The 2020 Delhi Assembly elections failed to throw up any surprises despite the high-pitch campaign of the BJP. Most of the pollsters, including us, got it right that it was a highly focused election where the AAP was set to win a comfortable majority and the BJP a not-so-significant gain in seats, with the Congress out of the contest from the very beginning. As predicted, the AAP has indeed romped home, with wins in 62 seats, five fewer than in the previous polls; the BJP’s tally is eight, five more than in 2015, and the Congress remains at zero, like the last time. In fact, in a significant number of seats, the Congress has failed to reach the five-digit mark, a prerequisite to be taken as a serious contender.
Of the eight seats that the BJP has won, two—Vishwas Nagar and Rohini—were won by it in 2015 too. The victory margins in constituencies like Laxmi Nagar, Bijwasan and Adarsh Nagar are around 1,000 votes. But other than a few exceptions, a majority of the seats were decided by a margin of 5,000 or more votes, showing clearly that this was not at all a close election; the AAP was leading outright.
In that scenario, it appears the general hyperbolic campaign that the BJP launched was more aimed at encouraging its own voters and creating an impression that it was seriously in the contest, while the party focused more on micro-targeting in a select few seats to reach respectable numbers.
A closer look at the electoral outcome indicates that the BJP’s strategy in Delhi failed on all the three cardinal features of mobilisational strategy prevalent in India, which veer around the identitarian, material and psychological aspirations of the voters.
First, while the BJP’s experiment to expand its social support base by having a Poorvanchali face failed to galvanise the migrant voters, this ironically led to the alienation of its core support base of Punjabis, Banias and Jats as revealed by the electoral reversals the party faced in constituencies dominated by them. This alienation of a section of core voters, in combination with the AAP’s outreach to women as a constituency through specific public policy, led to the BJP’s social support base shrinking further. Thus the BJP lagged behind on the identitarian plank.
Secondly, on the material plank, the party seemed to have committed political hara-kiri, at least in Delhi, when it was perceived as opposing the AAP’s pro-welfare plank around the basic amenities of everyday life as freebies. This stance of the Delhi BJP is a worrying factor that further entrenches its pro-rich and anti-poor image, which can affect its future electoral prospects at state level.
The BJP’s unprecedented high level of political investment towards the end of the campaign period led to a mixed outcome for the party. On a positive note for the BJP, it emerged as the only party whose vote share increased, by 6% as compared to the 2015 polls; both the AAP and Congress witnessed a fall in their vote shares, by around 1% and 5% respectively. This aspect must be appreciated all the more in the backdrop of the reasonable likelihood that a majority of votes that the Congress lost would have gone to the AAP on account of the similarity in the socio-economic profile of their voters. However, this positive aspect for the BJP was outshone not only by its massive defeat at the hands of the AAP, but also on account of its failure to shed its anti-poor image.
On the other hand, the AAP, which went in with a low-pitch campaign on the plank of welfarism, seemed to face a hurdle in the last leg of the polls due to the absence of a massive team of volunteers as seen in 2015; it had to face a high-pitch campaign by the BJP, which invested all its might in changing the dominant electoral narrative from welfarism to cultural and security issues. It is noteworthy that the BJP went for more than 7,000 nukkad-sabhas since January 23, besides Union Home Minister Amit Shah himself addressing around four meetings every day. This was augmented by party MPs from Delhi and various states being sent to camp in different localities in a customised way to exhort the activists on the ground. Finally, PM Narendra Modi himself pitched the narrative of Shaheen Bagh. However, as we had argued in our detailed ground reports on Delhi published in this newspaper earlier, the chance of Shaheen Bagh helping the BJP in Delhi was highly unlikely.
Most importantly, it needs to be contextualised as to why the low-pitch but sustained welfarist plank of the AAP trumped the high-pitch campaign of the BJP. Here, the timing and the mode of the non-exclusive nature of welfare-policies of the AAP acquires centrality. As the welfare state started taking a backseat with the advent of neo-liberalism since the 1980s, along with the decline of challenge from the socialist state, universal coverage simply disappeared. Subsidy became a cuss word and the market emerged as the panacea of all ills.
However, as markets crashed and the globalisation-induced instability brought new challenges, the neo-liberal state tried to respond by bringing some welfare back into the game through a new technique—targeting. This targeted welfare performed three important functions: decreasing the discontent among poorer sections by giving them relief, bringing back the legitimacy to the state and keeping welfare spending in check. It is this targeted welfare that became the mantra for neo-liberal states across the globe, India being no exception to the trend. Various state governments in India further enriched it by various experimental permutations and combinations, and ‘freebies’ like free TV to free gold to the poor emerged on the India political scene.
However, this targeted welfarism also created certain rifts within society. Those who got the benefits became supporters of the government that brought the policies, while those who were excluded simply became its fiercest critics, terming the beneficiaries as ‘freeloaders’ and what not. The state and statist political parties had no complaint against this as they were more interested in reaping the dividends of this divide. The welfarism of the AAP brought a fundamental change to this scenario for it brought back the old-fashioned, discarded concept of ‘universal coverage’ into the political discourse. Its policies of free electricity and water upto a certain limit covered all people, irrespective of community or class. Nobody could complain that they had been left out.
The same was the case with its investment in the field of education. Those who sent their children to private schools could also not complain as the government has ensured that private schools did not increase fees in the past five years. CCTVs, which the government promised, have been installed across the localities, be it a slum or a gated community. This welfarist plank didn’t create a scenario of relative deprivation among a class of voters as had been seen in other states, wherein every welfare measure for a particular class or section of voters was seen as being divisive, with one community preferred over the others. This precluded the very possibility of a scenario of constituting the ‘other’ in Delhi.
Finally, the universal welfare plank that didn’t leave much of a space for a politics of ‘Us vs. Them’ led to the AAP having a better success in influencing the psychology of the voters, by appealing to their material instincts over the cultural ones, as far as state elections are concerned. Therefore, the biggest takeaway from the Delhi election is a small but bold message: Political parties and incumbents get rewarded for delivering on welfarism provided they are available to all rather than just specific sections.
This universal welfarist plank didn’t create a scenario of relative deprivation among a class of voters as had been seen in other states, wherein every welfare measure for a particular class or section of voters was seen as being divisive, with one community preferred over the others
Rajan Pandey
The author teaches political science at Christ University, Bengaluru
Sajjan Kumar
Political analyst associated with People’s Pulse Email: sajjanjnu@gmail.com