Few predicted the decisive nature of the 2023 assembly election results. While this speaks poorly of election expertise and even political commentary, the electorate has once again proven its autonomy. Equally, social media and digital campaigns, though pervasive, ever loud, and more evenly played out between the contending parties, are unreliable indicators of emerging political trends. The fact that #Pannauti trended for nearly 48 hours on X after India’s loss in the Cricket World Cup only signifies that omens are but superstitions that can only misdirect hopes into delusions. For all that and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s magical hold over the Indian electorate, I am going to stick out like a sore thumb and stake out a different set of trends from the ones that have captured immediate analysis.
As I’ve asked before: Is India moving toward a party-state polity or going bipolar? My short answer is that India’s best chance to avoid becoming a party-state is to go bipolar. To this extent, the trends and news are bad for India’s many small and regional parties. Above all, despite, or rather because of its handsome victory in Telangana, the Congress has now come under the greatest burden of political identity.
Not North-South but BJP-INC divide
It would be convenient but incorrect to see the assembly elections verdict as reflecting a North-South divide. For all the neat colour coding of the spatial map of India that confines the BJP to the Hindi heartland, the picture is contested, mixed, and has, in effect, opened new battlelines.
Though the Congress lost in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan, the vote share remains more evenly poised than what the more consequential seat numbers tell us. With less than 10 per cent of vote share difference between the two parties in each state, the Hindi heartland is less saffronised and more divided than what that colour-coded picture conveys. Moreover, despite losing decidedly in the Karnataka assembly election in May 2023, the BJP remains a strong contender for the Lok Sabha election there. The party faces a challenge in southern India but is far from being blocked or fully thwarted. It’s cheap and wrong-headed of seasoned and liberal analysts to display a virulent but reverse prejudice in dismissing North India as uneducated and given to parochial and communal passions.
Significantly, the contested nature of the vote share is the strongest indication that an ideological fight is indeed afoot. The only fighting strategy for the grand old party is to double down on inclusive politics. The small two percentage point difference in vote share between the two national parties in Rajasthan indicates as much. The Hindutva-lite campaign by the Congress in Madhya Pradesh has yielded the greatest gap in vote share — eight per cent. Fighting with ideological clarity makes a difference.
Regardless of whether MP is a Hindutva bastion, the pivot of change in both these states has been the realignment of Dalit votes in favour of the BJP. That this has come at the cost of India’s main Dalit party — the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) — indicates an electoral shift of aggressive incorporation for the emergent party-state of the BJP.
While it has managed to woo Dalits with greater success, the under-analysed trend is the shift in the votes of the Scheduled Tribes (STs) also to the BJP. Anointing Droupadi Murmu as the President has proven to be more than mere symbolics. This has cost the Congress party both in MP and Chhattisgarh. New political alignments are thus discernible. In short, social mobility is gathering toward national rather than regional poles and is the unmissable if not unsettling upshot of the latest results.
Also read: If Rahul Gandhi can tie aspirations to caste census, he will have a winning formula
The ’90s are truly over
There is no going back to the formulae of the last century. Even in 2004, there was a similar set of assembly election results in favour of the BJP on the eve of the Lok Sabha poll but the Congress came to power. Hoping for such a pattern to repeat in May would be foolish, as the political contest now is entirely different and altogether challenging.
Thirty years of economic liberalisation and the BJP’s aggressive political campaigns have transformed the Indian polity and society. Census or no census, any coalition of castes will be insufficient to match the BJP behemoth. Caste remains most significant, but its political articulation and tethering are in great transition.
The BJP has shown agility in incorporating otherwise inimical social groups, whether it’s tribals or Dalits. The BJP’s cadre base and its key arm, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been pursuing the largest swing voter base of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) for even longer — since the ’80s, under M D Deoras. Slow off that mark, the BJP took two decades to follow the RSS in appealing to the OBCs. The Congress and the opposition, in general, will need to reimagine a new and bold politics of caste.
The BJP is clearly pursuing the idea of a party-state that incorporates India’s social order. To contest this, there is a need of the appropriate scale of contest that posits a new political imagination and programme on caste on the national level. A local arithmetic of caste is not only cynical but unfit for the challenge too. In short, what is needed is the grandeur and candour of a B R Ambedkar vision to remake and realise a new national politics of caste. By the same token, a Lohiaite vision, which inspired OBC-based regional parties in North India, looks small, dated, and broadly reactive. If anything, the Mandal politics of the last century now appears to be saturated. More than that, the regional assortment of OBC parties came at the cost of the Congress party — and the greatest national beneficiary has indeed been the BJP. To undo this, the Congress needs to recoup lost territory rather than cede more.
Also read: If Rahul Gandhi can tie aspirations to caste census, he will have a winning formula
Congress contra INDIA
With a handsome win in Telangana, the Congress has reasons to rejoice. Yet, this victory poses the most crucial question for its political identity. Winning over a popular regional party, the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS), attests not only to a growing bipolarity but, above all, revises the idea of alliance building. Simply put, the Congress is in open competition with regional parties. This makes the INDIA alliance a poisoned chalice, which is not only awkward but also potentially suicidal for the grand old party. This is more so as regional parties, especially from the Hindi heartland, appear static, saturated, and tangled in a generational crisis of leadership and cadres. If India’s Muslim voters are returning to the Congress after several decades of favouring local opposition to the BJP — as in Telangana and Karnataka now — then the burden to imagine and realise a new rainbow coalition lies with the Congress party.
It can be argued that with only one victory this season, the Congress will now need to show humility to other parties in the INDIA alliance for the ‘do-or-die’ election in 2024. This is the dominant view of election experts today. Some anxious others say that the solidarity of opposition parties is necessitated due to the growing powers of government agencies.
Yet, precisely because it has retained its vote share, managed a spirited campaign with an entente if not peace between its generations and factions, the Congress looks stronger than all of its coalition partners put together. Most importantly, the Congress has found its utterance, though hesitatingly. And this is after at least 40 years. Yes, the Congress won in 2004 and 2009, but it was primarily driven by technocratic ideas and policies back then. Those strategies and policies were no match for the political transformation wrought and captured by the party-state ambitions of Modi and the BJP.
As the only national alternative, the Congress could choose autonomy over generosity in a coalition and go for broke. It would lay down the foundations of a bipolar India that can militate against the growing party-state domination of the BJP. A new and bold inclusive India is unlikely to appear from a coalition of cynical desperation. It is even less likely to emerge from what appears to be an emergency back-stop of opposition parties to stave off the overweening power of government agencies. Going alone, the national alternative won’t win overnight, but nor will it confuse the opponent with a fake ally or the friend with a frenemy or worse, an enemy. A bipartisan polity is the only insurance against an ideological and emergent party-state. Even in loss, going solo is the best chance for the Congress to enhance its political identity to represent the alternative to Hindu-first India.
Staying aloof, and building from the ground up, inch by inch and victory by victory, is, after all, what the BJP did in its long decades of electoral wilderness.
Shruti Kapila is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Cambridge. She tweets @shrutikapila. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)