(This two-part explainer is drawn from a recent study undertaken by the InfoSphere team at the Centre for New Economics Studies, OP Jindal Global University. Read Part one here. For details on the Access Inequality Index (AEI) report, please see here.)
The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) campaign in all the states has been a distant reflection of Modi’s 2014 campaign, as the saffron party has been driven to address the more immediate issues of people. We have also seen how the BJP’s state assembly performance record (outside the Hindi-belt states) hasn’t particularly done well under the Brand Modi umbrella push. In other words, local governance, and socio-economic factors have played a dominant role in how the poor and those at the margins vote for the state elections.
As a result, state elections quite often, have contributed to producing different voting patterns as against the national elections (people vote with different intentions in each).
The national opposition to the BJP, Indian National Congress’ campaign in all the upcoming five state assemblies, has successfully driven home the point that an overdose of Hindutva and big business development, often leading up to cronyism, under the BJP’s regime at the Centre, have resulted in a neglect of issues like farming crisis, unemployment, inflation, and poor public health and education infrastructure.
What we try to do here – building from the first article in the series, is to assess each state’s socio-economic performance across five pillars from our AEI work below. It helps provide a summative idea of the nature of social, economic, and also political challenges (for incumbent and contesting parties) that are relevant for the electorate (and similarly to win over them).