Things missing from BJP's Amritsar campaign: Clarity, allies and a defence of demonetisation

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley should really not be talking about absentee Members of Parliament in Amritsar.

The Bharatiya Janata Party leader and Union finance minister, who infamously lost the Lok Sabha elections from the city in 2014 despite the Modi wave, claimed at a rally on Saturday that Amritsar had gone unrepresented for over 12 years now. To end this purported string of absentee MPs, Jaitley urged the city’s residents to vote for BJP candidate Rajinder Mohan Singh Chhina in the upcoming bypoll in the Amritsar Lok Sabha constituency. Chhina, former vice-president of the party’s state unit, had lost the Assembly elections from the Amritsar West seat in 2007.

“Yes, we share the guilt for that [absenteeism],” Jaitley admitted and indeed, it would be impossible not to. Amritsar’s MP over the last two-and-a-half years was former Punjab Chief Minister “Captain” Amarinder Singh of the Congress, the man Jaitley lost to in the 2014 elections.

But preceding him for 10 years was Navjot Singh Sidhu. The cricketer-turned-politician may now be in the Congress, contesting the upcoming Assembly elections from Amritsar East, but over that decade-long period starting 2004, he was the BJP’s MP from the city. Jaitley effectively said that his own party’s MP had not really been representing Amritsar, after which the finance minister decided to step in, only to lose.

Scales vs lotus

However, BJP’s current MP hopeful from Amritsar also happens to be absent from much of the campaigning.

Chhina is contesting the Lok Sabha bypoll at a time when the entire state votes in the most interesting Assembly contest in decades. The bypoll, which will be held on the same day as the state elections on February 4, was necessitated because Amarinder Singh quit his post in protest over the Supreme Court’s decision on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link Canal. The apex court had said that Punjab cannot unilaterally decide to terminate the water-sharing agreement with neighbouring Haryana.

The Amristar Parliamentary constituency has nine assembly segments, of which four feature BJP candidates for the state elections. For these constituencies, things are fairly straightforward and voters have been asked to press the lotus button – the BJP symbol – on the electronic voting machines.

But the other five seats, most of them in the rural segments outside Amritsar city, will be contested by candidates from the BJP’s senior alliance partner in the state, the Shiromani Akali Dal. Relations between the two parties have been strained of late – Sidhu’s departure from the BJP was credited in part to his unhappiness with the alliance – and asking voters to support different parties in the state and Lok Sabha bypolls in the seats contested by the Akali Dal is proving to be difficult.

The Times of India quoted an anonymous Akali candidate saying, “How can I talk about pressing button of ‘takri’ (scales, SAD’s symbol) and ‘kamal’ (lotus, BJP’s symbol) both on the electronic voting machines from the same stage and to the same audience? They will be utterly confused.”

Annoyed allies

There is perhaps no better demonstration than this of the dangers and difficulties of holding state and central elections simultaneously, an electoral reform that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been pushing for.

Though the move is by and large likely to benefit national parties over state ones – at least until voters get used to the dual nature of polling – in Amritsar, it seems to have worked to the detriment of the BJP.

A quick survey of people standing outside Jaitley’s rally in Amritsar revealed that most didn’t even know there was a Lok Sabha bypoll happening simultaneously with the state elections.

“I didn’t know we had to press two buttons,” said Dalbir Singh, a businessman watching the rally near Amritsar’s City Centre. “We all want to know who is going to be chief minister, and who will run the state. I didn’t realise there was also an election to Parliament.”

Concerned by the potential confusion, Akali leaders are choosing not to push Chhina’s candidature much, and focus on their own campaigns.

Wind blows

The senior alliance partner has other reasons to ignore the BJP too, beyond Electronic Voting Machine symbols. The national party has been reluctant to show up in big numbers to campaign for the alliance and reports, attributed to unnamed sources, have suggested that the BJP sensed the anti-incumbency mood in the state after 10 years of the Akali-led coalition’s rule.

Modi has yet to hold any rallies in Punjab in the weeks leading up to the elections, although the party claims he will turn up at one or two before February 4.

And at least one BJP candidate from Amritsar fears that the Centre’s decision to invalidate Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes from November 8 may work against the party in the state. On Monday, the party’s candidate from the Amritsar North Assembly seat asked his constituents not to punish him for demonetisation, since he had nothing to do with the decision.

Things could yet turn around for the BJP in Amritsar, but as it stands, Jaitley may have to continue complaining about absentee MPs, even after the elections.