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Our Correspondent in Chandigarh
The Congress party's victory in Punjab has caused some eyebrows to be raised -- which is strange, given that this result was actually foreshadowed by the 1999 parliamentary elections.
If you do a constituency-wise breakdown of the Lok Sabha elections of that year, the Congress had captured 66 assembly segments. As opposed to this, the Congress, in the just completed assembly election, has won 62 seats -- so, in actual fact, the performance has been a touch below par, if anything.
Yet, the 62 seats constitute a dramatic improvement over the 14 the Congress won the last time the state went in for assembly elections in 1997.
It is Kerala that has been talked of for its penchant to rotate power between two poles of the political spectrum, throwing out the elected government every five years. Yet Punjab has, unnoticed, been doing pretty much the same thing. Thus, in 1980, the Congress took power with 61 seats. In the next election in 1985, the Congress surrendered to the Shiromani Akali Dal, managing just 31 to the SAD's 72.
Then came the sweep of 1992, with 86 seats -- an all-time high -- as opposed to the SAD's haul of just three. And this in turn was followed by the rout of 1997, when the Congress hit an all-time low with 14, against the SAD's 73.
Things have thus moved full circle in the just-concluded election, with the Congress winning 62 of the 105 seats contested. While the national leadership of the Congress has been cock-a-hoop over the win, a sobering fact remains obscured -- to wit, that the SAD with 42 seats has run the Congress much closer than in previous years.
In fact, the difference of 20 seats between the two major parties is the narrowest in the period under review -- it was 24 in favour of the Congress in 1980, 41 in favour of the SAD in 1985, 83 in favour of the Congress in 1992, and 59 for the SAD in 1997.
For the record, independents this time captured nine seats -- a gain of three over 1997. The BJP managed three seats, a whopping 15 seats down from 1997. And the Communist Party of India halved its share from the 1997 level of two.
