A new myth has penetrated the Indian mind: that elections are all about election campaigns. Many seem to assume that there is a sort of election campaign decisionism. They reason that if a party decides to win an election and puts its best effort and resources into it, it can emerge victorious on the counting day.
This narrative overlooks the structural aspects of the Indian polity and its long-term transformations, and instead focuses on a few, self-styled Chanakyas. In this view, masterstrokes delivered by dear leaders alter electoral fortunes. The massive National Democratic Alliance (NDA) win in the Bihar election is thus chalked down to Nitish Kumar’s last-minute outreach to women or to Amit Shah’s acumen.
This election-centric ideology itself emerged with the rise of two tendencies—the ascent of Hindutva and the growth of political consultancies.
The professionalisation of election campaigns in India was a result of both tendencies. While the rise of Hindutva attempted to detach elections from materialist politics—the detachment of politics from the material needs of the people using right-wing identitarian anxieties—the rise of political consultancies soaked elections in a capitalist framework of efficiency and profit.
The truth about elections and winning elections is an altogether different matter.
Do Customised Campaigns Work?
During an academic workshop on Election Campaign Management, we actually posed the question of the effectiveness of tailor-made election campaigns to a leading political consultant. He honestly answered that election campaigns may not be as decisive as the media portrays them to be.
Much of the scholarly literature on election campaigns was, in fact, premised on a ‘minimal effects’ thesis, according to which campaigning was almost marginal to the outcome. This extreme view has since been challenged, but Joshua L Kalla and David E Broockman doubled down on it in an influential study, claiming that “the best estimate for the persuasive power of an electoral campaign is zero.” What we know is that a campaign matters insofar as it registers a presence and conveys some basic information.
In any case, the electoral wind begins blowing even before the campaign takes shape. As J Alexander Branham and Christopher Wlezien note in a chapter titled ‘Do Election Campaigns Matter?’, “On Election Day, voters tend to vote as expected.”
There is reason to believe that, as in Maharashtra and Delhi over the past year, what mattered in Bihar was not the campaign by all sides including of the NDA, but a predisposition among a significant part of the electorate to elect an NDA government, as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is anyway increasingly taking up and implementing the Opposition's demands, even without coercive protests. There is no longer a need for voters to change the government to obtain new benefits; moreover, an NDA state government can promise less disruption of normal politics compared to the political turmoil caused by antagonistic governments at the state and central levels.
That is, one should not seek to explain the remarkable outcome as a result of an aggregate of ordinary campaign factors, such as the merits of one side’s programme over the other. As anyone could see, there was little to differentiate between the two programmes—this lack of distinction, in fact, gives us the key to read the Bihar election results.
The Badlāv in Bihar
Badlāv was the clarion call of the 2025 Bihar Assembly election. The election outcome may have led many to think that the promised change will have to wait, as the incumbent returns to power with an enhanced majority. That’s not true. Bihar, the famed laboratory of Indian politics, has once again brought an overhaul in the form of what can be termed a ‘third convergence’ in the Indian political system
The concept of competitive convergence was introduced by Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar to describe the paradoxical lack of meaningful choices, even as political competition flourished.
Rather, competition ended up producing multiple copies of the same agenda. Both at the centre and in a majority of states, there was either bipolar or multipolar convergence, with an unplanned consensus dominating the electoral agenda.
Prakash Sarangi identified a second round of ‘convergence’ when he noted the indistinguishability of the Congress and BJP agendas between 2009 and 2019. After a period of high Hindutva polarisation between 2019 and 2024, during which the opposition and BJP agendas starkly diverged, another convergence is now occurring.
This convergence is centred on revditva, the political project of delivering welfare through unconditional cash transfers, freebies, and subsidies while pushing Hindutva to the background. It seems like a long time ago when, in 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for an end to the “dangerous” culture of revdis. The Modi who stood for a neoliberal nightwatchman state is already history.
Until the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP was not ready for strategic revditva, and its welfarism was limited to tactical concessions. A significant break has occurred between the pre-2024 and post-2024 BJP, which has turned it into the most flexible revditva party, wherein caste- and gender-sensitive welfarism is elevated to front-and-centre, overtaking Hindutva pitches. Revditva has freed, at least conjuncturally, Hindutva from its congenital anti-welfarist instincts and attenuated its divisive nationalist politics.
Now, any reasonable, constitutionally sound demand with popular appeal will be appropriated by the BJP. If Mandal and Kamandal were on opposite sides of the barricade, their contemporary counterparts of Hindutva-Revditva have settled on the same side, like a dialectical synthesis.
The Opposition parties, in parallel, have upped their sensitivity to concerns of the Hindu voter and moderated their secularism pitch, and even reduced the representation of candidates from the minority communities.
This means that most opposition parties are effectively non-contestants against the NDA. An ever-appropriative BJP does not let the opposition parties set a different agenda, or stand differently. A bad campaign can lose a winnable election, but a good campaign can’t win a lost election. And, a winning side may win irrespective of the merits of its campaign. The groundwork-based, perfectly designed campaign of the Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) failed as much as the coveted ideological campaign by Rahul Gandhi in Bihar. The NDA won despite diluting its strong ideological tenets. Having a strong organisation and ideology does not seem to have helped the Communists either.
The Bihar election was not decided by the merits or faults of anyone’s campaign, but by the polity-level shift to Revditva from the matrix of Hindutva and counter-Hindutva.
The Power of the Loser
This unity of opposites is, at the same time, a curse and a boon for the opposition, especially for Rahul Gandhi, who is capitalising on the “power of the loser.”
According to this idea, explored by Henrik Bech Seeberg, opposition parties can set the agenda and get the government to do its work. The curse is that any original idea he brings will be adopted by the BJP, and the boon is that he practically sets the terms in Indian politics without even coming close to heading the government. Rahul promises and Modi delivers. Among others, Shekhar Gupta and Tavleen Singh have lamented this oddity of Indian politics, where an apparently weak opposition and its blue-blooded leader seem to determine the course of events, seemingly despite the BJP’s will and the popular mandate.
The Indian people wanted the BJP to be tamed, and it has conceded. In return, the BJP has convinced the Indian people not to support parties that would be antagonistic to the centre or meaningfully challenge its Hindu First policy.
This tradeoff, an effect of the invisible hand of Indian democracy, which forces the preponderance of the Naram Dal (the Moderates), has made the BJP and its allies into an unbeatable formation for the moment. Only an intransigent political force can be easily defeated in a democracy, and pragmatic flexibility is a political virtue that the BJP has now mastered. The best example of this 'democratic opportunism' is the caste census. From terming the demand for a caste census an example of “urban naxal mindset”, Modi ended up making it an official policy.
In response to the Bihar verdict, the Prime Minister came up with a new moniker for Congress—the Muslim League-Maoist Congress Party or MMC Party, implying that the Congress turned out to be an Islamist party with an ultraleftist agenda of forced redistribution. Following Modi’s logic, one may think of an apt moniker for NDA.
NDA is now a Congressi (an umbrella group representing diverse sections) Mandalite Formation (CMF), which promised one crore government jobs, a slew of welfare measures, and effectively managed caste representation. Thus, one can see that the ‘NDA’ of Hindutva did not win Bihar, but the CMF did, based on revditva.
What Changed in the BJP?
The incremental shift in the BJP towards convergence is likely to be largely due to Modi-Shah’s ‘the primacy of politics’ approach, a concept proposed by Timothy W Mason in the context of National Socialist Germany. As Mason insisted, movements for whom politics is primary do not remain subservient to any economic orthodoxy.
Once they understood that an average Indian is averse to walking the last mile in the Hindutva radicalisation scheme and is rather swayed by parties that address bread-and-butter issues, Modi has convinced his party to show radical flexibility in adapting to and adopting the very tools that the opposition has crafted against him. Opponents’ tools, indeed, can be useful against them.
If intransigence is the greatest political handicap in a democracy, radical flexibility may be the greatest democratic virtue. The Modi government — especially after the anti-NRC-CAA movement and the farmers’ protests — is characterised by the latter rather than the former, whether one likes it or not. Political programmes are not patented; anyone can appropriate them. However, an inability to appropriate good ideas is a giveaway of ideological stagnation.
Modi is not hesitant to appropriate whatever works for keeping his party in power. A counterexample actually proves this: Gujarat doesn't offer any of this because there is no opposition strong enough to force the BJP into welfarist or Mandalite mode.
Still, there is a need to explain why Modi is uncharacteristically flexible by any standard, especially for someone who is spoken of alongside intransigent authoritarians like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin. The uniqueness of Modi’s personality and style is certainly a factor in this, but it alone cannot fully explain the BJP's evolution under his leadership.
Three reasons stand out. One, the fragility of Hindutva's social base: Its core unflinching base is limited to the upper castes minus the liberal elite, plus relatively small sections of OBCs. With radicalisation and recruitment into the core voter base having slowed down, the remaining votes needed for a winning bloc must be stitched together through concessions.
Secondly, for Modi-Shah, political power is the supreme value. This does not mean that they do not care for Hindutva or only seek to use it instrumentally.
Rather, they seem to believe that sustenance of political power is imperative to achieve Hindutva goals. They are ready to temper down their policies to acquire a long-term positional advantage in politics.
In this sense, they are Leninists who believe in a revolutionary process where the survival of state power ultimately determines the outcome of the revolution, rather than pursuing a preconceived path recklessly.
Thirdly, the present hegemony of revditva is the result of two economic and class-based factors. There is a bounce back from the tendency towards the least possible public spending, due to the decline of the neoliberal consensus, also enabled by enhanced fiscal freedom resulting from increased revenue generation and tax collection.
Moreover, there is no free functioning capitalist media or a critical capitalist class in the country willing to conduct a sustained campaign against the welfarist convergence in the polity, as they did during the United Progressive Alliance governments. Thus, the political voice, if not influence, of the extreme neoliberals in India, who once saw their messiah of the free market in Modi, is in terminal decline.
What Can Anti-Hindutva Campaigners Learn from Bihar?
With the revditva turn, the BJP no longer subordinates its caste politics and welfare policy to its core Hindutva pitch. This inversion of priorities means that the central beliefs of two opposition camps have faced a significant challenge: the leftist belief that they have a monopoly on pro-people welfarism; and the social justice camp’s belief that the BJP ultimately cannot step beyond its Brahmin-Baniya origins and that caste politics is a slippery slope for the BJP.
It is true, though, that these are appropriations that the BJP cannot ordinarily make, but they are ones that a Modi-led BJP did make. A post-Modi BJP may revert to its old habits, or it may not—the new habits may remain thanks to the compulsions of the invisible hand of Indian democracy, and it is too early to tell.
Modi may have changed the BJP irrevocably into an appropriative, umbrella formation under the current RSS paradigm, which seeks a constitutional route to Hindu Rashtra.
Rahul Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav are only the victims of Modi's rediscovered pragmatism. Until this politics exhausts itself, it’s a win-win situation for all—except in terms of electoral success for the opposition. People receive minimal welfare, the Opposition implements its agendas even without governmental power, and the ruling party can retain power. The primary challenge for the officially powerless Opposition, as Prashant Kishor described his own challenge, will be to motivate themselves every day to get out of bed and continue doing their job of demanding the best for the average Indian.
Because demanding bread, not blood, is the most authentic political act now. Further, there is one demand that the BJP can never appropriate—the absolute opposition to the BJP in any garb, Mandalite or otherwise. As long as anti-BJPism remains an ideology in itself, there will be a core voter base for opposition parties to work with.
This includes the critical demographic weight of objectively anti-Hindutva communities with numbers at their side, such as minorities, adivasis, secular absolutists, and castes with interests in non-Hindutva formations, which can continue to fuel the opposition. In states where this sentiment is hegemonic, the BJP cannot break the hegemony through mere appropriative moves. The revditva turn applies only to some states where the convergence is playing out.
As with any zoon politikon affair, this moment can't go on forever. But it can last for a reasonably long period, with minor fluctuations, barring any black swan events, until the Overton window shifts decisively.
(Kuriakose Mathew teaches politics and international relations at the School of Liberal Arts and Management Studies, P P Savani University, Surat. His research focuses on democratic forces in transitional polities. Arjun Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)