If Bengal and Puducherry were the two states in the five-state polls last year to be plagued by defections, in this year’s five-state elections nearly every party in every state is facing pre-election turbulence. In UP, Akhilesh Yadav can boast of having pulled off a minor coup by bagging veteran OBC leader SP Maurya but BJP has also won over a fair share of BSP and SP leaders.

In Uttarakhand the honours are even with both BJP and Congress trading top leaders. Congress has sacked its state party chief Kishore Upadhyaya for allegedly hobnobbing with BJP and the ruling party has ousted its minister Harak Singh Rawat for confabulations with Congress. Earlier former PCC chief Yashpal Arya, a transport minister in the BJP government, had returned to Congress despite dumping the party in 2017 while Congress had lost an important Dalit leader Rajkumar who had withstood the BJP wave of 2017.

In Manipur the exits have been primarily from Congress and many top BJP netas in the state have a Congress past. In Goa the pendulum is swinging all ways as Congress, BJP, TMC and AAP have seen turncoats knock and leave at frequent intervals. In Punjab, all parties in the fray have faced some defections and the leading contenders like Congress, AAP and Akali Dal are retaining most sitting MLAs to prevent more from crossing over.

Read: BJP has already sent Adityanath home, says Akhilesh after UP CM fielded from Gorakhpur

The politics of defections is complicated by many factors. States like Kerala and Tamil Nadu with a settled bipolar political system and strong polarisation along party lines see very few defections. In most other states, political parties are fluid entities where entry and exit is governed by a leader’s and party’s winnability and local clout besides caste and communal calculus.

But as the Bengal results showed, deserters are no good for the beneficiary party if its ground game isn’t good and political narrative isn’t selling with the masses. With every state, except perhaps for Manipur poised to see closely fought elections, voters have some tough calls to make.

Linkedin
END OF ARTICLE
Opinions