Has the 2024 poll outcome been foretold?

Radhika Ramaseshan

Senior Journalist

AFTER the BJP’s victory run in four of the five Assembly elections held recently, it is tempting and facile to call out the 2024 parliamentary polls in its favour, as some commentators have assumed without caveats. The enervated state of the Congress, a disparate Opposition consisting of regional parties, the lack of a compelling storyline to confront the ruling party’s incessant evangelism and indoctrination and the absence of that one leader who can potentially stand up as a counterpoint to the BJP’s Narendra Modi do not add up to anything substantive two years before the next Lok Sabha elections.

Parts of the east and south alone offer a bulwark of resistance against the BJP’s rolling juggernaut.

Let’s delineate the geographical scenario. The BJP’s hegemony over the north and west (Maharashtra is a significant exception) is near-complete.

The North-East is within its grasp, but electoral history establishes that the eight sisters (Sikkim and Assam always vote independently) go with the party at the Centre out of fiscal and security considerations. The BJP is now as firmly entrenched in Assam as it is in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh after the multi-ethnic state embraced the Hindutva ideology.

After a promising start, West Bengal slipped from the BJP’s grasp. The powerful Delhi brass is unable to rein in the recalcitrant regional leaders, many of whom returned to their original abode in the Trinamool Congress.

Odisha was high on Delhi’s radar, but the savvy Naveen Patnaik, who heads the Biju Janata Dal and the state government, has not yielded an inch of space to the Opposition, with his blow-hot-blow-cold approach towards the BJP. Patnaik aims to keep the BJP’s central leaders happy and run circles around the party’s state functionaries. The outcome of the recent panchayat polls, where the BJD won 766 of the 852 seats, testifies Patnaik’s grip on every power tier.

In the south, Karnataka — where the RSS worked hard for decades and continues to be the BJP’s spine — is the outlier in the party’s scheme. Given the BJP’s appetite for conquests and persistence, it identified Telangana as a high-growth region and may well displace the Congress as the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi’s (TRS) principal rival by the next Lok Sabha and state elections. It made a breakthrough in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections and won two Assembly bypolls, Huzurabad and Dubbaka, in a wake-up call to the TRS.

Between them, the east (including the North-East) and the south add up to 215 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats or 39.5 per cent seats. A bulk of the seats belongs to West Bengal (42), Tamil Nadu (39), Andhra Pradesh (25), Karnataka (28), Odisha (21), Telangana (17), Kerala (20) and Assam (14). The BJP can count on Assam and Karnataka as fail-safe states and Telangana for prospective gains.

The picture changes dramatically in the north and west. On the 110 seats sprawled across Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Haryana, the BJP and the Congress are pitted in head-to-head fights. However, the scenario discounts a few imponderables. Haryana has a fair share of regional entities. In case the BJP’s ally, the Jannayak Janta Party, goes solo, the decision might add another dimension to a muddled state of affairs. Bolstered by its Punjab success, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is also trying hard to break into Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

The AAP’s rise should cause more consternation among the Congress than the BJP, although the party has hurt the BJP for time to come in Delhi. While the BJP’s stock-in-trade rhetoric against the Congress played successfully on elements like parivarwaad, legatees, “corruption”, “minority appeasement” and a “lack of commitment” towards its version of “nationalism”, the AAP often beat the BJP at its game. The parivarwaad charge can’t stick to the party. Arvind Kejriwal’s consistent endeavour to steer clear of a debate on Hindutva — indeed his detractors have accused him of being the BJP’s B-team — robbed the BJP of another plank to assail the AAP.

On balance, the Opposition offers a mixed account: some of the regional entities are strong in their geographical areas, but none of them has a pan-India presence despite TMC chief Mamata Banerjee’s exertions to spread beyond West Bengal, while the Congress, potentially the sole sheet anchor, is enfeebled beyond redemption.

The Congress has a chance at survival in the impending Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka elections if it keeps its nose to the grindstone. But that’s too much of an expectation from a party that has buried its head in the sand, oblivious of the BJP’s capacity for hard work and single-minded focus on politics.

In the last Gujarat elections, at one point, it looked like the Congress could outpace the BJP, until the BJP recovered in the last phase. It was a narrow win for the BJP. The Congress could have built on the gains accruing to it after decades, but it lost the painfully accumulated political capital. The BJP spirited away its legislators, purloined district functionaries and hollowed out its innards. The Congress is left with a shell of an organisation.

In Gujarat again, the AAP hopes to chip away at the Congress, although it recently lost the elected members of the Surat municipal corporation to the BJP.

In Karnataka, the Congress’ internal squabbles robbed the party of the vitality needed to challenge the BJP.

On the other hand, a day after the state election results were declared, PM Modi rushed to Gandhinagar to celebrate the victory, but also, importantly, to launch the election campaign. Like in Uttarakhand, the BJP changed its Gujarat CM, a decision that should put the party at a disadvantage but will possibly not.

Whether it is the Assembly or national polls, the Opposition’s robustness manifests itself in spurts. It has not crafted a storyline to take a narrative to the people, distinct from the BJP’s hyperbole. Has the 2024 outcome been foretold?

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