If the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) succeeds in winning on its own, an ambitious though not impossible target of 370 to 400 seats in the April-June 2024 Lok Sabha election, then that will place the party in a pole position to bring drastic constitutional changes before 2029 when the constitutional landscape would have been totally changed. In the 543 Lok Sabha, the BJP had won 282 in 2014 and 303 in 2019 but its tally in the Rajya Sabha was far short of simple majority. The BJP needs at least 2\/3rd of the total seats in the Lok Sabha. The BJP has shown a remarkable determination to pursue the target of having overwhelming majority in both houses of parliament has shown a single-minded devotion to achieve just that by hook or by croo. Recently it bagged ten of the fifteen Rajya Sabha seats that went to polls on February 27 amid cross-voting reports in Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. These wins take BJP\u2019s tally in the Upper House to 97, three less than 100. The majority mark in the 245-member Rajya Sabha is 123. The BJP will need, with its allies a total of 164 seats to be in a commanding position to give the nod to any bill passed by the lower house(Lok Sabha). It does not require rocket science to realise the plan of the BJP with regard to altering the character of India\u2019s secular constitutional democracy. The cat was let out of the bag recently when Karnataka BJP MP Anantkumar Hegde announced that BJP needs 400 seats to change the constitution \u2018filled with unnecessary things\u2019 alluding to secularism and socialism. Hegde reportedly stated the same thing in 2017, when he was a Union minister in the BJP government but was given a ticket in the 2019.This time it could be different. Though most analysts agree that the BJP is certain to return to power at the Centre, the goal of 370-400 seats is a tough one for the party. It would not only need to ensure that it repeats its clean sweep in states where it won all the seats in 2019; retain its edge in states where it won more than half the seats; maximise gains in states where it punched below its weight and bag seats in states where it drew a blank. In 2019, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh were the states where the BJP made a clean sweep or a near-clean sweep. This time the story could be different in Bihar and Karnataka where the Cong-RJD combine could deprive a clean sweep as also Karnataka where Congress is likely to win more seats. Before the polls, the BJP has engineered splits or defections from other parties in various state assemblies to weaken or bring down governments. If splits don\u2019t lead to downfall of governments run by opponent parties, then the rebels and independents are coaxed into resigning and to re-contest as BJP candidates. The BJP doesn\u2019t have to put much effort in splitting the opposition INDIA bloc as this has already been achieved. Various decisions made by the BJP government confirm that it has a totally different perception of democracy and it is a moot point whether the voters will decide on the basis and vote for a divided opposition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) succeeds in winning on its own, an ambitious though not impossible target of 370 to 400 seats in the April-June 2024 Lok Sabha election, then that will place the party in a pole position to bring drastic constitutional changes before 2029 when the constitutional landscape would have been totally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}