Warning signals for UPA

The danger is a populist response from the Congress

As a rule, too much should not be read into by-election results, influenced as they often are by local factors that do not have national sway. Also, three of the four results of by-elections announced on Monday saw parties retaining their seats; only one seat changed hands, in Maharashtra, where the Bharatiya Janata Party bested the Nationalist Congress Party. Nevertheless, it is hard not to draw some broad conclusions from the results of the four elections, especially if two other elections whose results are yet to be announced (in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry) also end with defeat for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). A final score of 0-6, if that is what results, should shake up the UPA.

The scale of the Congress defeat at Hisar is certainly a straw in the wind. Admittedly, the seat was already held by the Haryana Janhit Congress. But the Congress candidate (who had won the seat in 2004 and twice before that) has not only come third, but also suffered the ignominy of losing his security deposit. Anna Hazare and his team might claim that they are responsible for this, and who is to tell whether they are right or wrong? What should worry the Congress is the scale of the swing in voter behaviour, away from the Congress by a massive eight percentage points. The other shock is the loss in Sharad Pawar’s pocket borough, influenced perhaps by the fact that Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman outfit did not campaign and split the anti-UPA vote — as it did in recent elections in the state. A third pointer to the future is the defeat of the Congress in Telangana, and the victory of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS). The Congress has been so confused and wayward in its responses to the agitation for a separate Telangana state that it now risks losing popularity not just in Telangana but in the rest of Andhra Pradesh too.

The portents for the future are grim. The UPA combine has already bitten the dust in Tamil Nadu. It is now in danger of losing Andhra Pradesh, and could be in trouble if it faces a united opposition in Maharashtra. On top of that, the rival alliance’s Nitish Kumar continues to ride a popularity wave in Bihar, while most pundits expect the Congress to be a poor fourth in the forthcoming assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. After Hisar, Haryana too looks like a poor wicket for the Congress. These six states account for nearly half the seats in the Lok Sabha. So when the party looks ahead to the next parliamentary elections, due in 2014, it must wonder what it should do between now and then in order to avert electoral disaster.

The danger is that it will turn populist with a vengeance. Already, the economy is paying the price for the unbridled populism that marked the run-up to the 2009 elections. The loosening of the government’s purse and the sharp increase in the fiscal deficit from 2008-09 lie at the root of many of the inflation problems that the government is trying to grapple with today, with limited results. Much of the legislation now under consideration, to deal with real problems of exclusion and unfairness, and other initiatives like an over-reaching food security Bill also have a populist edge that could spell more trouble for the economy.