As one takes a closer look at the numbers on party-wise vote share in the recent state Assembly polls, it becomes clearer how a strong organisational base of voter mobilisation, poor-centered welfarism, and support for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by the state-wise women voters yielded a thumping victory against the Congress in the northern states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh.
The success of the poll-anchored Ladli Behna Scheme was pivotal for the BJP in winning MP and greater consolidation of the women vote in its favour (even in Rajasthan) signals a transformative shift – especially considering the upcoming national elections in mid-2024.
Chhattisgarh’s victory wasn’t really seen or predicted – and it can be said that the Congress lost this one on complacency (at least in the last few weeks leading up to the polls).
OBC+SC+ST
If the current victories for the BJP reveal anything, it is that a governance model built around a push for Hindutva politics, poor-centered welfarism (for building specific beneficiary-based voter support groups), and a new aspirational model pitched under a 'hyper-nationalist’ wave, helped the party win across Hindi-speaking states.
There are other context-sensitive factors too.
For example, it is being increasingly observed how the majority of the OBC (Other Backward Class) vote bank, based on different caste-based electoral arithmetic, is pivoting in favour of the BJP, especially in the northern states, even if the SC/ST vote here goes to the Congress (or a regional opposition party).
This needs further scrutiny.
Till the time any Opposition party cannot get all of these (OBC+SC+ST) together, they cannot win comprehensively. In the south too, the OBC vote, on the other hand, has closely pivoted in favour of the Congress as seen in the case of the Karnataka election.
BJP's Persistent Efforts Vis-à-vis Welfare
On the support of women voters, it is worth analysing how, between the Congress and BJP, there is a more consolidated effort by the BJP to build its voter base among women as compared to the Congress.
Tokenistic welfare programmes appear to do less for the Congress when it comes to galvanising the woman vote compared to the BJP’s effort of building a long-term commitment to women and poor-centered welfare schemes. The latter has also been successful in marketing these in favour of getting votes in the name of Modi.
The missing word for the Congress in its electoral strategy (especially in states where it has been in power) remains 'persistence', i.e., on sticking with some key welfare programmes and schemes, and communicating their effectiveness for different voter groups across an elected term, which helps in creating a more successful pro-incumbency environment.
After all, it was the persistent efforts vis-à-vis welfare that helped a party like the BJP and its leader Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who, despite being in power for more than 20 years, was still able to consolidate a majority win in MP despite a strong anti-incumbency mood gauged in the initial period of the state’s election season.
The North-South Divide
In India’s macro-electoral landscape, there is also a greater north-south divide in gauging the voter’s party-wise preference one election after another.
In an article written after the Karnataka victory for the Congress, this author cautioned how that particular victory had a lot more to do with the way the grassroots-level leadership and cadre had united (rather than stay divided) against the BJP.
The Telangana victory for the Congress under Revanth Reddy underscores a similar set of observatory points (keeping aside context-dependent factors that enabled it to counter the BRS and KCR’s incumbent leadership in this case).
Southern states have also been seen opting against the BJP-Hindutva model to prefer whatever comes against that – whether in terms of the Congress or other regional party-based networks.
In our Access (In)Equality Index, while measuring the state-wise access to pillars of basic amenities, healthcare, education, social security, finance, and legal recourse through 58 indicators, we saw how the Southern states like Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, have all performed remarkably better across all pillars of performative evaluation compared the northern states (where the BJP electorally does well).
It's not just about competing models of welfarism that separates a northern stronghold from the BJP's electoral weakness in the south. An aggressive, non-compromising push of Hindutva, while pursuing a hegemonic policy of ethnolinguistic cohesion around Hindi-speaking dominance, doesn’t work for the double-engine Modi-anchored BJP in the South at all.
BJP in the South Marred by Regional Parties’ Dominance
A socio-cultural history of localised economic and social movements safeguarding basic (public goods), capability-enhancing opportunities has made most southern states position themselves distinctly, and perform better in almost all key development indices.
In these states, it is also difficult to hyper-amplify the successful implementation of welfare schemes in the name of a 'supreme leader’.
From states like Kerala to Tamil Nadu, each of these have incubated a culture of grassroots-level welfarism through strong community-based solidarity networks that aid political support rather than seeing the other way round, which is true in many northern states (like Uttar Pradesh and MP).
The BJP’s Modi-accrediting election strategy, in this respect, is both socio-linguistically limited or circumscribed in its local cadre and communication strategy across southern state Assemblies, where sub-regional diasporas have remained dominant and embedded in a more complex ethnolinguistic fragmentation, embracing diversity of thought and practice, because of which more established regional parties do better (from the DMK to BRS to the Left to others).
Even if national parties like the Congress come to power in some of these (southern) states (say, the Congress emerging victorious in Telangana and Karnataka), it’s where there is a strong anti-incumbency factor developed against the regional party in power (KCR’s BRS in Telangana and the BJP in Karnataka).
The Congress also has a relatively better organisational cohort on the ground in the southern states due to the party’s older networks and historical links with solidarity networks and social movements, as compared to the BJP.
This advantage, however, may only remain temporal in nature if the Congress continues to simply act as the ‘Grand Old Party’ rusting under a disorganised and confused leadership ecosystem in a dynamic electoral landscape.
(Deepanshu Mohan is a Professor of Economics and Director, the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P Jindal Global University. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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