Election links: BJP's miscalculations, coalition questions and 'knives out' in UP

Analysis, opinion and podcasts on the surprising Indian election results.

Jun 10, 2024

Welcome back to India Inside Out.

Last week I had some immediate thoughts in the aftermath of the Indian election results. Today, just as we’ve received news of how the portfolios have been distributed in the new council of ministers, I’m mostly using the newsletter as a space to post links to analysis and commentary on the results that I found interesting. If there is any particularly good writing on the elections that I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll add it in the next roundup.

Linking out

I linked to it last week, but in case you missed it Devesh Kapur wrote about how dominant parties can fade, and why we are past ‘Peak Modi.’

From an editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly:

“The tendency to interpret the mandate as a decisive rejection of the ruling party is avoidable and also not supported by hard facts. Yes, the ruling party has faced a relative decline, and despite having to wade through the manifold resource asymmetries and institutional impediments in the electoral competition, the opposition has got a major boost. But the revival is neither universal nor complete. One has to acknowledge the gains made by the BJP in terms of seats and vote share in the regions where it has not had a substantial electoral presence. Though it has lost the simple majority on its own, the BJP’s formidable electoral presence, even after 10 years in power, can hardly be belittled. For a correct understanding of any evolving sociopolitical phenomenon, it is necessary but not sufficient to get the trend right. One must also grasp the moment correctly. While the general elections may point towards the trend of the decline of the ruling party, the moment for the opposition’s ascendance has not arrived.”

Ruchi Gupta writes: “Relying too heavily on BJP’s minority status to predict significant changes in how Modi wields power may be a mistake… The real change may come from the shattering of Modi's aura of invincibility. Large sections of the media, bureaucracy, other state institutions and the corporate class had seemingly internalized that the BJP will remain in power forever.”

Dhrubo Jyoti on how caste dynamics influenced the election outcome:

“A dusty stretch of 340km separates the towns of Bharatpur in Rajasthan and Nagina in Uttar Pradesh. Their cultures, tongues and populations are disparate, as are their electoral dynamics – the bipolar polity swinging between the BJP and the Congress in Rajasthan a world away from the complex vortex of regional parties jostling for space with national outfits in Uttar Pradesh. Yet on Tuesday evening, these two constituencies were united in the manifestation of one unique phenomenon that ended up as one of the defining features of these elections – the consolidation of the Dalit communities over fears that the Bharatiya Janata Party will alter the Constitution if it wins an untrammelled majority, and their leaning away from the incumbent.”

Another piece that I had linked to in the last edition, but is worth returning to if you didn’t catch it – Suhas Palshikar on the challenge that the INDIA grouping now faces.
Hilal Ahmed lists out the three fundamental themes emerging from the results:

“Hindutva-driven nationalism has dominated Indian politics for at least a decade. The BJP as well as the non-BJP parties have designed their political strategies to suit this narrative. This time, the Opposition flipped the narrative. It evoked the idea of nyay or justice without making any direct comment either on Hindutva or nationalism. The discourse on nyay merely relied upon the old social justice politics of the 1990s by accommodating the question of economic inequalities and wider inclusiveness. This narrative of the Opposition made the BJP uncomfortable and provoked the leadership to communalise the Congress’s nyay promises. The argument that the Congress would take away the reservation from Hindu OBCs/SCs and give it to Muslims stems from this political unease. It is worth noting that the non-BJP parties did not openly respond to the BJP’s attack because they did not want to be perceived as pro-Muslim parties. Nevertheless, nyay has begun to take shape as an emerging political narrative.”

As many online made the point about the North/South narratives flipping – the cliche is of North being beholden to BJP, South acting as bastion against it, though this time around it was UP voters that did the most damage to Modi’s party even as it made major Southern inroads – Srinivasan Ramani looks at the “possibilities of a new form of progressivism” heralded by results in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.
Ashutosh Varshney on the meaning of the result:

“We need a prism through which we can connect the apparently disparate things that we kept hearing in our travels. These were — affirmative action uncertainties; the rise of animosities and polarisation in society; the concern about rights; the steeply rising inequalities, with a few becoming monumentally rich and millions without a job; the idea that if a job is available, one won’t need free ration, one can buy the food one needs, and also live a life of dignity. These thoughts can, I think, be aggregated into the so-called “idea of India”.
Hindu nationalists have always resented this term, calling it a Nehruvian imposition… But this argument is fundamentally flawed. The so-called idea of India is not a Nehruvian imposition. It is enshrined in India’s Constitution.”*

Harish Damodaran on food inflation and how it played into this election result.

Five podcast episodes to check out, in the aftermath of this election:
- Neelanjan Sircar on the Times of India podcast about the BJP’s big setback.
- Suhas Palshikar on the Times of India podcast thinking through Modi 3.0.
- Milan Vaishnav speaks to Rahul Verma and Sunetra Choudhary about the results.
- This week’s NL Hafta looking back at election results and the exit poll debacle.
- And, a pre-election results episode, but Milan Vaishnav speaking to Christophe Jaffrelot about Gujarat under Modi, as a useful reminder of the third-time PM’s backstory.
Yamini Aiyar on, among other things, Rahul Gandhi and the future of the Congress:

“For bringing the Constitution into the political discourse, much credit has to be given to Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav. Rahul Gandhi is the real story in this election. His emergence as a leader with credibility and legitimacy, a process that began with the Bharat Jodo Yatra in September 2022, finally consolidated through this campaign. He presented a clear and distinct political position, one that positioned him as a humane, people’s leader, centering issues of the Constitution, democracy and social justice. He was also effectively able to use Modi’s campaign errors to his advantage in his public rallies and speeches; this is a sharp contrast to the Rahul Gandhi of 2014 and 2019.
But his real challenge comes now. Rahul Gandhi has emerged as a leader by separating himself from the organisational realities and, indeed, the atrophy of the party. He has yet to take his party along to create ideological coherence. The question going forward is this. Now that his leadership finally has some legitimacy, can he leverage this to strengthen the party organisation and build forward?”

Manoj CG on how the Congress is back to being the largest party of the South.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out that “the mere prospect that power might change hands is an antidote to the servility that had set in India’s elites and independent institutions.”
Roshan Kishore critiques the two big narratives that held going into the elections:

“There were many commentators, who until the results fructified on June 4, had written lengthy epitaphs of Indian democracy. The blame was ascribed to a multitude of factors, but primarily some sort of genetic mutation of north India which had converted voters into majoritarian bigots.
A complete consolidation of so-called independent institutions of capital and state behind the Modi government was abetting this murder. Now they see a democratic revival suddenly. This is despite the fact that the BJP’s popular support if one were to look at it in terms of national vote share, is virtually unchanged between 2019 and 2024…
There was another cohort, almost diametrically opposite to the group described above, which liked to believe that Indian democracy, from 2014 onwards, had bloomed into some sort of a metaphysical bonhomie between the ruler and the ruled in India….
For this echo chamber, the 2024 results are comparable to having lost, fully, or in part, access to a huge endowment fund which was always supposed to stay.”

Gilles Verniers asks: How will Modi and his party will react to a configuration of de facto power-sharing?
Udit Misra offers a reminder of the economic successes of coalition governments in India.
Liz Mathew suggests that some of the BJP’s pet projects – simultaneous elections, a uniform civil code, North-South delimitation – may face tougher opposition now.
A Mint editorial calls for the return of a body that can act as a forum of state-Centre dialogues.
Mukul Kesavan on the result: “It’s fine for a day or two or three, to wallow in this semblance of political normalcy, to enjoy this glimpse of an ordinary world where a rational politician might think twice before making the surreal claim that he was not ‘biologically’ born, where the exigencies of coalition government might keep the prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy from toxic slurs, minority baiting and dog-whistling. It’s a long way from here to an inclusive politics, but we should celebrate the fact that on the 4th of June, 2024, we, the people, avoided the abyss.”

What happened in Uttar Pradesh (and Bihar)?

Shyamlal Yadav and Bhupendra Pandey compiled the explanations being offered for the BJP winning only 33 seats out of UP’s 80 (after winning nearly double that in the previous elections:

”The SP appeared to have learnt from the BJP social engineering experiment of expanding its base; many among the BJP candidates were not those the party and supporters wished; warnings of local disconnect were ignored in the belief that the ‘Modi magic’ would override dissent and complaints; the lack of cohesion with RSS workers was not hidden; there appeared to be over-reliance on the state machinery, rather than the party organisation, for events, crowd mobilisation and voter outreach; and the disenchantment among the youth over the short-tenure Agnipath scheme in the armed forces and leak of recruitment exam papers became a crucial factor.

(see the rest of CSDS’ state-level analyses here).

One of the key explanations for the SP’s success in taking on the BJP in UP was its decision to tack against its Yadav-heavy image, which in the past is said to have alienated other OBC groups (who, as a result, preferred the BJP’s non-dominant OBC leaders) as well as Dalits.

Asad Rehman and Lalmani Varma write:

“Confident of retaining its core Muslim-Yadav voter base and seeking to make inroads into the votes of non-Yadav OBCs, who were seen to be consolidated in favour of the BJP, the SP fielded only five candidates from the Yadav community in its 62 seats…
Akhilesh, in fact, coined a new slogan for the vote base he banked on this time, expanding from “M-Y” or Muslim-Yadav to “PDA” or “Pichde (backward classes or OBCs), Dalits, Alpasankhyak (minorities)”.
So, while five SP tickets went to Yadavs, it fielded 27 candidates belonging to other OBCs, 11 upper castes (including four Brahmins, two Thakurs, two Vaishyas and one Khatri) and four Muslims. It nominated 15 Dalit candidates in SC-reserved seats.

Omar Rashid, expanding on the use of this tactic, points to how the ‘PDA’ framing drove the SP’s success, while also leading to widespread BJP decline across the state:

“The party lost popular support across the length and breadth of the state, with alarming drops in vote shares in the central, southern and eastern regions. In fact, out of the total 80 seats, there was only one constituency, Gautam Buddha Nagar, where the vote share of the BJP and its allies did not drop in comparison to 2019. This means that the BJP’s collapse was a pan-state phenomenon and not restricted to select pockets, seats or opposition strongholds.”

As a result, Shikha Salari reports, ‘knives are out’ now within the BJP’s UP unit.

One of the key ways that one might attempt to understand why the BJP won in Uttar Pradesh is to look next door. If bread-and-butter issues had prompted ordinary voters to turn against the BJP in UP, then why didn’t they do the same in Bihar next door – where many had expected the INDIA grouping to make some gains?

Bihar, where the BJP has never been able to win a majority by itself, was expected to be a more likely venue for gains from the INDIA grouping, but didn’t end up doing so. Roshan Kishore and Nishant Ranjan examine why here – concluding that the RJD did not adapt their form of ‘Mandal’ in the way that the SP did in neighbouring UP.

India Inside Out by Rohan Venkat

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