What explains the BJP's last-minute alliance efforts ahead of the Indian elections?
400 seats & 50% vote share.
Welcome back to India Inside Out.
Election dates have been announced: India will be voting over seven phases, starting April 19 and ending June 1 – a whopping 44-day long election – with results due on June 4.
This week also brought up two important developments that have some bearing on the question below (essentially, ‘if the BJP is so confident of winning the elections, then why is it doing this?): Congress’ Rahul Gandhi claimed on March 21 that all of the party’s accounts have been frozen, based on income tax department notices, some of which date back to the 1990s, making it impossible for the party to campaign. Later, that same day, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate, India’s financial crimes unit, following allegations of money laundering in connection with an abortive attempt at restructuring the capital’s liquor sale laws.
These two massively significant actions against Opposition parties, days before the elections, are bound to raise further questions about how level the playing field is in India’s General Elections. Not to worry, though, the government reportedly plans to unveil its own democracy index to counter talk of democratic backsliding from international observers.
Finally, I’m collecting links for next week, but for all the latest on the electoral bond revelations, see ‘Project Electoral Bond’, a collaborative project bringing together three news organisations – Newslaundry, Scroll and The News Minute – and independent journalists.
“I want to make it clear to you…. that the doors of the BJP have been shut forever for Nitish Kumar.”
That was Amit Shah, current Union Home Minister and former president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, about a year ago. Yet, earlier this year, the doors of the BJP were indeed thrown open to the Bihar Chief Minister (a topic I wrote about when it happened).1
Meanwhile, in Andhra Pradesh, the BJP has entered into an alliance with the Telugu Desam Party, whose leader, Chandrababu Naidu, once said Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a “hardcore terrorist.”
Remember, the BJP is going into these elections as the overwhelming front-runner. Conventional wisdom has suggested that the main question for this election is how many more seats it will win this year compared to 2019, when it won 303 seats in the 543-seat Lok Sabha. Modi and Shah have set the party a target of 370 seats, which, if successful, would put the party by itself above the 2/3rd majority needed to make major amendments to the Indian Constitution.
Why then is it rushing to sew up last-minute alliances ahead of India’s General Elections, which we learned this week will take place over 7 phases between April 19 and June 1, with results expected on June 4?
Before we get to the answer, a quick plug.
This week on the Election Tricycle, a show that I co-host with Emily Tamkin and Tom Hamilton, we spoke to Dalibor Roháč about the upcoming Slovakian presidential elections, and what echoes it has for those of us tracking politics in India, the US and the UK.
If you haven’t already, subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, or elsewhere, and send us feedback, questions, or suggestions of which other elections we ought to touch upon or who we should feature.
Back to the BJP and its alliance-making efforts. It isn’t just Bihar (where the BJP also has several other alliance partners) and Andhra Pradesh (where Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena is also tied-up with the BJP alongside the TDP).
In Maharashtra, where the BJP is already tied up with breakaway factions of the Shiva Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party, reports have suggested that Amit Shah is also about to finalise an alliance with Raj Thackeray, head of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Thackeray, you may remember, is the same politician who, in 2019, was saying things like “I have never seen a liar like Modi” and “I have been saying for a long time that all should come together to realise a Modi-free India.”
Last September, the Janata Dal (Secular), previously allied with the Congress in Karnataka, announced that it was joining the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. (There seem to be some grumbles over seat-sharing at the moment, though the alliance is holding, for the moment).
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP managed to persuade the Rashtriya Lok Dal to exit the INDIA grouping, and re-enter the NDA.
In Punjab, talks are on between the BJP and the Shiromani Akali Dal, one of its oldest partners which broke away from the NDA in 2020 in the aftermath of the farmer agitation.
In Odisha, there have been suggestions of a potential tie-up between the BJP and the Bharatiya Janata Dal – which has ruled the state for more than two decades – although the final terms have yet to be agreed upon.
In Tamil Nadu, the BJP has agreed to terms with the Pattali Makkal Katchi, though it had been hoping to bring the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam back into the NDA fold.
And so on and so forth. What explain these concerted efforts from the BJP to build alliances, including with parties that were in the recent past openly hostile to its politics, despite going into elections as the overwhelming favourite?
Pre-election alliance-making is, of course, not new. India’s first-past-the-post system encourages parties to pool their support bases, and voters are often expected to transfer their support to their preferred party’s allies at a reasonable rate (though there is always a discussion about “maths” versus “chemistry”).
Opposition leaders have repeated over and over that the BJP won only 37%2 of the overall vote in the 2019 elections, implying that there are plenty of pathways to take on the BJP if only other parties would come together as they attempted to do with the INDIA grouping.
This potential vulnerability may explain why the BJP, after initially aiming fire at the INDIA grouping – which might have ended up giving it more legitimacy and cohesion – chose instead to undermine it and focus more on targeting the Congress, while enticing some of its constituent parties to jump ship.
In 2019, for example, Adam Ziegfeld found that, “the BJP won 157 seats in states where there were multiparty systems and either the BJP had an alliance with another party or there were parties competing against the BJP that were not in an alliance. In these 157 seats, the election outcome could potentially have been different if the BJP had failed to form the alliances that it did or if other parties had formed alliances that did not ultimately materialize.”
Alliance hopping isn’t new either, which makes the BJP’s openess (or eagerness, depending on how you prefer to view it), to tie up with parties that were recently opposed to it less surprising than it may seem to those unfamiliar with Indian politics.
Here’s Ziegfeld again: “In a context like India, where parties garner support based more on their ability to get things done for voters than on their policy stances or ideological purity, ideologically incongruous alliances are less likely to impose a high cost at the polls. Meanwhile, alliances between parties dissimilar in terms of who their supporters are can help parties protect their respective support bases.”
A genuine examination of the BJP’s alliance-making approach would actually split these states into several buckets:
states where the BJP is dominant, and seeking to cement its dominance (Uttar Pradesh being the prime example. Read this piece by Omar Rashid on why the BJP needs its own grand alliance in the state)
states where the BJP is expecting a tight contest and needs alliance support to cross the line (Maharashtra and Bihar are the obvious ones here, where the BJP – even in the Modi era – has been unable to win majorities on its own)
states where the BJP is a smaller player, and is hoping the Modi phenomenon plus a regional ally will help it expand (Tamil Nadu and Odisha come to mind).
The messy negotiations and bitter arguments over alliance-making on the INDIA side of the aisle have drawn more attention from the press in the run-up to these elections. Yet the story of why and how the BJP chooses its allies and why those parties in turn agree to jump on the bandwagon (or keep their distance) is as interesting and deserves more scrutiny.
Indeed, one of the topics I’ve been most interested in over the last decade of BJP dominance is how the party thinks about federalism – not from the administrative organisation or democratic lenses, on which its opinions seem evident, but on the political side. I’ve written about, for example, what makes a successful BJP chief minister in the Modi-Shah era? One could also ask, what makes a successful BJP ally in this current era?
We’ll hopefully return to these questions, and also look a little more closely at some of those buckets listed out above to understand the calculations of the BJP and its allies in upcoming editions of this newsletter.
But while the fact that pre-election alliances are par for the course in Indian politics may be part of the explanation for the BJP’s last-minute efforts, its overweening ambition for this particular election also appears to be playing a major role:
As Pratul Sharma suggests:
“What is driving the BJP—pre-contest anxiety or a cogent strategy?
The BJP’s national leadership, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and party chief J.P. Nadda, has set an ambitious target: securing more than 50 per cent of votes. No party in India has been able to achieve that; even the Congress’s remarkable 404-seat victory in 1984 came with a vote share of less than 47 per cent…
The target of securing more than 400 seats for the NDA, and 370 for the BJP, is driving the expansion of the saffron alliance. Achieving the target would not be possible without making strategic alliances with smaller parties that have sizeable vote banks—such as Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal, which has a Jat support base, and Om Prakash Rajbhar’s Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party, which has OBC backing. In Tripura, the BJP is in alliance with Tipra Motha, a party championing the tribal cause….
The BJP had wanted help from allies in 200 difficult seats in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Bihar and West Bengal. It has been successful in stitching up alliances in most of these states.”
Even if Modi and Shah have spoken of decades of BJP dominance ahead, they are unlikely to ignore the dangers of anti-incumbency that may set in after three full terms in 2029 (assuming that this year’s election goes as everyone expects it to).
Given that context, some may see 2024 as potentially being the high watermark of the Modi phenomenon. If so, it represents a major chance for the party to capitalise on its popularity and convert that into legislative heft, which could then be used to make significant moves for both ideological and electoral ends – things like simultaneous elections (which we discussed last week), Parliamentary delimitation (which we discussed the week before) – and other constitutional alterations that have always been part of the BJP’s platform.
Being able to boast of more than 400 seats to its alliance and over 50% vote-share, higher than the Congress' ever won, would – at least in their reading – give the BJP and Modi an unprecedented victory, and therefore the legitimacy and mandate to push through those changes and cement their dominance. Whether they can actually get there (and whether not hitting those numbers will constrain their legislative options), we’ll only know on June 4.
Amit Shah this week tried to explain this: “Our position has always been the same. We were on the side of the Ganga, and Nitish Kumar joined us.”
A somewhat inaccurate point, given that the actual vote share for the BJP-led alliance, the NDA, was closer to 45%.