Winnability not the only reason BJP’s pushing fresh faces. It’s a signal to headline hunters

Dropping MPs, MLAs to beat anti-incumbency has been one of the core formulae of success for Modi since his chief ministerial days. But does it really work?

File photo of PM Modi, BJP President JP Nadda and Home Minister Amit Shah | Representational image | ANI

In July 2021, Pratima Bhoumik became the first ever permanent resident of Tripura to join the Union council of ministers, thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When the Bharatiya Janata Party fielded her in the Assembly election in February 2023, it was seen as an indirect projection of her as a chief ministerial contender. After all, Manik Saha who had replaced Biplab Kumar Deb as the CM barely a year ago lacked the mass appeal of his predecessor. Bhoumik won the Assembly poll from Dhanpur, a Left bastion for five decades. The BJP secured a wafer-thin majority with 32 seats in the 60-member Assembly. The high command chose to retain Saha as the CM and got Bhoumik to resign her Assembly seat. PM Modi obviously thought she would be more useful at the Centre.

On Saturday, the BJP denied her a party ticket to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha election and replaced her with Deb in the West Tripura constituency. Come to think of it, Deb, who had steered the BJP to its historic win in Tripura, was replaced by Saha who had spent just three months in the Rajya Sabha. Deb was brought to the Rajya Sabha in his place. Now, Deb has replaced Bhoumik as the party’s Lok Sabha candidate in West Tripura. No one knows why Deb had been suddenly removed as the CM. But it couldn’t be that he was losing popularity. Because if that was the case, the BJP wouldn’t field him in the Lok Sabha election. Bhoumik must also be puzzled as to why she is being tossed around.

But that’s just one piece of the many puzzles that the BJP’s first list of 195 Lok Sabha candidates has. The Modi-led government has been tom-tomming its successful handling of Covid-19. One would, therefore, expect former health minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan—who held the portfolio during most of the pandemic—to be felicitated and promoted. In July 2021, PM Modi dropped him from the Union Cabinet instead. On Saturday, the BJP denied him a party ticket from his Chandni Chowk constituency. On Sunday, he quit politics but not before posting on X that he had won all five Assembly and two Parliamentary elections that he fought “with exemplary margins”.

Ahead of the release of the list, two sitting MPs of the BJP—cricketer-turned-politician Gautam Gambhir and former finance minister Yashwant Sinha’s son Jayant Sinha—also called it quits, saying that they wanted to focus on cricket commitments and global climate change respectively.

Drop MLAs/MPs, beat anti-incumbency?

In BJP’s first list of 195 candidates, there are around three dozen fresh faces. In 2019, it had dropped all its 10 sitting MPs in Chhattisgarh. It won nine seats. Out of these nine MPs, only two have been repeated this time. The party has changed candidates on five out of 15 Gujarat seats declared so far. It’s four out of five in Delhi and seven out of 15 in Rajasthan.

Many more sitting MPs are likely to be dropped in the subsequent lists of BJP candidates. Even in states where the BJP has been making a clean sweep (or almost so) in the past two Lok Sabha elections—Gujarat, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, and Uttarakhand, among others—Modi-Amit Shah haven’t hesitated to change candidates, reportedly on the basis of internal surveys. In Assembly elections, they have gone to the extent of replacing the entire Cabinet, like in Gujarat, or at least the CM, like in Uttarakhand or Tripura.

Dropping MPs and MLAs to beat anti-incumbency has been one of the core formulae of success for Modi since his chief ministerial days. Or so we have come to believe. But does it really work? Is there anti-incumbency at the candidate level? No, say Prannoy Roy and Dorab R Sopariwala in their book- The Verdict: Decoding India’s Elections. They analysed all state assembly elections held between 2008 and 2018, which involved checking and matching 34,700 individual candidates’ names to understand whether MLAs face anti-incumbency. Their first conclusion was that political parties appear to prefer renominating existing MLAs—66 per cent. They replace 34 per cent of the MLAs. The interesting finding of the research was that the renominated MLAs have a better strike rate of 50 per cent; new candidates have a strike rate of 37 per cent in seats a party won last time.

“The bottom line is: Election data over the last 11 years suggests that there is no clear anti-incumbency at the level of the individual MLA. In fact, it is more likely, if anything, that there is now a slight pro-incumbency advantage for sitting MLAs. Consequently, for candidates of equal quality, it is slightly smarter for political parties to renominate existing MLAs instead of lining up new candidates,” write Roy and Sopariwala.

Mind the phrase “candidates of equal quality” here. They have not taken into consideration the possibility of parties renominating ‘better’ individuals after getting rid of underperforming sitting MLAs. One can assume safely here that parties, while dropping sitting MLAs, go for better candidates, based on feedback from the ground. That should make the 37 per cent strike rate of new faces much less appealing.

Chemistry not arithmetic

I took a random sample of the BJP’s second list of 23 candidates in the 2023 Karnataka assembly election. The party denied tickets to sitting MLAs in seven constituencies—Channagiri, Mudigere, Kalaghatagi, Davanagere North, Haveri, Mayakonda, and Byndoor. 

The BJP lost six out of these seven seats, winning only in Byndoor.

In the case of parliamentarians, it’s difficult to test the validity of this anti-incumbency strategy, especially in an era of personality cults and polarising narratives where the performance of an individual MP has taken a back seat. As BJP leaders tell us, field a robot as the BJP candidate and it will win because the people vote for PM Modi and the party’s ideology, not for candidates.

So, why do Modi and Shah take so much trouble to conduct internal surveys and replace sitting MPs and MLAs to beat anti-incumbency if the incumbents have a better strike rate—50 per cent as against 37 per cent for fresh faces—in assembly elections?

That’s probably where Modi and Shah get the better of psephologists and analysts one election after another. For one, as we know, Modi-Shah go by chemistry and not arithmetic. And nobody understands this chemistry better than they as is evident from their record of electoral victories. Second, it’s not always about winning. It’s also about giving opportunities to fresh faces. For instance, when they saw potential in late Sushma Swaraj’s daughter, Bansuri, they went ahead and fielded her in the New Delhi constituency, replacing sitting MP Meenakshi Lekhi. The BJP won all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi in the last two Lok Sabha elections, securing over 50 per cent vote shares in all seven seats in 2019. So, the party is not necessarily bothered about Lekhi’s popularity. It’s more about giving an opportunity to a bright, young leader. Of course, Lekhi didn’t really help her own cause by embarrassing the Modi government by disowning a parliament reply last December.

If one looks at the BJP’s list closely, there are hints of larger objectives, too—it’s sending a signal to motor mouths, headline-hunters, zealots, and those with suspect loyalty to the high command, among others.

But, of course, these are not reasons that can be cited publicly. Winnability as the criterion comes in handy.

DK Singh is ThePrint’s Political Editor. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)