Come November, and 161 million voters in five states—Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram— will exercise their franchise to elect their governments. Elections in these five states, which account for 83 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats, are the last major battles before the general election in 2024. Of course, state elections do not necessarily influence, or presage, the outcome of the subsequent Lok Sabha election—in the 2018 assembly polls, for example, the Congress notched up victories in Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh, but won just three of the 65 Lok Sabha seats in these states in 2019.
Yet, the results of the electoral contests in November will most certainly set the tone and narrative of the poll campaigns of political parties, particularly the two national ones—the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress. Even in 2018, following its defeat in three states, the BJP-led Union government made several course corrections, including launching populist schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi. These poll battles will also determine the political future of several veterans, including the incumbent MP chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan of the BJP, his Rajasthan counterpart Ashok Gehlot of the Congress, as well as former CMs, be it Kamal Nath of the Congress in MP, or the BJP’s Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan or Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh.
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