingly facing a number of electoral setbacks, after having dominated the country’s politics for much of the post-independence era.
The BJP’s performance will give the party a boost before the next general election, scheduled to be held in 2024, with some saying that the party, and prime minister Narendra Modi, were losing much of their popularity since the party’s win over Congress in 2014. However, there will also be concern about the BJP having increasingly ramped up its rhetoric against India’s Muslim minority and the prospect of its continued popularity meaning this will continue.
In Uttar Pradesh Muslims have often found themselves subjected to discrimination, much of which is at least implicitly approved of by the BJP, and the party’s performance (particularly in Uttar Pradesh) may be seen as a tacit approval by voters of its position towards Indian Muslims.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/photos/india-punjab-amritsar-sikh-2830745/]