The state of the provincial bloc, namely the state parties that have gained salience in the past two decades as being key to government formation at the Centre, has not attracted much analytical attention of late. It is the two key national parties, the Congress and the BJP, that have drawn comment in the run-up to the next general election.
As for the local parties, it is generally assumed that their numbers in the next Parliament will be impressive as a gaggle, although individual parties among them may gain or lose.
This “inevitability” theory rests on the belief that state parties live (or die) on local factors alone, and these may not have undergone radical change since the last general election. Two, those among them that are not running state governments or are not associated with the Union government as partners of a major party (in the present instance, the Congress) cannot face rough weather and may safely rely on caste and other such considerations.
Essentially, these are rooted in the assumption that social or political dynamics within a state are generally placid. This is a surprising belief, of course. But this fact is generally lost sight of. What we often find instead is that state parties perform in one way in Assembly elections while the situation changes in the parliamentary polls. A good example of this is Uttar Pradesh, where the Congress did extremely well. Fighting alone, it bagged the same number of seats in the last general election as the strong state parties (BSP and SP), though the party does not have a leg to stand on in state polls in Uttar Pradesh. In some cases, the opposite tendency is also seen, as in the case of Tamil Nadu. The Congress there gets seats when aligned with a state party that is on the upswing (DMK the last time round).
The real point is that there is nothing preordained about the way state parties will fare. If that were so, the Congress wouldn’t have logged more than 200 seats in the last Lok Sabha election. The gains were not made only at the expense of the BJP but also state parties that stood alone or were the BJP’s allies. As the political system prepares for the next general election, there is a general sense that the Congress and the BJP, taken together, will account for only around 250 seats in the next Parliament and the state parties will jointly take just short of 300. True, similar propositions were floated before the last election, and no one cared to remember their falsity afterward. In the end, a good deal depends on what the electorate thinks of the two key national players.