The Congress has as much to cheer about a defeat – in Agra East - as about the victories in the three States.
While the BJP has managed to retain Agra East in UP, its margin has reduced considerably from 19,000 votes in1996 to only 4,000 this time. The crucial aspect of the Agra East results is not the second position that the Congress has come to occupy. But the fact that the Samajwadi Party has lost is deposit.
The Congress was in the number two position in this constituency even in the 1996 elections ... It had polled 23,379 votes as opposed to 42,533 by the BJP.
The disastrous performance for the SP has shown that the Muslims voted for the Congress. That's bad news for Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had successfully projected himself as the sole political leader of the Muslims of north India.
And great news for the Congress which finds the Muslims coming back to its fold, six years after the December Disaster. Add to it the fact that UP is the most crucial state when it comes tot he Lok Sabha election. And the Congress had hit the rock bottom in the last elections as even hopes of a revival in the state seemed remote ... In the past six months, the Samajwadi Party chief had time and again given the Congress respectability among the Muslims by calling on Sonia Gandhi to lead a government at the Centre ...
.. Agra East comes as proof that UP cannot be insulated from the way Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi think.' Punjab also showed traits of what can be clearly terms a trend. The Congress has wrested Adampur Assembly seat in Punjab from the Akalis, even though it is by only six votes.
Adampur has been considered an Akali bastion and only last year the party won by a margin of over 15,000 votes here.
Bihar is in a somewhat different category ... The RJD has retained three seats and the CPM Purnea.
Given the current mood in the Congress, it is not likely to ally with the SP in the general elections which may take place in the coming year. The Party may either go it alone or evolve a "strategic alliance" with the Bahujan Samaj Party, which suffered a setback in Madhya Pradesh and may be more chastened ...
Mulayam and Laloo ... who have projected themselves as potential allies of the Congress, because they perceived it to be weak, have become prisoners of their own rhetoric.
Their ideological battle is with the BJP but their fight for votes will now be with the Congress and a Congress on the upswing will hardly suit them ...
The Trinamool Congress is learnt to be of the view that its association with a declining BJP is responsible for the downturn in its fortunes.
Aware that only a reunited Congress can take on the Left in its eastern fortress in a Lok Sabha election, Sonia has been in touch with Mamata Banerjee in the hope of brining her back to the party fold.
The by-election results will lead to a phase of cooling off between the Congress and the Third Force which had been egging on Sonia to dislodge the Central Government. In the long term, it may also herald a dilution of the anti-BJP axis around which politics has revolved since the early '90s .... (Source: The Indian Express, 30 November, 1998)