Although the BJP's “victory” has averted the immediate “crisis”, the ruling coalition faced after the BJP ministers threatened to walk out of the government and support it from outside, the partial power hike rollback may change the equations between the alliance partners. The BJP may now be emboldened to press for the spoils of office the senior Akali partner has been denying it despite its 19 MLAs being the mainstay of the alliance government. Among these spoils was the demand for Deputy Chief Ministership which the BJP said should have gone to its nominee but was given to the Chief Minister's son Sukhbir Singh Badal.

Besides, the party also has a grouse that, as in the case of Akali nominees, the BJP's chairmen of Boards and Corporations have not been given the rank of ministerships. The party also wants equal say in the functioning of the government, particularly in postings and transfers. In the past whenever the party raised these demands Mr. Badal would approach L.K.Advani and Rajnath Singh who would ask the state BJP leaders not to press for the demands obviously because they did not want to annoy an important constituent of NDA and BJP's long-tanding ally.

But with the appointment of Nitin Gadkari as BJP chief, the top Akali leadership's equation with the central BJP leaders may have undergone some change. The BJP is anxious not to annoy its urban vote bank which it lost substantially as indicated by the last Lok Sabha elections when it lost 17 out of the 19 Assembly segments which it had won in the 2007 Assembly elections. The party will now try to win over its lost support base saying it has fought for its “cause”. Whether it will be able to achieve any success is too early to say as there is no let-up in the anti-incumbency sentiment prevailing against the Akali-BJP government.

The power tariff rollback will be for a limited period -for one year for the domestic consumers and for six months for industrial consumers who are the BJP's main urban support bases. The power tariff hike effective from April 2009 would have yielded around Rs.800 crore to the almost bankrupt Punjab State Electricity Board. But the partial rollback would involve a subsidy of around Rs,550 crore which the government will now have to reimburse to the PSEB. The government which has already been defaulting in paying Rs.3100 crore a year subsidy for the free power the Board supplies to the farm sector and BPL families, however, has no money to pay the amount.

Punjab's debt has already crossed Rs.62,000 crore and for day-to-day expenses including staff salaries and pensions the government has been borrowing around Rs.600 crore every month as a result of which it has almost exhausted its borrowing limit for the current year. (IPA)