Turnout, hawa and Modi's 'infiltrator' remarks
What have we learnt from the first round of India's elections?
Welcome back to India Inside Out.
Before we get to this week’s main item, two quick plugs:
Last week on the Election Tricycle, the podcast I co-host, we spoke to Matthew McGregor, CEO of 38 Degrees and veteran of digital campaigns in the UK and the US, on how digital campaigning has changed over the years.
This week on the show, we look at confidence vs complacency, from Modi’s latest remarks – which I discuss below – and whether that reflects an effort to address BJP complacency, to similar concerns for Labour in the UK, and, from a fairly different angle, for the Republicans in the US, given how much they’ve sought to demonise mail-in voting. Listen, share, subscribe!
Vibe shift
India’s long election season – with the first votes having been cast on April 19 and results not expected till June 4 – leaves observers in an odd sort of vacuum. A 100 million people have voted, a polity larger than most countries in the world, but it will be a month and a half before we know which buttons they pressed. In order to prevent the results of one phase impacting another, the Election Commission of India even bars publishing of exit poll surveys or indeed any opinion polling until all votes have been cast.
But that doesn’t mean there is no data at all. There is plenty to pay attention to in the limbo period between voting and results:
First, there is turnout. This is the only official data we get between phases, and as a result, there is an entire cottage industry built on attempting to extrapolate results data from turnout numbers.
The conventional wisdom suggested that a high turnout number was likely to be a reflection of anti-incumbency, as unhappy voters would be showing up in droves to punish the incumbent. However, an analysis of 128 state-level elections over three decades by Milan Vaishnav and Jonathan Guy found no decisive link between turnouts and either pro- or anti-incumbency results. To complicate matters further, an analysis by Neelanjan Sircar found that turnout increase was pro-incumbent in 2019, when the Bharatiya Janata Party returned to power with even bigger numbers than in 2014 – though it remains unclear how singular that year’s election may end up being.
So what happened on April 19?
From the Indian Express:
“On Friday, the 102 seats that were up for election, with a little over 16 crore voters eligible to cast their votes, saw a turnout of approximately 65.5%, a decline from the 70% recorded in 2019. While the Election Commission was yet to release the final turnout figures, as per the EC’s Voter Turnout app at 7pm on Saturday, turnout had decreased in 19 out of the 21 states and Union Territories in the first phase.”
At over 65%, the numbers were still relatively robust, even in the face of extreme heat conditions across much of the country, which may explain the dip at least to some extent. The biggest drops came in North-East India, in part because of a call-to-abstain in areas of Nagaland and as a result of violence in Manipur, where re-polling had to be conducted in some areas. Beyond that, there were also swings of up to -9% in North India, prompting concern from BJP supporters given that turnout dropped in 39 of the 40 seats that it had won five years ago.
Second, is the ‘hawa’. That literally means wind, as in, ‘which way is the wind blowing?’ but can also be translated to mean atmosphere, mood or vibes. Unlike turnout, this is a much more inexact source of information, but one that broadly refers to political narratives and perception (built in the absence of actual data) that might sway undecided voters. More specifically, political parties make deliberate efforts to be perceived as having done well in early phases of the election in order to convince undecided voters to jump on the bandwagon.
Like the turnout-anti-incumbency connection, this too is conventional wisdom in Indian politics. But is this a real phenomenon? The Lokniti CSDS’ ever insightful National Election Studies consistently record nearly 30% of voters saying they make their mind up on the day of voting, or in the days just before. Moroever, CSDS analysis from 2014 finds evidence of a bandwagon effect, with that year’s survey showing that as many as 43% of voters1 said that they specifically voted for the party that was likely to win, i.e. with the hawa, rather than regardless of the party’s prospects.
As a result, parties make a major effort to emerge from each phase attempting to build the impression of success – often spinning turnout data to do so – in the hopes of this perception snowballing into further support.2 Occasionally, news events can flip this on its head, sending the hawa in a different direction, as with the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s remarks in 2015 questioning caste-based reservations, which were widely believed to have played a role in building momentum and consolidating support for the anti-BJP ‘Grand Alliance’ that year.3
So which way is the ‘hawa’ blowing? Going into the elections, the assumption was that the BJP was so dominant – as all the polling appeared to show – that there was barely any contest at all. As a result, rather than any ‘hawa’, it was not uncommon to hear another Hindi word: ‘thanda’. Meaning cold, or more accurately, in this case, lukewarm:
“The election campaign is evidently the dullest in recent times.” “Why are the current general elections so lacklustre? … The absence of buzz is palpable.” “There is a general refrain that… the campaign in this election is rather muted. Party workers are not running around with enthusiasm and voters are not showing signs of any great excitement.”
To be clear, the hawa may still develop over the coming weeks, as more phases go out to the polls, and parties make sharper, more targeted attacks (see below for more on this). Also it is important not to discount the journalistic and, indeed, human impulse for a competitive narrative – especially over a 44-day election – which inevitably means some contests end up being covered as if they are closer than they actually turn out to be.
But the current lack of enthusiasm, coupled with the turnout data, is driving some concern among BJP supporters, particularly given the example of 2004 when the party confidently expected to return to power – and was projected to do so by all the polling – but was then voted out.
Third is the actions of politicians themselves. If turnout is the only official data, and ‘hawa’ is gleaned from the ground, those who presumably have the most direct access and incentive to study and utilise both these sources of information are politicans themselves.
Watching how campaigns evolve over the course of the election may, therefore, also give us an indication of what parties have gathered. There is one caveat here: Messages are also often crafted differently based on the region that will be voting, making it sometimes hard to disentangle what is a new campaign tactic from one that had been planned beforehand for a particular phase.
With that aside, here’s Scroll.in:
“Opposition leaders on Sunday criticised as hate speech Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks claiming that the Congress would distribute citizens’ property among “infiltrators” if voted to power.
At an election rally in Rajasthan earlier in the day, Modi claimed that the Congress’ manifesto talks about calculating “the amount of gold that mothers and sisters have, get information about it and then distribute that property”.
Modi said: “When the Congress-led government was in power, they had said that Muslims have the first right over the country’s assets. This means that they will distribute wealth to those who have more children and those who are infiltrators. Is this acceptable to you?”
The prime minister added: “This Urban Naxal4 thinking will not spare even the mangalsutras5 of my mothers and sisters.”
Modi’s incendiary comments might require a bit of explanation. The prime minister was attempting to turn the Congress’s campaign pitch, which has focused on addressing a sharp rise in inequality and perception of crony capitalism under Modi, into a way of making those planks appear threatening to his core Hindu base. And he did so, in classic Modi fashion, by turning India’s Muslim population into the ‘other’ –referring to Indian Muslims as “those who have more children” and “infiltrators” to whom the Congress would distribute everyone else’s wealth.
He also referenced comments by former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who had said in 2006 that the country’s priorities were to bring upliftment to the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, minorities and women and children. “We will have to devise innovative plans to ensure that minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, are empowered to share equitably in the fruits of development,” Singh had said, at the time. “They must have the first claim on resources.”
The BJP has frequently brandished this comment as a sign of the Congress’ Muslim appeasement, and in this argument, its willingness to sell out the Hindu majority. But here Modi went a step further, deliberately attempting to use it as a tactic to halt the Congress’ social justice campaign platform – which has spoken of a caste census, providing reservations and rights in proportion with representation, financial surveys to map out inequality in society and following that, a vaguer promise of “revolutionary measures”.
(Indian Overseas Congress Chairman Sam Pitroda’s comments about an inheritance tax added fuel to this fire over the last few days, with the BJP attacking the Congress over it… until tweets emerged of several BJP leaders having called for an inheritance tax in India as well in the past).
We can try to return to the plank that the Congress has embraced in a future edition, but what is equally interesting is why Modi – the presumptive frontrunner – has chosen to change the tenor of the campaign.
“The shift in the focus of PM Narendra Modi’s campaign from the guarantee of a Viksit Bharat (developed India) and the ‘Beyond 400’ (seats) pitch to generating fear of “our women’s mangalsutra would be stolen by Congress’s hand” after the first round of voting has raised questions.
Playing up the majoritarian fear has always been a part of the BJP’s strategy but after two terms, a distracted opposition, and the entry of secular characters in the NDA family, it appeared for a while like the BJP is looking at a post-polarisation scenario in western Uttar Pradesh, where eight constituencies went to the polls in the first phase.
But this time, the Opposition has its counter-narrative of fear. Using the anxiety that the BJP’s 400-paar pitch is causing among the subaltern groups, the Opposition is portraying a brute majority as a precursor to change the Constitution as envisaged by B.R. Ambedkar and the reservation policy. It thus comes as no surprise that PM Narendra Modi did not refer to the magic number at the Aligarh rally on April 22.”
Further down in that report, BJP workers complain about the top-level campaign saying, “Polarise nahin ho raha hai”, meaning the campaign isn’t polarising enough, which in India is generally short-hand for playing the Hindu-Muslim card more openly.
Is Modi’s shift in tone a sign that the BJP has noticed its previous tack was not working, or a response to lackluster numbers from the first round? A number of commentators seem to think so.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay points out that “we have seen that Modi uses the M-word whenever he is not very confident in the course of the campaign.” Pratap Bhanu Mehta, while making it clear he expects the BJP to win, says “The listlessness of the first phase can also have self-fulfilling effects. The very fact that there is no crescendo of triumphal enthusiasm, at best a sullen acceptance of the BJP, can open up more cracks in later phases. Hence, it is no surprise that the BJP is foregrounding its ideological project once again.”
Ohers point out that Modi had already drawn upon this well earlier in the campaign, in part to address the lack of fervour following the consecration of the idol at the Ram Temple.
With the second phase of voting taking place on April 26, we might get a better sense of whether the drop in turnout numbers sticks, whether the thanda hawa is still holding, and whether campaigns find themselves changing tack even further.
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While this may seem odd to those from two-party systems, it may be easier to understand if you recall that most Indian voters are presented with a larger range of political options and a lower level of partisanship than in Western democracies.
After Phase 1, Congress’ Jairam Ramesh said the verdict was “BJP’s Graph: South Mein Saaf, North Mein Half!” – meaning, no seats for the BJP in the South, and only half its previous count in the North.
Not everyone agrees that this reservation comments that year actually led to a bandwagon effect, based on arguments that the BJP already seemed to be losing in the early phases.
A phrase often used by BJP and its support base to refer to those who criticise the current government, implying that they are insurgents, rather than dissenting citizens.
Gold-and-bead necklaces traditionally worn by Hindu women as a marker of their married status.