India is an election-bound nation, where no six months pass by without at least one state assembly election. As local elections have stronger affinity with mundane everyday issues, their outcomes exhibit collective aspirations, anxieties and assertions with demographic and regional specificities. This constitutes the soul of Indian democracy, where multiple aspirational diversities get reflected in state assembly elections. They signify the much-desired perpetual fluidity of the political arena, where all political parties get a fair chance to win the people’s mandate at different intervals.
Against this backdrop, the saga of electoral processes in five states—Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Mizoram—suggests that the electorate is becoming more experimental and layered, weighing contending options and employing multivocal narratives, which makes the pollsters’ job nightmarish. This is a phase where electoral outcomes render all the old statistical wisdom and field experiences absurd. They also offer new insights and newer analytical stereotypes.
Some of the new semantics and frames that dominated the analytical arena in these elections were: fatigue vs anger, freebies vs welfarism, regional satraps vs Modi factor, gendered mobilisation vs youth anger, and manageable anti-incumbency vs intense anti-incumbency. Similarly, there were unsubstantiated but consistent speculations about the impact of issues such as the OBC caste census on the electoral prospects of the BJP and other parties. The old wisdom of drawing inferences based on the increased or decreased turnouts is on the verge of losing the settled plot completely. Also, the huge pan-Indian interest in all the state elections revealed another level of citizenry engagement where even the generic audience exhibited more curiosity to get into not only the macro electoral data of different states but the detailed inputs about sub-regions and localities.
When was the last time non-experts and common people outside these states sat at tea stalls or public squares and talked about the dynamics of the Bastar and Sarguja in Chhattisgarh; Chambal-Gwalior, Bundelkhand, Mahakaushal, Malwa-Nimar and Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh; Mewat, Jaipur, Shekhawati, Marwar, Mewar, Hadoti and Ajmera in Rajasthan; and North and South Telangana along with Hyderabad? It seemed as if the sub-regional dynamics of every state was familiar to a broad spectrum of people across India, including the youth, women, farmers, middle class, and the urban and rural segments. Further, popular policy outreaches to the voters by rival parties in different states made various schemes and their targeted constituencies matters of widespread interest. All this has thrown up a new challenge to old election analysts and experts on Indian democracy: remaining relevant. If this is the state of analysts, one can only imagine the rugged terrain that politicians and political parties are having to tread on account of this new level of active agency that Indian voters are coherently displaying.
To unravel the new grammar of state assembly elections, let us take on a binding theme that is still in the nascent phase. Experts, journalists and pollsters felt that there was fatigue rather than anger towards the incumbents in Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in varying degrees. It raises several questions. How does one understand the intersectionality of fatigue and votes? Does voters’ fatigue offer a silver lining to the incumbent as opposed to their anger? Or can fatigue be a sign of the undercurrent of change rather than an open wave against the ruling party? Here, the confusion is both a matter of degree and direction.
What would be the takeaway if under similar conditions, two states offer diametrically different results? That will unfold another level of tentative submissions on the indispensability of organisational strength and resources on one side and relative autonomy of the voters’ sentiment on the other. The bottom line is simple: there are no grand laws in Indian elections that hold true for all states.
For instance, in Madhya Pradesh, one witnessed relatively more women for the BJP but more young men in favour of a change. In Rajasthan, while the core voters of the BJP and Congress stood behind these parties, swing voters oscillated between giving more weightage to the popular policy outreaches of the Ashok Gehlot government and the poor state of law and order. In Chhattisgarh, it was difficult to infer whether to the swing voters, CM Bhupesh Baghel was a pull factor or a sign of fatigue. Similarly, in Telangana, one has to let the dust settle to decide whether the fatigue towards the Bharat Rashtra Samithi made the Congress a default beneficiary or it was the result of the grand old party’s active efforts to emerge as a serious challenger.
Arguably, there are certain easy takeaways. One, regional satraps are indispensable for all parties when it comes to assembly elections. Two, welfare schemes and policy outreaches need to cater to the changing aspirations of different segments in a customised way. The existing popular schemes do not suffice anymore. And three, voters love to surprise political parties by showing greater autonomy, making the management of elections increasingly difficult for the tribe of professional election managers. But this is good for Indian politics as democratic processes should not be outsourced to managerial experts.
Parties need to rely more on their workers and leaders to get healthy feedback and feel the pulse on the ground. On a relative scale, electorates operate on the intersectionality of popular schemes and community identities, making the electoral area more layered, fluid and unpredictable. Nothing could be more desirable in a pragmatic sense. Irrespective of the electoral outcomes, the mist surrounding people’s choices is a win-win for Indian democracy.
Sajjan Kumar
Political analyst associated with PRACCIS, a Delhi-based research institution