The Lesson of 2016 State Elections

The Assembly elections to the four states – Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala – have brought cheers to the BJP, a dismal performance by the Congress and mixed results for the Left. The Left won Kerala convincingly, but its alliance in West Bengal led to results that was even worse than the 2011 elections. The BJP won in Assam, a first for BJP in the eastern part of the country. The other gainers were Trinamool and AIDMK, which retained their hold on the West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

The victory of BJP in Assam – it won 86 seats out of the 126 in the Assembly – poses a threat to the complex religious and ethnic fabric of the state. Clearly, the BJP could combine the anti-Bangladeshi sentiment whipped by AASU with its anti-Muslim rhetoric to stitch together a majority. How long this patchwork of ethnic and communal groupings will last is another question. The Congress had a serious anti-incumbency factor based on its 15-year rule of the state. It did not also help matters by sticking to Tarun Gogoi, who, as evident in the Lok Sabha polls, had clearly lost the people.

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In West Bengal, though the Left won about 38.5% of the votes in the seats it contested, it lost heavily in terms of seats. Trinammol won 211 seats in the 294-member Assembly, securing more than a two-thirds majority. The Left Front tally came down from the 55 seats it had won in 2011 to only 32, even below the Congress which won 44 seats. Though the BJP won 3 seats, its vote share came down from about 17% in the Parliamentary elections of 2014 to about 10%.

Clearly, the Left's alliance with Congress did not work. While the left votes did get transferred to the Congress, the Congress voters with their five decades of animosity to the left, did not shift as much. But beyond this simple electoral arithmetic, the left has to acknowledge that the political arithmetic did not work either. Even after TMC's involvement in massive scams, Mamata's credibility with the people, pulled her party through.

More worrying is that the left in Bengal has lost touch with the people. They should have known before the results that the voters were still with Trinamool and not with them. More than its tactics, the left has to reflect on this alienation from the people.

Meanwhile, violence by Trinamool goons has broken out against the left; offices are being attacked, people being forced to flee their homes; TMC Goonda Raj is back.

In Tamil Nadu, Jaylalithaa and AIDMK bucked the revolving door electoral results of the past decades by winning a second successive term, even though with a reduced majority. She got 132 seats in a 234-member Assembly as against 150 last time. However, last time she had a number of allies, including the Left who secured 19 seats as well. This time, she fought alone, and was still able to get a comfortable majority. The DMK, which had aligned with the Congress, secured 90 seats, with the Congress getting 8. The Left which had allied with some of the smaller local parties, was not able to retain its seats.

Kerala is a significant victory for the Left. It won 91 seats in the 140-member Assembly, with the UDF coming getting only 47. The BJP secured one seat, and was able to get about 10% vote share. It shows that the “social engineering” of trying to woo the leadership of various caste formations worked only partially. Clearly, the left retains its social and class base in Kerala, and was able to provide a viable alternative to a Chandy government, mired in various scams.

The Congress won only in Puducherry, a small Union Territory, providing little solace for its rout in the two states – Assam and Kerala -- it held power and its poor overall performance.

For the Left, particularly the CPI(M), these elections mean that waiting for Mamata to fail to get back the people will not work as a strategy. Neither will short-term alliances that have no ideological basis. They have to go back to what Left was always known for: take up local causes, larger issues and build movements. Yes, with the kind of terror that exists, in West Bengal, it is going to be difficult. But then left politics is never going to be easy.

The Indian left also has to address the larger crisis of the global left. Whether it is Latin America or Europe, the Left makes gains, and then loses out to more right-wing populist forces.

For those who believe that getting everybody together against the BJP will work, these set of elections do not bear that out. The crisis of the Congress, seen by many as the corner-stone of such an alliance, continues. With only a dynasty and no ideology, it is showing little signs of revival.

What we need are credible platforms and not just anti-platforms. This is the lesson of the 2016 state elections.