State elections should never be confused with sporting nomenclature of ‘semi-final’, but in all significant State elections, it is imperative that we draw clear lessons. What must leave the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chuffed is that the elections from disparate States around India have resulted in its bettering its performance — and by a significant margin. The BJP era appears to be in top gear and cruising.
The BJP gains
In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party (SP), up from its meagre seats in 2017, led a robust campaign and enthused those who saw the election to believe that it had the momentum. But the message was clear when the votes were counted. Any spring in its feet from the boost it secured from emerging as the sole Opposition pole was no match for the BJP that kept its enormous advantage in the urban and semi-urban seats. Even more, the BJP has gained in vote share from 2017.
The decimation of the informal economy in U.P. has consequences that hurt the poorest. Youth unemployment is among the highest in the country and has grown in the past five years, with 16 lakh fewer people employed in the State in 2022 than they were in 2017. The much lower growth in the State’s GDP, when compared to the 2012-2017 phase, and the meteoric price rise, impacting the food basket, are all matters of statistical record. NITI Aayog ranked U.P. at the bottom of the multi-dimension poverty index. But the incumbent Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, was returned to power, in a first since 1985. So, in the face of deep economic distress, the Centre and State taken together with a nearly eight-year incumbency at the Centre and a full majority in Lucknow, one must look at the implications of when the voter does not factor her/his own well-being when making electoral choices. The ‘something else’ that has driven Mr. Adityanath back toMukhya Mantri niwas must concern us.
Campaign’s focus
Mr. Adityanath was careful to pursue his campaign with a single-minded focus on Hindutva. From the ‘separateness’ argument of preferential treatment of ‘Kabrastan ’ versus ‘Shamshaan ’ under the then Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, made prominently by the Prime Minister in 2017, Mr. Adityanath and the new 2022 campaign took things to another level throughout his tenure.
The treatment meted out to anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) protesters (mostly Muslim) was unprecedented, and a key legislation enacted in the middle of the novel coronavirus pandemic was the anti-conversion law known to provide legal cover for mobs wishing to attack inter-faith couples, mostly where the man was Muslim. The shutting down of abattoirs and tanneries had a communal slant as it attacked the economic backbone of several Muslims. And then during the campaign, an analysis of 34 publicly available speeches over three months (between the first week of November and the first week of February), found “100+ Instances of Hate Speech, Religious Polarisation, Hindutva Supremacy”. There were bulldozers as campaign pieces placed outside rallies of the incumbent Chief Minister and the anti-Muslim stance of several MLAs, some of whom even went as far to speak of “tearing beards off faces of Muslims”.
A Chief Minister, also a head priest in Gorakhpur, in India’s most populous State, who made no bones about standing for what he did, gets back with a comfortable majority. This has national implications as it suggests that a significant section of the people here have bought into a sharply divisive idea of a Hindu Rashtra. The BJP’s confidence in pushing for similar actions, making States theatres of a show of aggressive Hindutva — like Karnataka, Assam and Madhya Pradesh — would get a fillip.
It had been believed after the elections in the Hindi heartland in the winter of 2017 that Narendra Modi could sway voters nationally, but the BJP was consistently losing States. That ‘jinx’ on the BJP has gone away with this round, as these elections were in States all around India, and with varying social complexions and political cultures. The BJP has managed to retain power across the board.
If the BJP finds no electoral pushback to its economic policies, of simultaneously keeping big business (via privatisation) as well as the extremely poor (in itslabaarthi , or beneficiary logic) on its side, there would be no problems with raising the price of petrol even further, or re-introducing farm laws. Watching economic policies unfold, in the face of mounting challenges in the next two years, would be a fascinating exercise.
AAP’s gains
The remaking of the Opposition space is a key message in these elections. The only Opposition party that has succeeded is the Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab. The losers would include, other than the Congress, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Akali Dal. The full kaleidoscope of parties with connections with old India, who thought of themselves as progressive or linked to social justice in some way, have been turfed out. AAP, a party which came into its own in the post-2014 world, after the Congress-era had waned fully, is the only one tasting success. AAP having as many Chief Ministers as the Grand Old Party, and parties such as the SP and others unable to mount an electoral challenge to the BJP, signals a blow to the whole universe of how politics was done before 2014, at least for the moment.
When this winter, the absence of a caste census was a serious issue with smaller Other Backward Classes and several prominent leaders leaving the BJP and joining the SP, there was hope that there could be a burgeoning social justice and welfare model, akin to the Dravidian model. A BSP unwilling to fight appeared to be a positive. But as results have come in, it is clear that merely trying to use another social faultline as a counter to the Hindutva faultline will not work at a time when so much political, institutional and monetary power is concentrated in Hindutva. It would need much more in the mix to mount the challenge. To think of a resurgent ‘post-Mandal’ to take on Hindutva would be foolhardy. U.P. is miles away from a Dravidian model.
Mounting a challenge
It is not clear if the challenge to the dominant narrative can be met with just electoral tactics. If anything, these elections have proved that to counter the idea of Hindu nationalism or ensure that voters are enthused by harmony, or even a 21st century version of Indian nationalism, would need much more than smart electioneering or tactical plays. For the moment, these verdicts have provided the justification of the ‘popular will’ that the ruling party in Delhi needs to implement policies which it may have hesitated to until now — for example, to bring back the farm laws or push more aggressively towards a Hindu Rashtra, by law.
Seema Chishti is a journalist-writer based in New Delhi
Uttar Pradesh has entered a new political era. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has romped back with a two-thirds majority: the first incumbent to return to power in over three decades. The project of the Samajwadi Party (SP) to transcend its Muslim-Yadav social base has come a cropper. The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress have been virtually annihilated.
Mandate as a meta narrative
The triumph of the BJP is not surprising, even if its scale was largely unanticipated. A common theme of the reportage from Uttar Pradesh has been the existence of a wave-less election. The antennae of journalists neither caught strong sentiments of pro-incumbency nor a widespread sentiment of anti-incumbency. What then explains the decisive mandate given to the BJP?
Decoding a political mandate is a complicated affair. There are several components that go into the making of a political majority. Some pundits have read into the mandate a validation of the governance achievements of the Yogi Raj, particularly welfare provisioning and tough law and order: a ‘rashan ’ and ‘shasan ’ mandate. Others maintain that the BJP was saved from a sticky wicket by its structural advantages: organisational machinery and media management. There is some truth in both the explanations, yet, they both miss what is essentially the ideological driving force behind the mandate, which is Hindu majoritarianism. This was the meta narrative of the BJP campaign, in reference to which all the smaller narratives were stitched together.
The principal challenge facing the BJP in these elections was keeping together the sprawling social coalition of Hindu voters it had assembled over the last decade: the upper castes, non-Yadav backward castes, and non-Jatav Dalits. This task was made even more daunting by the prevalence of multiple sources of discontent, which had also hurt the BJP in previous State elections. These include the usual litany of unemployment, price rise, stagnant incomes and rural distress, coupled with a particularly disastrous impact that the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown had wrought in the State.
To say that an expanded provisioning of rations outweighed the combined effects of all these governance deficits stretches credulity. It is hard to think of an Indian electorate in the third decade of the 21st century being swept off its feet with bags of food grains — something they have come to expect from the government for at least half a century.
More than just welfare
Cash transfers for a variety of welfare schemes — farmer income support, toilets, houses, school bags, etc. — present a stronger case. Though, here too, analysts reading an election-swaying effect need to tread with caution, for two reasons. One, welfare transfers on their own did not save the BJP from a voter backlash in recent State elections in Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. And two, neither survey data nor journalistic accounts indicated a whirlwind of public enthusiasm that could explain such a huge mandate. In fact, two months before the election, a survey finding highlighted the ambiguous nature of the public mood: while more than two-thirds of respondents claimed to be broadly dissatisfied with the State government, a slim majority still wanted it back in power. Clearly, something else was also in play.
And that decisive factor is Hindu majoritarianism, which has forged an emotional bond between the BJP and Hindu voters, barring the Yadavs and the Jatavs. The political activist, Yogendra Yadav, reported from his travels in Uttar Pradesh the existence of a political and moral ‘common-sense’ shared by Hindu voters of the State. This ‘common-sense’, borne out of what he calls the ‘Hindu-Muslim divide’, led them to excuse material suffering and misgovernance because they wished to stay on their ‘own’ side.
BJP versus SP
Make no mistake, this was primarily an ideological clash between the BJP and SP, waged mainly over non-Yadav backward caste voters. With the rest of the voters — upper castes, Muslims, Yadavs and Jatav Dalits — firmly in different camps, backward castes (and to a lesser extent, the non Jatav Dalits) were supposed to decide the fate of the election.
They were the fulcrum of Akhilesh Yadav’s campaign, who leaned heavily on the Mandal lexicon of ‘haq ’ (due rights) and ‘hissedari ’ (equal representation), promising a ‘revolution of the backwards’.
How did the BJP then manage to keep its backward caste voters from falling under the sway of the SP’s Mandal politics? Or in other words, how did Hindu majoritarianism reinforce the Hindu political identity of the backward castes that made them indifferent to Mandal politics? There are two aspects to this.
The first aspect is providing the backward castes with a sense of physical security — the law-and-order pitch of the Yogi government, symbolised by bulldozers and encounters. Under the Hindu umbrella, they are safe from the depredations of the Yadav and (even more so) Muslim criminals. The securitisation of communal prejudice has reached its highest form in Uttar Pradesh. There was an explicit conflation of ‘mafias’ with Muslim strongmen such as Mukhtar Ansari and Atiq Ahmad; rioters with Muslim anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protesters; and anti-social elements with Muslim cow smugglers and love jihad conspirators. For instance, more than a third of all National Security Act (NSA) detentions by the U.P. government (2018-2020) have been against cow smugglers. Thus, the law-and-order pitch of the BJP largely comprised converting Muslims into a security threat and then making high-pitched demonstrations of taming that threat. Many journalists who reported the absence of overt Hindu-Muslim tensions on the ground missed the potency of the communal assumptions that have become normalised among wide swathes of the electorate.
Economic security
The second aspect is providing the backward castes with a sense of economic security — without reference to their caste identity. The latter part (mechanism) here is as politically crucial as the former part (delivery). As I have argued in a previous article inThe Hindu , “In Uttar Pradesh the crux of welfare politics”, historically, Mandal and Dalit politics had gained ground in Uttar Pradesh by turning caste mobilisation into a pathway for greater access to public goods. The welfare regime instituted by the BJP, where provisions are made in a universal and programmatic manner, cutting out the middlemen particularly through cash transfers, dilutes the political salience of caste identity. Thus, this type of welfare politics works in tandem with a Hindu majoritarian discourse towards the political transformation of Dalits and backward castes into Hindus.
We must also consider why the Mandal strategy of the SP party failed in disturbing this Hindu political majority. In another article inThe Hindu , “Re-establishing ownership of the Mandal space”, my argument was that it was an enormous challenge to resurrect Mandal politics in the space of an election campaign.
On the eve of the elections, the SP engineered defections from the ranks of the BJP of prominent backward caste leaders such as Swami Prasad Maurya and Dara Singh Chauhan. This was meant to underline the dissatisfaction of backward castes under the Yogi regime, and make backward caste assertion a central theme of the election. As it turned out, most of these leaders did not have a hold on their own caste beyond their constituencies, and their record of opportunistic and transactional politics did not fit well with their pious ideological refrains. These efforts of the SP were, in short, too little too late.
Formulating an alternative
As this writer had mentioned previously, to make a serious effort to revitalise the Mandal space would require a longer term organisational and ideological revamp, and to contend with a new, flexible form of Hindutva. The BJP’s Hindu majoritarian campaign is carried out through the year, every year, through an active organisation and friendly media channels. It cannot be effectively challenged through an alternative ideological gambit that barely lasts more than three months.
Mr. Adityanath had framed this election as an 80 versus 20 election: an ill-concealed reference to a Hindu versus Muslim electoral competition. In hindsight, this framing did carry more than a grain of truth. Muslims duly consolidated behind the SP, while the BJP carried along with it the majority of the Hindus. The Hindu political majority that the BJP had constructed over the last three elections has now been demonstrated to be a durable phenomenon. Uttar Pradesh, much like Gujarat, is now a BJP-dominant state, where Hindu majoritarianism is deeply embedded in the political common sense.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has retained power in all the four States it held, of the five that went to the polls between February 10 and March 7, while the Congress lost the only one it had, Punjab, to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The BJP overcame the fatigue and popular disenchantment it had accumulated over five years in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, and Manipur, while the Congress collapsed in Punjab. The popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who remained the central figure of the BJP campaign, contributed significantly to the party’s victory; for the Congress, the leadership of the Gandhi family has become more of a burden going by its moves ahead of the elections that contributed directly to the party’s Punjab debacle. The resounding victory of AAP in Punjab opens new possibilities for the emergence of a national alternative to the BJP, but, at the moment, the latter’s electoral appeal appears unassailable. A combination of identity appeals, welfare promises, and strongman rhetoric helped the winners — the BJP in four States, and AAP in Punjab. The potency of a caste-oriented social justice plank as a mobilisation strategy is at a low ebb as the collapse of its Samajwadi Party (SP) version in U.P. and the Congress version in Punjab shows. Dynastic politics can be taken as having received a definitive drubbing — the leadership of many of the parties on the losing side are controlled by families over generations — the Congress, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). Mr. Modi and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal were quite possibly seen by their supporters as subaltern raiders of elite citadels.
The U.P. Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, has risen as a formidable vote catcher for the BJP in the Hindi heartland. His brushes with controversies only add to his popularity, the results suggest, and a new Modi-Yogi iteration of Hindutva politics has reinforced the BJP in U.P. The voters had appeared anguished with inflation, stray cattle menace, poor COVID-19 management, and unemployment, but not enough to vote out the BJP government. A protracted agitation of farmers had minimal impact on the polls, as the BJP won many seats in its epicentre of west U.P. It appears that the non-Jat and non-Muslim votes considerably consolidated behind the BJP in the face of the aggressive campaign of the SP-RLD alliance. Several backward caste leaders switched from the BJP tent to the SP camp, but ordinary voters did not follow them to an extent that could have threatened the BJP. The SP more than doubled its tally of 2017 but it still fell short. It could not wash off its image of being a party that provides protection to criminals and favours Yadavs and Muslims. The election saw a decimation of the Bahujan Samaj Party, helping the BJP more than the SP. The Congress only helped in creating an atmosphere for the SP alliance, and barely opened its account.
Punjab’s voters have given a decisive mandate for an ‘alternative politics’ promised by the AAP, which won 92 out of 117 seats. AAP, which has been in power in Delhi for seven years, has built a reputation for its welfare schemes, particularly in health and education — two sectors that voters care a lot about. That reputation stood AAP in good stead in Punjab, while the Congress and SAD were done in by the burden of their past sins. The projection of Bhagwant Mann as Chief Minister helped AAP, while the Congress seemed to have gained little by advertising the Dalit identity of Charanjit Singh Channi, who was appointed Chief Minister just five months ahead of the elections. The decimation of SAD signals the diminishing appeal of ‘Panthic’ or Sikh religious politics. The Sanyukt Samaj Morcha (SSM) — an amalgamation of 22 Punjab-based farmer outfits that spearheaded the agitation that forced the Centre to withdraw three controversial farm laws that it had enacted — failed to make any political impact.
In Goa, the BJP retained power, though the Congress put up a spirited fight. Goans can breathe easy, now that the State is not heading to yet another round of skulduggery to form a government. The BJP was also helped by the division of votes by players such as the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), the Trinamool Congress, and AAP. The BJP’s strategy of selecting candidates on the basis of ‘maximum winnability’ yielded rich dividends for the party. Manipur did not escape the general trend in the northeast, where people tend to vote for the party or coalition in power at the Centre since the States are dependent on Delhi for funds. The BJP emerged on top and the Congress cut a sorry figure, behind smaller parties such as the Naga People’s Front. The election was bereft of emotional issues, and the BJP gained from its development rhetoric. The demand for Scheduled Tribe status for the Meiteis, the community that dominates the Imphal and Jiribam valleys comprising 40 of the State’s 60 seats, failed to get traction. Neither did a controversial demand for greater autonomy to the tribal councils straddling the 20 constituencies in the hills. In Uttarakhand, the BJP retained power despite setbacks it had to deal with, while the Congress squandered its chances, getting bogged down in internal power tussles. But the defeat of its Chief Minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, is a serious embarrassment for the BJP. A fresh face would mean a fourth person as Chief Minister in a little over a year.
The BJP and AAP have gained huge momentum ahead of 2024. AAP’s durability as a viable national alternative will be put to the test. So far, it has not shown either the organisational strength or the political vision to be a national level player. Indeed, there is no one party that can challenge the BJP. A loose coalition of regional and Left parties, with or without the Congress at the head, might not inspire confidence among voters.
In a major outbreak of violence, anti-liquor agitators indulging in looting clashed with the police on Tuesday in Anantnag town, 50 km from Srinagar leaving at least 65 persons injured including a magistrate and some senior police officers. The police fired several rounds in the air to disperse unruly supporters of the pro-Pakistan People’s League who took to the street for the second day and forced shopkeepers to down their shutters. The police swung into action with firearms after lathicharge had little effect on the mob demanding a ban on sale of liquor. Infuriated by the police action to re-open the closed shops, threw liquor bottles on the roadside and stoned police personnel in the roadside.
An allegation that former Maharashtra Chief Minister A R Antulay took Rs 1.6 crore from a brewery was brought to the attention of the Rajya Sabha. In return, the brewery got an allocation of 2 million litres of molasses from the Maharashtra government, according to A G Kulkarni (Congress S).
Charanjit Singh, known as the Campa Cola MP, has landed himself in another scandal. His Pure Drinks company that is constructing a hotel in Windsor Place in Delhi has, in addition to the bungalow land allotted to the NDMC, made other encroachments.
As Holi revelers in Delhi prepared to celebrate, it seemed that winter was not ready to depart. Some parts of the city were greeted with a thunder in the evening on March 9.
There was no edition of the paper on March 11 because of Holi. The above are excerpts from the March 10 paper
The scoreboard after the latest round of assembly elections is confirmation, if more was needed, that the BJP is the primary pole of this country’s politics. At one time, it now seems very long ago, India’s polity was described as a one-party dominant system, with a Congress which was more a coalition than a party, its centrepiece. That time is long gone, the Congress is inexorably becoming a paler and more shrunken shadow of itself. And a BJP that got new life with the ascent of Narendra Modi at its top in 2014, is notching up achievements. With this round of elections, it has all but upended one of the last few caveats to its spectacular success – the party is yet to conquer the country’s south, barring Karnataka, it is pointed out, and even elsewhere, its performance in the states does not match up to its dominance of the Centre. While the south remains a challenge for Modi’s party, its decisive victories in four out of the five just-concluded assembly elections, including and especially UP, have, at least for now, put paid to the latter criticism. In politically crucial UP, the Yogi Adityanath government has become the first to get a consecutive second term in more than three decades.
The BJP’s formidable electoral successes are a result of larger changes on the ground and they also serve to deepen the new currents and transitions. In UP, fighting as an incumbent, it had etched its pitch and appeal clearly: One, a promise of “suraksha (safety)” that melds the promise of stricter law and order at the local level with the pledge of a more self-conscious nationalism and harder national security, both backed by the redefinition of the state as a less forgiving, more retributive entity. Two, the state as the provider of direct transfers and schemes to the citizen as labharthi or beneficiary – in UP, the free ration scheme had touched large sections in a time of severe economic distress exacerbated by a public health emergency, but there were other schemes too that had reached those who had not felt touched by the state before, from Ujjwala gas cylinders to PM Kisan Samman Nidhi to toilets. And three, a Hindutva both more assertive and insecure. In UP, the BJP has stoked a cultural and religious consciousness that feels it was long denied its due in echelons of power and in public spaces and feels that its moment has finally come.
The BJP’s political opponents do not have an answer that is either coherent or credible to any of the strands of its multi-vocal appeal. That is, of course, a challenge for the country’s Opposition. But in a democracy that is large and diverse, in this moment of triumph, there is also the victor’s challenge: To respect voices that oppose and disagree. To give the non-elected and countervailing institutions, the checks and balances, their due space and hearing. To include sections of the electorate that do not feel represented in its spectacular victory. The hard-fought election campaign was the party’s, but the government is, always, of the people.
The verdict is unambiguous: The electorate does not see the Congress as a party of governance any more and the party’s first family can no longer escape the blame. The Gandhis, Rahul and Priyanka in front, led the party’s campaign in all five states that went to polls and the party was rejected by voters everywhere. They should now accept the reality and vacate their positions of leadership, formal and informal, if the party has to survive and reinvent itself to battle the BJP juggernaut.
The Congress has been in a free fall since 2014, when the Narendra Modi-led BJP won a decisive majority in the Lok Sabha, the first time a party had done so since 1984. Thereafter, the Congress has ceded space to the BJP almost all over India. Take the five states that have now emphatically rejected the Congress: In UP, where Priyanka Gandhi Vadra led the campaign, the party polled just a little over 2 per cent votes; in Punjab, the party has received a drubbing — outgoing Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi, and state chief, Navjot Singh Sidhu, have failed to win their own seats. Former CM and the party’s chief campaigner in Uttarakhand, Harish Rawat, also did not get elected, a repeat of his 2017 performance. In Manipur, where the Congress held office for three terms between 2002 and 2017, the party is poised to finish behind the Janata Dal (United) and the rising regional force, the National People’s Party (NPP). Goa was seen as an election for the Congress to lose, and it has lost it. Unlike in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh in 2018, the Congress local leadership in these states could not check the BJP’s “double-engine” campaign, led by PM Modi and CM Yogi and backed by an energetic party machinery.
The writing has been on the wall for some time, and many in the Congress have read it. Some left what they felt was a sinking ship whereas others — for instance, the G-23 – still hoped to make the leadership address the crisis. The fact is the family has outlived its political utility and is now a burden for the Congress: Its continuance at the party’s helm reflects a sense of entitlement that alienates a young and aspirational electorate, and gives the party a jaded look. The voters have moved on from the Nehru-Gandhi family, it’s time the party did too.
A little less than a decade after it was formed, the Aam Aadmi Party has won the election in a state that has had an entrenched bipolar polity for decades and was the epicentre of a large farmers’ movement in the year preceding the polls. The AAP, Arvind Kejriwal and Chief Minister-designate Bhagwant Mann deserve credit for their spectacular Punjab victory. After the jubilation, they will need to focus on the challenge — to address the multiple, structural crises that afflict the state as it struggles to transition from a political economy that was based on a Green Revolution that plateaued long ago.
That it has, in such a short period after its entry on the political landscape, won office in a full-fledged state displays the AAP’s ability to learn from setbacks and course-correct. During its first stint in office in Delhi in 2013, the party that had emerged from the Anna movement appeared to rely more on a politics of confrontation and protest vis a vis the Centre — a vestige of its roots in the anti-corruption campaign – rather than the hard labour of governance. Then, in its last attempt at capturing power in Punjab in 2017, the AAP’s prospects seemed dented by the fact that it did not have a chief ministerial candidate, was accused of flirting with Khalistani elements and its “high command” was seen to be micro-managing the state unit from Delhi. Clearly, the party leadership took cognisance of these shortcomings, running a campaign that highlighted its achievements in health and education in Delhi, naming a CM candidate and steering clear of controversial or polarising issues.
The politics of solutionism that it has showcased in Delhi may not be enough, however, to address the complex issues plaguing the state. Agriculture has become economically unviable and ecologically unsustainable and the state has been unable to take advantage of the IT or services sector boom. Both industry and the young are fleeing Punjab and drug addiction continues to increase. Tensions around alleged acts of sacrilege complicate the dynamics in the border state where memories of the decade lost to terrorism haven’t faded. To build on its victory, the AAP must now construct a “Punjab model” that responds to the strong desire for change that has propelled it to power with such a large mandate.
The election results in Goa have come as a shock to many. The single-party mandate in favour of the BJP, amidst a fractured opposition and contrary to expectations, makes this election distinct from the rest. The nail-biting moments during the counting finally resulted in the BJP inching closer to the majority, with 20 seats in the 40-member Assembly. With the aid of three independents, the BJP is on its way to forming a popular government for the third consecutive time in the state.
The Congress euphoria has died down, with the party managing a meagre 12 seats, including one seat for their alliance partner, Goa Forward Party (GFP). The prospects of the relatively new entrant in the state, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), have been razed, and the hope of the Maharastrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) that it will turn out to be the kingmaker has been shattered. The painstaking groundwork of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has helped it to open its account in the coastal state with two seats. Against the expectations of the exit pollsters, the radical regional outfit, the Revolutionary Goans (RG), has a maiden victory, although with a slender margin.
The electoral contest in Goa this time has been a close, five-cornered contest. Political optics were hazy, as the limited political space, with an average of 30,000-35,000 voters in each constituency, was crowded with more organised and resource-rich players like the TMC and AAP, alongside the traditional parties, the BJP and the Congress, and regional outfits like the MGP, GFP and RG.
The BJP, with its battery of astute observers from the Centre, took no chances and was quick to adapt. After all, it had to defend its 10 years in government, with four chief ministers in the last two terms. For the Congress, it was an existential battle. From being the single-largest party with 17 seats and yet failing to elect its leader and form the government in 2017, the grand old party was reduced to just two legislators in 2022. Defections gave a big blow to the rank and file of the party. With one former CM, Luizinho Faleiro, joining the TMC, and another former CM, Pratapsingh Rane, backing out from the contest, it was the other former CM, Digambar Kamat, who single-handedly had to lead the dilapidated Congress.
The BJP’s organisational strength has delivered in its favour. Despite the double anti-incumbency, it was able to retain its vote share at 33 per cent. The party had secured just 13 seats with the same vote share during the last assembly election in 2017. Its comprehensive victory seems significant as this party faced a lot of internal bickering in the run-up to the present elections. The spat between CM Pramod Sawant and Vishwajit Rane, a heavyweight leader who switched from the Congress, the Covid crisis, alleged recruitment scams, a financial debacle in the state and the closure of mining for over a decade, presented the BJP with tough challenges. Moreover, this was the first election the BJP was facing without its tallest leader, Manohar Parrikar.
The results mean that the BJP’s intrinsic vote share remains intact. The narrative of the principal opposition party, the Congress, that it now represents a “New Congress”, is stumped by the BJP’s “seat-by-seat micro plans”.
The BJP got an edge due to its offensive strategy of massive “take-overs and acquisitions”. It offered tickets to as many as 12 defectors and in the run-up to the polls managed to poach as many as five winnable candidates from other parties in the 33 seats that it seriously contested.
Much of the credit for the win goes to those who defected from the Congress, adding over 60,000 votes for the BJP. The “individual effort” of the imported and poached leaders compensated for any loss due to anti-incumbency and helped the BJP retain its decisive electoral position in Goa’s politics. Among the 36 candidates that the BJP fielded, three were fresh faces (all won) and five were former legislators who had lost in 2017. Four among these five were able to gain voters’ confidence this time. Of the 12 defectors from Congress fielded by the BJP, five lost, and yet they were able to transfer their massive vote banks to the BJP kitty.
The narrative of the “New Congress” got no electoral sympathy, as there was no attempt to consolidate the opposition vote. The Congress failed to reach out to the MGP, neither did it pay any heed to the TMC’s overtures for an alliance. The GFP’s call to come together and strategise was heard only at the last minute. The Congress’s overconfidence about bipolarity in the contest led to its self-destruction. The five per cent dip in the Congress vote share led to the loss of six seats. The absence of any strategy to form a credible united opposition has led the Congress to the greatest debacle of this election season.
It is hoped that the current mandate in favour of the BJP will do its best to move Goans away from the worst political experience they have had in the last five years.
This column first appeared in the print edition on March 11, 2022 under the title ‘A Goan surprise’. The writer is an academician and political commentator
As Uttarakhand’s fifth state assembly elections wind down, let us take a look at some of the key factors that determined its outcome and how the major players fared.
>Having thus far been an electorally bipolar state, this election marks the first time in the state’s history that the ruling party has not lost the election. Some may see this as a testament to the BJP’s sway over the Himalayan state whereas others may feel it more noteworthy to point out the ineffectiveness of the opposition parties. It is fair to say that the result was impacted by both the former and the latter. However, what is certain is that the 2017 Modi wave is still sweeping across Uttarakhand.
Despite the political baggage that comes with having appointed three different chief ministers over the past year, the “Modi magic” remains intact. In other words, as long as Narendra Modi holds the reins at the Centre, the disorder in Uttarakhand’s BJP unit will continue to be overlooked by the state’s voters. Further, Modi’s public affection for Uttarakhand — which includes his personal involvement in the Kedarnath restoration and Badrinath redevelopment plans — has catapulted him to an almost unassailable status in the eyes of many.
That being said, the current chief minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, who came to power approximately six months ago, has also helped to steady the BJP ship. Although Dhami has not measurably impacted the state yet, the fact that he has avoided the kind of controversies that haunted his predecessors has served the BJP well.
An analysis of this election indicates that women turned out in huge numbers for the BJP. In an unprecedented turn of events, women voters outnumbered male voters in 38 of the 70 assembly seats. The voting patterns appear to suggest that the double-engine philosophy has shaped up rather agreeably for the BJP. The BJP’s well-oiled electoral machinery — consisting of manpower, managerial efficiency and unlimited resources – has become formidable in Uttarakhand.
One party’s success is another’s undoing. The Congress is staring at a bleak future. It is no secret that the party has been faltering at the state as well as the national level. Its inability to take advantage of the anti-incumbency sentiment — as was the case in prior elections – is a marker of its decline. As things stand, it appears unable to challenge the BJP in Devbhoomi.
The 74-year-old Congress veteran Harish Rawat was insisting that the party declare him as the chief ministerial candidate. However, the party decided to go ahead with a collective leadership model. Ironically, Rawat has failed to win in his own constituency of Lalkuan, another disappointing result to follow up on his equally dismal performance in the 2017 elections when he had lost from Haridwar Gramin and Kichha. All signs suggest this could be the end of the road for Rawat. Going ahead, whether it is Rawat or a new leader that the Congress appoints, there is no denying that the party has to rise from the ashes, revamp its strategy and rebuild its organisation from scratch.
Lastly, it turned out to be an underwhelming result for the Aam Aadmi Party in their Uttarakhand state assembly election debut. Chief ministerial candidate Colonel Ajay Kothiyal fared poorly from the Gangotri assembly seat. The AAP failed to win a single seat. Unlike the Congress, however, the AAP can draw inspiration from its emphatic win in Punjab, and use that momentum in the upcoming urban local body elections in 2023 and the next Uttarakhand state assembly elections. In the event that the AAP does well in Punjab in the next five years, it will be a force to be reckoned with in 2027.
This column first appeared in the print edition on March 11, 2022 under the title ‘In Himalayas, saffron peak’. The writer is a social worker and the founder of Dehradun based SDC Foundation
It might take time for any analysis to approach a semblance of being comprehensive, but nothing can hide the comprehensiveness of the BJP’s success — and of the Congress’s complete failure — in the results of the assembly elections in five states. A similar comprehensiveness also marks the AAP’s success in Punjab. In the days to come, there will be a search for multiple factors, which may have influenced voters from different social backgrounds, and state-wise explanations of the outcome to complete the jigsaw puzzle that election outcomes often are.
Results from the five states may be explained by two standard templates. It could be said that the electorate was “misled” or misguided by the BJP, barring in Punjab. This would involve a critique of the BJP campaign. On the other hand, it could be said that the BJP won riding on its governance record, including its welfare measures. This argument would ignore both the ideological assault by the BJP and the many limitations of its governance model. Both these arguments will surely possess an element of truth and yet miss the larger dimensions of these outcomes.
The dramatic victory of the AAP in Punjab, the dismal performance of the Congress and the decent showing by the BJP indicate that over and above complex templates of analysis, there is something simpler that needs to be stated and re-stated: In terms of structure of competition, India’s polity is deep into the framework of single-party dominance. Such is the dominance of the BJP that its politics of misguiding the electorate resonates with the voters and its limited achievements in the field of welfare provisioning constitute the centrepiece of its governance record.
To grasp the significance of these outcomes, it is necessary to keep at a distance these temptingly plausible explanations. They surely have a certain explanatory value. But the larger point which should not be missed is about the fundamental shift that the BJP has been able to bring about. As this writer has been repeatedly arguing, the rise of the BJP in 2014 marked the rise of a new political culture in the making. With almost every election and every political controversy, this new culture is more clearly on display. No interpretation of an electoral outcome, therefore, would be complete without taking into consideration this new political culture.
There are at least three key aspects of this shift in the political culture of contemporary India. One, the average Hindu voter today appears more favourably inclined than ever to become part of a politically mobilised pro-Hindutva mass of voters. The BJP, over the past decade, has repeatedly displayed its ability to shape effective voter polarisation on the basis of religious identity. If one were not to be carried away by campaign claims about good governance and instead track the continuous and low-volume communal rhetoric appealing to Hindus to politically organise as Hindus, particularly against Muslims, it would be clear that in most states, a large chunk of the voters would be swayed by Hindutva.
Two, voters are willing to consider leadership and personality as the most important factors in making their political choices and determining their opinions on contentious issues. The BJP has taken the leadership factor or the personality cult to a new level. Voters are most likely now to perceive governmental authority in the form of the leader. Since 2014, the emphasis on personality and the audacious claim of “Modi hai toh mumkin hai (Anything is possible if Modi is there)” has meant that everything the governments achieve or claim to have achieved is invariably linked to the persona of Modi. While this is not the first time that we have seen such politics, the extent of the current claims and their durability surpasses not just state-level personality cults but also pushes into insignificance the efforts of Indira Gandhi to project herself as the saviour of the poor. As we continue to witness the marvels of Modi’s personality cult, a more systematic study of personalised authority under him is yet to happen. As such, the extraordinary shift this has brought to the game of electoral competition can only be imagined for the time being.
Both these factors have helped the BJP in overcoming the many shortcomings, particularly its monumental mishandling of the pandemic during the second wave. Once the electorate is deeply divided on religious basis and once the voters are convinced of the extraordinary powers and sincerity of The Leader, governance failures can be easily overlooked — in fact, their occurrence can be simply rejected as opposition canard. It is no wonder then that whether in UP or in Uttarakhand, voters chose not to be concerned about what happened during the pandemic or during a natural disaster. Hindutva mobilisation and personalised imagination of authority thus operate as an insurance against misgovernance.
Three, increasingly, voters are willing to endorse a proactive police state as protecting the national interest rather than demanding an institutionally moderated exercise of state powers. During the past eight years, the meanings of governance and statecraft have been entirely transformed. Extensive and consistent use of the repressive arm of the state have marked the polity. A truly hard and harsh state has been unleashed. What is more significant is that public opinion has uncritically upheld this avatar of the state. This point particularly helps us understand why the many accusations against the UP CM of being high-handed never cut much ice with the public.
Seen in the context of this three-pronged shift, which, of course, has not been a magical outcome that emerged in 2014 but has been in the making for quite some time, the victory of the BJP in the state assembly elections poses complicated choices for other political players. Anti-BJP politics, in the backdrop of the kind of single-party dominance that the BJP has shaped, faces two alternatives. An ambitious and long-term alternative, which almost seems impossible at the moment, is for anti-BJP parties (and there is a difference between non-BJP parties and anti-BJP parties) to reshape the consensus sketched above; it involves seeking to change the middle ground that the BJP has set as the framework of competitive politics. This route is not easy to take and, clearly, there are no takers.
The other alternative, a tame one, is that anti-BJP parties choose to operate within the space set by the BJP. Thus, for instance, the AAP or the TMC harps on personalisation of authority, the TRS does not bother about the hard state mechanisms it adopts or the AAP does not bother about the mobilisation of Hindus on the basis of Hindutva. The victories of the BJP, including in the key state of UP, only reiterate and alert non-BJP players of this bind: An impossible route or a route that will only strengthen the BJP in the long run.
The writer, based in Pune, taught political science and is currently Chief Editor of Studies in Indian Politics
Punjab was in the throes of an economic, sociological and environmental meltdown when the state assembly elections turned into a political tornado. The Aam Aadmi Party uprooted not only a whole forest of leaders from Parkash Singh Badal to Amarinder Singh but possibly the Congress party from the national mantlepiece as well.
The trajectory of the decimation of the traditional parties is not difficult to map. The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) was identified with and supported by the Sikhs and the farmers.
The sacrilege charges had already eroded its identity as a party for the Sikhs. It blundered further by initially supporting the farm laws, thus losing the faith of the farmers. Being disconnected from the masses is not the exclusive domain of the Congress.
If demonising the Badals had provided Amarinder Singh with the licence to power in 2017, his consorting with the same Badals after he became the Chief Minister became his nemesis. It was his bonhomie with the Badals that made Punjab hold him in contempt and eventually forced the Congress high command to show him the door. The occasion provided the opportunity for change that the people were seeking from the stranglehold of the two families who had been at the helm of affairs for over a quarter of a century.
Of the 79 Congress MLAs whose opinion was sought, other than Charanjit Singh Channi himself, only one other MLA opted for him. Still the Congress high command put Channi at the helm. Not to forget, Navjot Singh Sidhu, a person who has delusions of having daily conversations with the gods and who had been earlier imposed as the state party president on the hapless Punjab Congress, was acceptable to only four Congress MLAs. Consequently, the party was laughed out of power.
It was no surprise that the Congress in Punjab, a party with raging internecine feuds, could not capitalise on the social engineering of appointing a lower caste chief minister, which was seen as a ploy to beat the anti-incumbency factor. But in its hubris of appointing a lower caste CM, the party grossly miscalculated the backlash from other sections. Hindus in Punjab felt slighted when a few senior party leaders objected to a Hindu CM and the party high command buckled. That the blatant indiscipline of CM Channi in supporting his brother as an independent candidate against a Congress candidate went unchecked is a telling sign of the terminal decay in the Congress leadership. To top it all, January 18, 2022, became the tipping point of the election campaign, when the family of the CM was raided by the Enforcement Directorate. Unaccounted cash amounting to Rs 10 crore was recovered from the operation, along with humongous sums of unexplained money in bank accounts. It validated what people had long suspected: The CM was just another version of the earlier regime.
Decades of misgovernance, easy availability of drugs, rampant corruption, illegal sand mining, liquor lobby pay-outs, lack of employment opportunities had people frustrated and clamouring for change. If the Akali Dal is to blame for initiating the cynicism, the Congress is largely at fault for allowing the wounds to fester. Other than the obvious crisis of leadership, the Congress faces a deeper crisis of purpose.
Indeed, the only real loser in the elections is the Congress party. Amarinder Singh, in spite of his loss, has exacted his sweet revenge for the humiliation seemingly sanctioned by the Congress high command.
The level of dejection with the traditional parties was so large that people did not care to notice that like these parties, the AAP too has a high command that sits in Delhi, that 51 per cent of its candidates have criminal records and over a fourth of its candidates were turncoats from other political parties. Desperately seeking a change, the people concluded that the AAP would provide it. The AAP did not need to be intelligent; it just needed to be seen as being different. As a party unencumbered by the past and without a legacy to drag it down, the AAP thus won decisively.
The BJP’s gambit achieved two advantages. One, a clear AAP victory in Punjab muddles the chances of opposition unity at the national level in the run-up to 2024 parliamentary elections as AAP becomes the “go-to national party”. Next, with the help of Amarinder Singh, some farm union leaders were incentivised to form the Sanyukt Samaj Morcha to contest the polls. Apart from the expected thorough rout of the Morcha, its leaders lost the trust of the people and the chance of a farmers’ protest effectively targeting the BJP again in the future has been neutralised.
Looking ahead, the AAP will quickly realise that it is easier to make poll promises than to deliver on them. After the GST compensation comes to an end in three months, the appalling gap between revenue receipts and the committed expenditure will be impossible to plug. This shortfall does not account for the humongous cost of fulfilling the election promises. There is little doubt that after the elections, the real “aam aadmi” will feel short-changed by the long list of promises and expectations that simply cannot be fulfilled.
The AAP is also different because its state leadership is without administrative experience, devoid of ideology and a party structure for checks and balances. This and the high number of MLAs (many of them first-time) will make it very tricky for the party to govern a state where expectations have peaked and emotions always run high. Time will tell if Bhagwant Mann as the chief minister can wield power as a statesman. That will decide the fate of the AAP as the road to India’s capital leads through Punjab.
This column first appeared in the print edition on March 11, 2022 under the title ‘In Punjab, a clear wind for change’. The writer is chairman, Bharat Krishak Samaj
The results of the five assembly elections are a further consolidation of the momentous changes in Indian politics over the last decade. The results in UP are a spectacular win for the BJP, consolidating its power and ideological hegemony over Indian politics. It sends a plain and simple message: Politics, in the end, is a game of competitive credibility and the BJP simply has no competition.
The BJP has transformed the nature of politics in ways to which the Opposition has no answer. The first is a commitment to a generative conception of politics. The sense that the BJP has a deep social base, especially amongst women and lower castes, and a spectacular geographic reach as Manipur has demonstrated, completely belies the identity determinism that has for so long characterised Indian politics. The project of now opposing any national party on the basis of a coalition of fragmented identities is dead. No political party can be averse to social calculations. But every party at play in this election other than AAP and BJP were, in the final analysis, relying on a kind of social arithmetic.
To reduce politics to simply the social — as the SP, BSP, Congress had for so long done — was to already give the game away. To continue to think that people simply voted their caste or that the BJP represented upper caste hegemony was to take a starting point that was at best a product of selection bias, at worst a refusal to acknowledge voters driven by the spell of an idea. Social engineering or mere descriptive representation makes politics sound trivial, it seems to rob voters of their agency and they respond with revulsion.
Second, is the weariness with old, corrupt, doddering, ancient regimes trying to reinvent themselves. That there is social discontent is palpable. Akhilesh Yadav ran an energetic campaign. But at the end of the day, it was hard for him to overcome the taint of his own past. Many people saw the prospect of the SP’s return as, in the end, a return to an old corrupt mafia ridden order. Most of these parties, especially the Congress, come across as the Bourbon monarchy trying to reinvent itself after the French Revolution has taken place. Even a whiff of the old regime or baggage from the past, whether it comes as Priyanka Gandhi (who did a large number of rallies in UP) or even a reformed Akhilesh will be enough to kill its chances. In Punjab, the Congress tried a new social engineering by selecting Charanjit Singh Channi, but so overwhelming is the shadow of the party’s culture that no amount of that worked. The sense that the Modi-Yogi combine is still in the process of upending the old order whether in culture or in style of governance is still palpable.
It is not an accident that since 2014, it was the BJP and AAP that were seen as possible alternatives — both taking India into a place that was not the tired entitlement of an old regime that had already imploded. Both spoke a new ideological; both were not tainted with that “old regime” tag; both presented a politics that went beyond the social arithmetic. The AAP’s victory in Punjab has given it new wings as a leader in the Opposition space. These are the plain truths of politics. The question for India now is no longer the reconstruction of the Congress or the future of Rahul Gandhi. It is finding a new Opposition almost from scratch.
The third is just the ability to think politically. The BJP’s handling of the farmers movement was going to make retrieving Punjab difficult. By defusing a potential time bomb, even if that meant doing a U-turn on a much trumpeted policy reform, the BJP perhaps came across as responsive. Eating humble pies from a position of strength can be, if used well, endearing, especially when the alternative is trumpeting entitlement from a position of non-achievement and weakness.
The fourth is the importance of leadership. Whether we like it or not, this vote reiterates trust, in most states, in the leadership of Narendra Modi. Again, it is an academic debate whether the vote is for Modi or Yogi. The point of a successful leader is that they create the conditions where there is no division in the party, and in the final analysis, an ability to work together. It has been an obvious fact about the BJP that its constituent parts are marching to the same tune. But this is not just a command and control performance; mere command from the top can at best produce a sullen compliance. It is creating an organisational culture that always has its eyes on the bigger prize. The Opposition, in contrast, can scream all it wants that there is an existential crisis of democracy. But if its conduct, its internal battles convey no minimal ability to work together in a crisis, there is no ground to stand on. If in the face of this evil, you could not get your act together, why should I even trust your diagnosis, seems to be the refrain.
Finally, there is the question of ideology. There will be another time to discuss how much of Yogi’s triumph in UP has to do with governance and delivery. This is empirically a complicated matter. This is in no small part because what a regime gets credit for is as much a matter of prior trust as it is of facts. Certainly Yogi’s new welfarism, or crackdown on certain kinds of corrupt intermediaries may contribute to the BJP’s popularity. But the idea that all of that was enough to wipe out the effects of the Covid-19 devastation, unprecedented inflation, a dip in consumer spending and a real jobs crisis requires more explanation. Perhaps the angriest and the most devastated no longer feel politics is the conduit for solving their problems. Your protest will be expressed more as social pathology, not as political revolt.
But here is one simple thing Indian democracy will have to think about after these elections. The fact that a politics that has venom, hate, prejudice, violence, repression and deceit is not a deal breaker for voters is something to think about. This road always ends in catastrophe. The somewhat less disquieting answer is that this a reflection of the depth of incompetence to which the Opposition has sunk. The more disquieting answer is that the loss of our moral compass on fundamental values is irretrievable. Only time will tell. But for now the sovereign people have spoken, and all other tongues will have to fall silent. In any case there is no power to oppose the BJP; one can only hope glimmers of a moral conscience can survive this undoubted feat of political mastery.
The writer is consulting editor, The Indian Express
The first point to note after March 10’s verdicts is the sublime messaging of Indian democracy. Incumbent BJP beat history in UP and Uttarakhand and won. In Manipur and Goa, supposedly tough-to-win small states for the governing party, BJP improved its tallies. And in Punjab, voters showed how dramatic the fallout of popular anger against established parties can be, by giving AAP, in existence for only 10 years, a massive mandate. There’s more. Voters have demonstrated how emphatic they can be in their rejection of so-called big names – look at how many stars lost their seats in Punjab, look at the fast-fading Nehru-Gandhi brand across states, look at the virtual irrelevance of Mayawati in UP, look at the failure of Akhilesh Yadav to extend SP’s social base. As always in Indian elections, when old stars crash to the ground, new stars shine bright. Yogi Adityanath is now a politician with the potential to transcend his state’s boundaries. Arvind Kejriwal is now an opposition leader with the best potential to take the fight to BJP. And in Pushkar Dhami (despite losing his seat), Pramod Sawant and N Biren Singh, BJP has found energetic state-level champions in, respectively, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur.
But, of course, the brightest star of this show is Narendra Modi. His popular appeal is clearly intact, he’s probably the most important reason why BJP’s win in UP was so handsome, why BJP won in Goa and Manipur, too. And that this has happened despite his government’s inability to create enough low- and medium-skilled jobs and the gathering inflation momentum speaks volumes for his political skill. Modi’s BJP has created a new model, at least in the politically most significant Hindi heartland – continuous subliminal and/or overt messaging to attract a pan-caste Hindu vote and, by Indian governance standards, very effective delivery of welfare benefits.
Kejriwal is another leader who’s earned voter trust on welfare delivery. But, despite his extraordinary performance in Punjab, he will need a massive political skills upgrade to take on BJP – and replace Congress as the main challenger – in the heartland, which is where he must succeed if he’s to challenge Modi in 2024. AAP’s caste playbook is very thin, and the question is whether it has enough time to change that for national polls. If AAP can’t upgrade fast enough and Congress continues to wither away, the opposition has a big problem: Who will effectively fight BJP in seat-heavy north India? Congress is also a lesson for other family-led parties, as is SP. If you are bound hand and foot to a family and if that family doesn’t deliver, and if you have no culture of encouraging new talent, how do you imagine a new future? Today’s BJP is so formidable only because in 2014, it made Modi its national face, in the teeth of opposition from many then-prominent national leaders.
As for the future of India’s economy and its ability to spread mass prosperity, these elections will be pivotal in one of two ways. Either parties will think that welfarism and rank populism will win polls and therefore reforms are unnecessary and probably politically costly. Or, hopefully, at least some of them will conclude that the fiscal limits of welfarism will be reached very soon and that growth and jobs via smart policies is the only sustainable political economic formula in a country where a vast number of low-income citizens are looking for reasonably well-paid jobs. It is vital that BJP, the most influential party by far, chooses the correct alternative.
Two years ago, on March 11, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Covid-19 as a global pandemic. In this time, the world dealt with immense loss of life that pushed even the most robust healthcare systems to their limits, brought about economic standstill and erosion. It is a testament to human capacity that the world is now rebuilding. But the pandemic is not over. Vigilance and protocols are now integral to daily lives.
There is more that needs to be done. Building sturdy healthcare systems, addressing inequity - particularly of vaccines and therapeutics - reorienting economies to address the drivers of pandemics, diversifying supply chains. The list is long. As Covid-19 inches towards becoming endemic, governments must take measures to build better. These 24 months have demonstrated that faced with a crisis, governments can move decisively. The world produced vaccines in record time - 12 vaccines authorised for full use, 19 others for emergency use, and more in development. India built up its capacity to produce masks, personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing infrastructure. It ensured support to those most in need through food and monetary support. As with any crisis of this magnitude, there were setbacks. The failure to set up adequate oxygen plants contributed to a higher toll during the second wave. Building a strong healthcare system must be a top priority. Equally critical is the need to put in place measures to tackle issues that contribute to the occurrence of zoonotic diseases.
The pandemic forced governments to take note of issues often not given priority. Economic growth that does not contribute to human and planetary well-being is not sustainable. Let that be the takeaway of these two years.
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Results of the assembly elections this week - of four states, at any rate - should provide the BJP room to push through parts of its economic reforms agenda that has been held up by political opposition. Management of the economy facing supply disruptions due to a pandemic, and now an energy shock, involves targeted welfare delivery that has paid - and will continue to pay - out political dividends. But a crisis is a good time to build systemic resilience. Reducing distortions in the goods and services tax (GST), bringing greater flexibility to the labour market and a bolder privatisation drive have been announced and await implementation. The party could use the latest electoral mandate to whittle down resistance in the run-up to the next general elections.
GoI's credentials in economic crisis management could help sway the argument. New Delhi has an ambitious capital expenditure programme to pull the economy out of the dumps that co-opts both states and the private sector. Selling free markets should be relatively easier under these circumstances. Improved credit flow after a clean-up of the banking system, for instance, not only helps economic recovery but it also makes the case for privatising banks and insurance companies stronger. Disinvestment can also augment efforts to improve tax revenue buoyancy and better targeting of welfare delivery.
The BJP has faced the most entrenched opposition to its efforts to free factor markets. It has had to turn back on land acquisition and farming market reforms. Labour law changes have also been held up. These are the far reaches of liberalisation, and reformist ambitions may need to be tempered here. But the ruling party could well aim for low hanging fruit such as improving efficiencies where market forces are already in play. That would principally involve lowering the cost of doing business as the state withdraws from business. The NDA has succeeded more than its predecessors in delinking economic reforms from the ballot box. It should push this advantage further.
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The exit polls earlier this week had prepared us for the score line on Thursday, though some of the details are sure to vary. The main task is therefore to interpret the continued success of the BJP in four of the five Assembly elections, especially in Uttar Pradesh. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a telling comment in the last phase of the election campaign in the state when he said that there was a “pro-incumbency” trend in the country. Perhaps, he had in mind the electoral outcomes in West Bengal and Kerala as well.
The outrage among liberals over the BJP’s victory in Uttar Pradesh must be moderated because it is not just the sway of the BJP’s anti-Muslim Hindutva rhetoric that gave the party its winning numbers. Hindutva remains an important plank, and it is the clinching factor as in the case of Jats in western UP. In eastern UP, the Ram temple in Ayodhya surely had its impact as also the spruced-up Kashi Vishwanath Corridor. More important, what helped the BJP to get past the Samajwadi Party was the coalition of the non-Yadav Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and partly that of the dalits. Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati had given a push to the BJP indirectly.
The Muslim vote has not helped the Samajwadi Party much in the face of the BJP’s caste coalition, which included the upper castes, the OBCs and dalits. It gives the impression of a communally polarised scenario. But one can’t press the point too far. The BJP would want the Muslim vote too, and it wants to be seen as a benign party that will patronise and protect Muslims as the Congress, SP and BSP had done earlier. It is for the different sections of the Muslim community -- there is no monolith here -- to decide their strategy. Conservative and reactionary elements among the Muslims will now negotiate with the BJP, and the BJP is not averse to the prospect. Organisations like Jamiat-ul-Ulema are already dealing with the BJP and RSS. Muslim liberals and socialists will remain arraigned against the BJP along with the Hindu liberals and socialists. Though the BJP has relentlessly and shamelessly labelled the Opposition parties as pro-Muslim and thus anti-Hindu, the SP and the Congress had played into the BJP’s hands by distancing themselves from the Muslim question. The Muslims in UP and the BJP must now come to terms with each other.
Punjab has shown the way out of the communal problem as it has voted for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which moved away from the plank of Sikh politics and brought in a new political perspective of governance. The AAP’s success shows that people are willing to opt for a new party when one is presented to them. The Akali Dal has proved itself to be a spent force, and the Congress is as jaded as the Akalis. The BJP perhaps sees itself as party of the future, but it has Hindutva baggage. The AAP has stolen the show because it moved beyond the traditional community-based calculations. The AAP’s victory is in many ways the victory of the politics of governance, away from community and caste. It is necessary to remember that the AAP is not the traditional liberal party with secular values. It is a traditional conservative party which cunningly mixes Hinduism and nationalism, sometimes as blatantly as the BJP. It will be a mistake to interpret the election outcome in Punjab as the victory of liberal secular values as against the conservative, communal ones. India is now squarely in the zone of conservative politics, and that includes West Bengal.
In the smaller states of Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur, the BJP is in a winning position but it is not the solve victor. It must share the political space with the Congress in Uttarakhand and in Goa, and with the regional parties in Manipur. It means that overarching ideologies do not matter in these smaller states, and local questions retain significance.
Looking at the result of the Assembly elections in these five states, it is possible to say that the health of the polity is robust. The BJP, despite its victories, in not the sole repository of power in these states and in the country as a whole. The BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will stay true to their habit of trumpeting their big and small victories as the dominating force in the country, but the party, though a big player, is not the only one. While the victory in UP reaffirms the BJP’s dominance in the heartland, it does not have a monopoly of power even in the Hindi heartland. It shares political space with the Janata Dal (United) of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, and with the Congress in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The BJP’s electoral victories in these elections do not lend credence to the claim of its critics and supporters that Indian politics has turned saffron. The granular picture shows that there are many parties jostling with each other in the political space, even of the Hindi heartland. The hawks in the BJP are sure to crow after the victory in UP that the BJP is India and India is the BJP. And the liberals, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, are sure to lament the saffron triumph. That will be misleading. India remains a politically complex country, and homogenous hegemony of Hindutva does not fit the bill.
The victory in UP in 2022 can be seen as a precursor to a BJP victory in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, but if the UP numbers are any indication, the BJP will have to content itself with a limited victory. Of course, for Mr Modi and his party, victory matters more than any margins. But a BJP victory in UP in 2022 and in the Lok Sabha in 2024 does not itself guarantee good governance. The BJP under Mr Modi is yet to establish its credentials on the governance front, despite the loud claims to the contrary by all and sundry in the party. Tough talk is not the same as good governance. Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath are only good at tough talk. The fair question to ask is why then do people vote for the BJP? The adage of a good democracy is that you choose the best of the worst. The beneficiary is the BJP.