Why the Modi-Shah BJP loses — 3 lessons for those asking if this BJP can be defeated at all

To beat BJP, you either deny it critical mass of Hindu vote or build a regional leader & party strong enough to protect their turf. And there’s a 3rd option too.

Illustration: Soham Sen/ThePrint

The headline of this week’s column may seem risqué, but here is why it isn’t. The BJP, since its rise under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, has been an election-winning cavalry. But it has also lost some. With its sweep in Uttar Pradesh and three other states now, the air is overloaded with gyan from the entire pundit class on why and how the BJP wins.

It is important, and interesting therefore, to step away and examine when, how and why it loses. And lose it does. If in any doubt, check out this graphic put together by our data reporter Nikhil Rampal on how much of India the BJP controlled at its peak in late 2013, early 2018, and now. In terms of area, it is now about 44%, accounting for about 49.6% of the population.

The 2018 winter loss in the three heartland states, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, was the Modi-Shah BJP’s first and last defeat by the Congress party. Karnataka, earlier the same year, was a messy story as the BJP topped the tally but didn’t cross the halfway mark and initially conceded the state to a short-lived Congress-JD(S) coalition.

We do not count Punjab 2017 or 2022 because the BJP is marginal there. Since its second national sweep in 2019, the BJP has also lost big time in West Bengal to the TMC, and decisively to the Congress-JMM-RJD coalition in Jharkhand, where it was the incumbent. Two other BJP setbacks are qualified. In Haryana, it fell short of a majority soon after sweeping all Lok Sabha seats with humongous margins, and lost Maharashtra after winning it because stalwart ally Shiv Sena walked away.

In the Modi-Shah era, the basic BJP playbook is clear. Get 50 per cent of the Hindu vote and win. Check out Uttar Pradesh, for example. Yogi Adityanath may have made an indiscrete remark about this being a battle of 80 versus 20, but it was at worst a Freudian slip. He was speaking the truth. In UP, the Muslim vote is just over 19 per cent.

So, it follows that if BJP discounts the Muslim vote, its target is only the 80 per cent Hindus. In the final tally, if the party, with its allies, polled around 44 per cent of the total vote, it is evident that it collected more than 55 per cent of the Hindu vote. That is good enough for a landslide. Of course, we are presuming that the Muslim vote for the BJP, if any, would be insignificant.

This 80:20 formula works with local variations, but only in the Hindi heartland and the three big west-coast states — Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Karnataka. In the Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh in 2019, the BJP with allies polled 52 per cent of all votes. Again, discounting the Muslims, this would be about 67 per cent or almost two-in-three of all Hindu votes. That’s the reason it was able to annihilate the SP-BSP alliance which, on paper, was unbeatable. What happens where this equation doesn’t exist?

Take West Bengal. The BJP invested more time, energy and resources in winning the state than in any other except Uttar Pradesh. The CAA commotion set the stage for a super-polarised election. The BJP was eyeing another first conquest of yet another major state. The opposite happened. Mamata Banerjee’s TMC trounced it. How and why did the BJP lose here? Especially as, in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, it had annexed 18 of the 42 seats, was ascendant, and then of course threw in the campaigners, funds and the ‘agencies’.

If we just look at the vote counts, the BJP polled about the same nearly 40 per cent in the 2021 assembly elections and 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Yet this did not translate into a comparable number of seats in the assembly.

What changed within two years? First of all, after the destruction in 2019, the Left-Congress combine lost almost all its remaining voters. But more importantly, unlike UP, West Bengal does not offer the BJP an 80:20 equation. It is more like 71:27. A mere 50 per cent of the Hindu vote cannot get it past the halfway mark. At 38.13 per cent of the total vote, it netted much more than 50, more likely about 53 per cent of the Hindu vote. But in a 71:27 equation, it would have needed close to 65. That was denied as Mamata Banerjee was able to retain the loyalty of women voters. Gender, in this case, defeated Hindu consolidation.

That is the first lesson then. If you want to beat the Modi-Shah BJP, you have to still win a sufficient number of Hindu votes to deny it that critical 50-plus percentage. If you can’t, as in UP, Bihar and Assam, you are wiped out. That is why the parties of Akhilesh and Lalu Yadav, built on a Muslim-Yadav core, can no longer win. Unless they are able to bring in other strong and large caste groups from within the Hindus, they do not have a chance. Unless you fight the BJP for the Hindu vote, you have no chance.

Or, like Mamata, find an answer through gender. In Uttar Pradesh, it worked in reverse. All reliable exit poll data indicates that many more women voted for the BJP than Samajwadi Party. Maybe Priyanka Gandhi had an interesting idea, appealing to young women with her catchy ‘ladki hoon, lad sakti hoon’ campaign. But her party was in no position to exploit it.

Something like that might have made some difference for Samajwadi Party. But it lacked the imagination for something so innovative, hat-ke. The conclusion therefore, is that for any chance in hell to beat the Modi-Shah BJP, you must deny them a sufficient number of Hindu votes. Don’t take just the Muslims and one loyal caste to this battle.

Mere party combinations cannot defeat the BJP. Congress-SP in UP assembly 2017, and in Lok Sabha 2019, SP-BSP in UP, Congress-NCP in Maharashtra and Congress-JD(S) in Karnataka were swept away. Jharkhand 2019 is the one exception where the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)-Congress-RJD alliance won. But please note that the BJP had run a particularly listless government under Raghubar Das and the experiment of handing over the state to a non-tribal had caused resentment. About 15 per cent of the state’s electorate is Muslim, and that fight, going by Yogi’s standards, became more like 60:40 as about 25 per cent of the voters are tribal. Evidently, it is the loss of tribal vote that left the BJP only about two per cent behind the winning coalition. The state is back with a tribal chief minister in Hemant Soren.

We are not making the Delhi 2015 and 2020 assembly elections a part of this analysis because it is a city state with sui generis politics, and in both corresponding Lok Sabha elections here in 2014 and 2019, the BJP had a sweep. That phenomenon, the voters making a distinction between Lok Sabha and state assembly elections, is evident elsewhere too, notably in Odisha. In 2019, the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections were held on the same day. In the Lok Sabha, BJP won eight out of the 21 seats with 38.83 per cent votes, just over 4 per cent behind Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal. For the assembly, in the same count, the BJP stopped at 32.49 and was smashed by the BJD at 44.7. We’re also staying clear of the Rajasthan-MP-Chhattisgarh results of 2018 because the BJP was facing anti-incumbency in all (three-term anti-incumbency in the latter two). And the only one it lost decisively was Chhattisgarh, the smallest of the three.

Three lessons then. To beat the BJP, you either deny it the critical mass of the Hindu vote, or build a regional leader and party strong enough to protect their turf. And third, the best of all, have a regional, ethnic and linguistic fortress so strong that the Hindus vote primarily as Tamils or Malayalis or Telugus. This will be put to test in the next Telangana elections. But, in the big picture, here is evidence to show how the BJP can be beaten if you get your politics right.