What March 2022 says about May 2024 - Hindustan Times
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What March 2022 says about May 2024

Mar 12, 2022 06:41 PM IST

The PM is right. The BJP is in pole position to return to power for a third term

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the pathway to electoral victory in Delhi does not necessarily lie through Lucknow. Between 1999 and 2014, the significance of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in national politics dipped. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won just 29 of the 85 seats in the state in 1999, compared to 59 seats in 1998, yet it returned to power to complete its first five-year term. The Congress won just nine seats of the 80 seats in 2004 — but was able to lead the government for five years in Delhi, with issue-based support from regional forces in UP, but without being dependent on them for survival on a day-to-day basis. In 2009, the Congress did better in the state in a surprise performance, winning 22 seats — but even without that performance, it would comfortably have been the single largest party and formed a coalition government in Delhi.

What does this history tell us about the significance of the 2022 elections? (ANI) PREMIUM
What does this history tell us about the significance of the 2022 elections? (ANI)

Narendra Modi brought UP back to the national centre-stage with his decision to contest from Varanasi, and with his decision to deploy Amit Shah in the state. The 71 seats that the BJP won in the state in 2014 made the difference between the party getting a simple majority in the Lok Sabha and being the single largest party, dependent on others for survival. The 2017 assembly elections reinforced the party’s dominance and gave it the reins of power in Lucknow, thus allowing smoother coordination between the national and state capital, a synchronised political message, and more effective welfare delivery on the ground. All of this helped Modi defeat the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) combine in 2019.

What does this history tell us about the significance of the 2022 elections?

One, the fact that Delhi and Lucknow will be governed by the same party means an additional burden on the BJP — it will be responsible for all policies and actions, at both the national level and state level, when it returns to seek votes in 2024. But the BJP, as the prime minister (PM) is fond of saying, actually wins a “pro-incumbency” vote. It isn’t scared of power eroding its base; instead, it is adept at using power to sustain and expand its base. And this ability of both central and state governments to work together, be it in terms of focused welfare delivery or wooing specific social constituencies, will help the party in 2024 in India’s most crucial state.

Two, it demoralises the Opposition even before the next battle has begun. The SP has, to its credit, seen an increase in its vote share and seat tally. But if the past five years are an indication, the SP will hibernate for the next year-and-a-half, somehow try to keep its party machinery from atrophying and deal with low cadre morale, and begin campaigning only in early 2024. More importantly, the SP usually has a better chance in the state elections — where voters are willing to explore the possibility of Akhilesh Yadav as chief minister — than in national elections — where voters discount the prospect of Yadav becoming PM and thus prefer voting for national forces. This is true not just for the loyal BJP voters, but also swing voters in each social group, including Yadavs, who are more hostile to Yogi Adityanath than they are to Modi.

And third, the decimation of the Congress and the BSP means that both upper castes — which sometimes see the Congress as an alternative — and Dalits, large segments of which have been loyal to Mayawati in the past, are captive audiences for the BJP in the next election too. Muslims prefer voting for the Congress in national elections than state elections because they see it as the only national alternative to the BJP; but minorities too can see that the Congress is in no position to pose a challenge to Modi.

So the BJP begins the race for the next Lok Sabha elections in UP with its own social coalition intact, its bargaining power with smaller allies much higher than it was in the state elections, its own power structures in both capitals aligned, a weakened Opposition, the possibility of its vote base expanding in 2024, and possibly looking at a further erosion in the Opposition’s collective vote base. Given that in the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP has now been fighting to win over 50% of the vote share to counter any united Opposition alliance means that the Indo Gangetic plains will remain the BJP’s core strength as it plans for polls two years from now.

But what if the road to power in Delhi is not necessarily through Lucknow? Is there still an electoral pathway for the Opposition to defeat the hegemon in 2024?

In that case, to defeat the BJP, the Opposition has to sweep the rest of north, west, and central India and parts of east India — regions where the BJP has peaked not once but twice, and, therefore, should, by any normal electoral metric, be vulnerable.

The following states then come into play: Himachal Pradesh (4 seats), Uttarakhand (5), Rajasthan (25), Gujarat (26), Haryana (10), Delhi (7), Bihar (40), Jharkhand (14), Assam (14), Chhattisgarh (11), Madhya Pradesh (29), and Maharashtra (48). Out of these 233 seats, the BJP, with a small set of allies, won 197 seats in 2019. And if you remove Maharashtra from the mix, the BJP and its allies won 174 out of 185 seats. So if the Opposition struggles to reduce the BJP’s strength in UP, then, logically, it needs to focus on reducing the BJP’s strength in these 233 seats. Except in Delhi, across all these other states, the BJP’s primary challenger is the Congress or one of its allies.

What does March 10 tell us about the Opposition’s prospects in these seats?

One, think of the Congress. It has not won a single state election since 2019 on its own and lost power in two (Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka); it has a president who wants to retire (Sonia Gandhi); it has a Member of Parliament who wants to run the party but doesn’t want to take charge and has limited popular appeal (Rahul Gandhi); its third power centre actually achieved the impossible by reducing the party’s vote share and seat tally in UP with her campaign (Priyanka Gandhi); it has a decision-making process that destroyed the party in the one north Indian state where the party had power (Punjab); the two states that it is in power are riddled with internal factionalism (Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh); it drags its allies down in state elections (Bihar); and it neither has the organisational strength and financial resources, nor the popular appeal and the leadership that can suddenly reduce the BJP’s strength in these 233 seats to offset the saffron dominance of UP.

And what about the rest? Aam Aadmi Party, by cannibalising the Congress in Punjab and attempting to squeeze its space in Gujarat, can expand in terms of states — but Arvind Kejriwal is neither a prime ministerial challenger to Narendra Modi (in fact, his politics rests on not criticising Modi too sharply) nor does the party have an organisational footprint across all the north, west and central Indian states. Mamata Banerjee was not a player in the current set of state elections, and her best prospects lie in increasing her seat tally in West Bengal and picking a few seats in smaller states of the Northeast. The Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party can, at best, dent the BJP a little more in Maharashtra but not enough to erode its numbers substantially. But most importantly, given what we have seen in 2014 and 2019, the Lok Sabha elections will be fought on the question of who voters want as PM, and that automatically reduces the prospects of regional leaders with a limited state-specific base in a national election.

And so what the Opposition can rely on are events that may suddenly alter the national mood. But if the second wave of the pandemic, a year-long farm agitation, and acute economic distress did not alter the BJP’s electoral prospects in 2022, it is hard to see what will two years from now. And that is why the PM is right. 2022 puts the BJP in pole position for 2024.

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  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    History has an uncanny way of intruding into contemporary life and shaping our public conversation. A new controversy emerged recently over the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose.

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