Why anti-incumbency may not help Congress
NEW DELHI: Haryana and Maharashtra state assemblies will go to polls on October 21. The context of these two elections is not very different from the last time they went to polls in 2014. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had won a majority of its own in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections with 282 seats. It has replicated this feat, with 303 seats, in 2019. The BJP and its allies had won a majority of seats in both Haryana and Maharashtra in 2014. They won 7 of 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana and 42 of 48 in Maharashtra. They have put in a similarly dominant performance in the 2019 general elections. They won 10 of 10 in Haryana and 41 of 48 in Maharashtra. The BJP replicated its Lok Sabha performance in the 2014 assembly polls in these states. Will it do the same in 2019?
There are good reasons, at least on paper, why the BJP might not find the going easy.
The Congress had lost the 2014 polls as the incumbent party in these states. It will be fighting the 2019 polls as the opposition. The BJP’s chief ministers in these two states — Devendra Fadnavis and Manohar Lal Khattar — were not its declared chief minister candidates in 2014. In fact, post-poll surveys conducted in 2014 by CSDS Lokniti show that neither Fadnavis nor Khattar were popular as chief ministerial candidates in the assembly elections. (See Chart 1)
They are both seeking re-election as chief ministers this time. Will the Congress will able to exploit this double antiincumbency, both against party and individual chief minister faces, to improve its performance in Maharashtra and Haryana? It achieved this feat in the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in December 2018.
There are two reasons, one national and one local, why the opposition will find it difficult to dislodge the BJP in these states.
The first is the BJP establishing itself as a hegemonic force in Indian politics after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The BJP’s 2014 victory was seen by many as a result of anti-incumbency against the second United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and a lack of opposition unity.
The fact that the BJP lost crucial assembly elections such as Delhi, where the Aam Admi Party (AAP) had emerged as the main anti-Congress force, underlined the former factor. The victory of the grand alliance of Janata Dal (United), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress in the 2015 Bihar elections and the BJP’s spectacular victory in 2017 in Uttar Pradesh elections against a divided Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) created the belief that opposition unity was key to defeating the BJP.
The Congress improving its 2017 Gujarat performance, managing to form a government in Karnataka in 2018 and its victories in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in 2018 also suggested that the BJP could be susceptible to anti-incumbency anger.
The 2019 Lok Sabha outcome has shown that merely a prepoll alliance is not enough to defeat the BJP. The Congress, despite having performed well in some key pre-2019 assembly elections, failed to consolidate the success at the national level. These two factors, put together, have created the impression that the BJP’s political dominance is far more stable today than it was in 2014.
It will be erroneous to think that the BJP’s political success in these two states is just a function of Narendra Modi’s charisma. Both in Haryana and Maharashtra, the BJP has recrafted existing social equations. This has benefitted the BJP and confused its main opponents. The strategy is primarily rooted in pushing the opposition towards consolidating the dominant social group, namely Jats and Marathas. This focus has allowed the BJP to consolidate almost everyone else except Muslims.
On the other hand, it has also managed increase its foothold among the dominant social groups, who realise that the winnability factor is strongest with the BJP. This can be seen from the community-wise vote shares collected in CSDS-Lokniti surveys. Even though the opposition has improved its performance among the dominant social groups, the BJP has a bigger chunk of their support. In the case the Maharashtra, the biggest proof of this is the traditional Maratha force Shiv Sena agreeing to be a junior partner of the BJP. ( See Chart 2)
These two factors — the BJP being the dominant political force in the foreseeable future and dominant social groups switching loyalties towards it for this reason — are likely to increase the opposition’s difficulties in not just Maharashtra and Haryana, but other parts of the country as well.
The opposition’s political challenge has undergone a qualitative shift.