How Jogi And Mayawati Delivered Chhattisgarh To Congress
Why Rahul Gandhi may have to send a thank you note to Ajit Jogi and Mayawati.
Rahul Gandhi may have to send a thank you note to Ajit Jogi and Mayawati.
The alliance between the two helped the Congress in conquering Chhattisgarh, which had remained a Bharatiya Janata Party stronghold since the state’s formation in 2001. Janta Congress Chhattisgarh and the Bahujan Samaj Party collectively won 10.9 percent of the total votes. That is largely the difference between the vote shares of the Congress and the BJP.
Trends show that in earlier election, the vote share difference between the two national parties had never been so wide. In 2008 and 2013 state elections, BJP’s vote share in Chhattisgarh was merely 1 percent higher than that of the Congress.
So what changed? In 2016, the state’s first Chief Minister Ajit Jogi, after being expelled from the Congress, launched a new regional party called the Janta Congress Chhattisgarh. In 2018, he announced an alliance with Mayawati’s BSP. It had been widely expected that this alliance would cut into the votes of the Congress. But it went the other way round.
In Marwahi constituency, Jogi is comfortably beating BJP’s Archana Porte with over double the votes. His wife Renu Jogi is also beating BJP's Kashi Ram Sahu in the Kota constituency by over 4,000 votes. In Khairagarh, JCC’s Devwrat Singh was ahead of BJP's Komal Janghel by a narrow margin. In Lormi too, JCC’s Dharmjeet Singh is defeating BJP’s Tokhan Sahu.
In fact, of the eight seats that the Jogi-Mayawati alliance have secured, they beat BJP candidates in six and Congress candidates in two. “We have always been saying Ajit Jogi will cause more damage to the BJP than Congress,” TS Singh Deo, Congress leader from Chhattisgarh, told NDTV. “I am glad to have been proven right.”
But that can’t take away the credit from the Congress. It managed to flip 34 constituencies in its favour that had in the previous elections voted for the BJP.
The Congress had, perhaps, fielded its most-low profile names in Chhattisgarh. Top names like the state's party president Bhupesh Baghel and TS Singh Deo were among the lesser heard names during the state elections. Yet, promising farm loan waivers, minimum support prices for crops and a ban on liquor sales, they delivered Congress' best performance among the five states where counting is underway.