As the first electoral exercise after the Lok Sabha verdict, these assembly election results gain an especially national context. For the BJP, in a spiral of denial since its May defeat, they come as a reminder that postponing a stock-taking will not stop the wreckage from piling up. The BJP will perhaps wonder what may have been had it persisted with its earlier seat-adjustment with the INLD in Haryana. In Maharashtra it has gamely conceded defeat. But it needs to do a lot more to show itself worthy of the opposition space it occupies, especially in Maharashtra and at the national level.

The BJP’s Maharashtra leadership is already rationalising the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance’s third successive defeat to the Congress-NCP combine by arguing that Raj Thackeray’s votes were really theirs. This is disingenuous and lazy. In a first-past-the-post system, pointing to fragmentation of the vote can hardly be consolation. But the Thackeray factor is certainly at the heart of the BJP’s troubles in Maharashtra. It is not that Thackeray was threatening to garner substantial vote away from the BJP-Sena combine, especially in what used to be their urban stronghold. It is that the party failed to articulate a political response to his hyper-chauvinism. It was certainly a chauvinism inspired by the Sena’s familiar rhetoric. But the challenge for the BJP, as a national party, was to craft a positive agenda to present itself as an alternative to both the ruling coalition and to the challenger-come-lately. As seen from its feeble statements and its manifesto, it chose to play Thackeray-lite — and even alarmed its coalition partner in Bihar, the JD(U) — with talk of work permits for migrants.

... contd.