State elections are bad news for BJP and not good news for Congress either

A supporter of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Vadodra | Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

While the BJP is going down, the largest opposition party isn’t rising to the occasion.

First round of pre-election opinion polls are in for the coming assembly elections. Although the track record of pre-election forecasts does not inspire confidence, I still keep an eye on these polls. Old habit, I guess. But also because I find imperfect (but not spurious) polls more useful than drawing room or newsroom gossip. The overall trend seems to be this: it’s advantage Congress in Rajasthan and close contests in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and now in Telangana.

On the face of it, this may not be all that bad news for the BJP. I can already see the BJP spin doctors explaining it away: Rajasthan regularly flip-flops, and if you lose a state like Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh after reigning for 15 years, that is hardly a matter of shame. But the BJP strategists know that the matter is not so simple. It needs to do well in the three Hindi-belt states.

The BJP won 62 of 65 seats in 2014 in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. It cannot afford to lose 25-30 seats here. A drubbing in Rajasthan and a defeat or near-defeat in MP is bad news in hard numbers. Besides, a setback in these states will be seen as an indication of the way the wind might blow in the Hindi belt. It would also be bad news for the moral of party workers going into the Lok Sabha elections. And it would be bad news as it would encourage more of bad news, literally. A result like this would loosen the BJP’s current stranglehold over the media. Once the media owners start hedging their bets, a lot of bad news that the regime has managed to keep off from the mass media may begin to reach the people. That is why these elections, mainly the three Hindi-belt polls with wider ramifications, deserve closer scrutiny.

Let us begin with the headlines. Every single agency (CSDS, C-Voter, CNX and C-fore) agrees that the BJP lags way behind and is in for a drubbing in Rajasthan.  The estimates of the Congress’ lead over the BJP vary from 4 to 8 percentage points in vote share. On Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the polls are split, but none gives comfort to the BJP. While the C-Voter reported the BJP trailing the Congress by one percentage point in Madhya Pradesh, the CSDS and CNX polls say the BJP is slightly ahead. It’s only in Chhattisgarh that the CSDS poll shows the BJP is comfortably ahead, while the C-Voter reports the Congress is ahead by a wafer-thin margin. We don’t have many quality polls on Telangana, but the latest C-Voter poll suggests that the Congress-TDP-TJS tie-up has reversed the earlier trend of a comfortable lead for the TRS.

Let us use here figures from the CSDS-ABP polls for a closer analysis of the three Hindi-belt states. It’s not because of my past association with it, nor because I believe their election forecast over that of others. It’s just that the CSDS team is most transparent in reporting its methodology and findings. You can use their data to disagree with them. Also, it so happens that the CSDS team had carried a similar survey in these three states just before 2013, asked many identical questions and the findings of that survey are also in the public domain.

The BJP has three reasons to worry. First, as Tables 1 and 2 show, the level of anti-incumbency in all the three states is deeper than the headlines might suggest. In Rajasthan, the Vasundhara Raje government is nearly as unpopular as the Ashok Gehlot government was in 2013, just before it was booted out unceremoniously. Those who wish to give this government another chance are outnumbered by those who don’t – a clear sign of deep anti-incumbency. Despite the poll showing the BJP in an overall lead in Madhya Pradesh, the level of satisfaction with Shivraj Singh Chouhan government has plummeted. The ratio of those who wish to boot it out has risen to match those who don’t. In Chhattisgarh too, the proportion of dissatisfied and those who want to throw the government out has increased. In other words, the BJP is more vulnerable in Madhya Pradesh than it might appear and is not invincible in Chhattisgarh.

Table 1: “How satisfied are you with the performance of the state government?”

Source: CSDS pre-poll surveys, 2013 and 2018.

Table 2: “Should this state government get another chance?”

Source: CSDS pre-poll surveys, 2013 and 2018.

Second, in each of the states, the BJP does worse in rural areas than in the cities. This could prove decisive in Madhya Pradesh. The CSDS poll shows the BJP in overall lead, but trailing behind the Congress in the rural areas. This could mean that the BJP scores big victories in a small number of urban seats but loses a large number of seats by a small margin. A similar logic appears to be at work in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh as well. This could be the sign of a wider trend throughout the Hindi belt, something that must worry the BJP leaders.

Finally, the BJP leadership would worry because the major issues identified by the voters are likely to hurt the party all over the country. Unemployment has been topping the chart of issues in all the national surveys for the past one year. It trumps as the voting consideration among these three states, upstaging the usual favourites like price rise, poverty and corruption. This could again point to a wider pattern, beyond these three states. While the central government is not seen to be corrupt, the information about the Nirav Modi scandal and the Rafale deal seems to be percolating down to more than one-third of the voters. This could go up further if the media picks up more courage after this verdict.

All this should be music to the Congress’ ears. Yet a moment’s reflection shows that this is more a negative vote against the BJP rather than a positive vote for the Congress. None of the Congress CM aspirants is more popular than the current BJP CM in each of these three states. The level of satisfaction with the central government is fairly high, higher than it was with the UPA government in 2013. More importantly, Narendra Modi continues to be the top choice for the PM’s post, even in Rajasthan. While the party that wins the assembly election tends to take the state in the subsequent Lok Sabha elections, it should worry the Congress that Rahul Gandhi is not liked very much in Rajasthan. While the BJP is going down, the largest opposition party is not generating any positivity and hope. And that is a story not limited to these three states.

Yogendra Yadav is National President of Swaraj India.