A do-or-die moment for regional parties

Assembly polls in UP, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur, and Goa next year will decide the political fate of many regional parties, leaders, and political families

- Shashi Shekhar

The beauty of India’s democracy is that it always moves from one election to the other, as if by instinct. For the BJP, the heady feeling of a landslide victory in West Bengal must not have subsided yet.

Nevertheless, it has started laying the groundwork for the coming assembly polls. Elections in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur, and Goa next year will decide the political fate of many regional parties, leaders, and political families.

The contest between the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BJP-led alliance in Uttar Pradesh would be quite interesting to watch. SP supremo Akhilesh Yadav is leaving no stone unturned to win the elections. He knows that any regional party that loses three elections in a row can't hold its flock together. After winning 37 seats in the Lok Sabha elections his morale is high. But the path ahead isn’t exactly littered with roses. He’s pitted against a towering political rival, Yogi Adityanath. Along with establishing a successful law and order system, Adityanath enjoys great traction among the majority voters. A senior member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet, Rajnath Singh, too comes from this state. The BJP would like to deploy its political prowess to the fullest.

For Mayawati, too, next year would be a decisive battle. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has been in the doldrums after its landslide win in the 2007 assembly polls. Right now, it has zero representation in the Lok Sabha and just one representative in the UP assembly. To attract the younger generation, she has fielded her nephew, Akash Anand, as her deputy. If the experiment fails, she'll face a double whammy. She will have to face defeat and allegations of nepotism.