A gap had opened up in India’s polity this summer. It was after a decade that political strands contrary to the reigning one had found space for articulation. With two saffron sweeps in succession, first in Haryana and now with a tsunamic victory in Maharashtra, that gap has been closed emphatically. Both states exhibited a strong ‘recoil’ effect, almost a hypercorrection of the way they voted during the Lok Sabha election.
A similar reversal of pattern also made itself felt in Jharkhand, though going in the other direction and offering cold comfort to the Congress-led INDIA bloc. It would be a travesty to reduce the tribal state, with its own identity and internal specificities, as a meagre consolation prize. But in the grand scheme of things, against the sheer weight of India’s richest state on the western coast, it will be read as the exception that proves the rule.
What is that rule? That the sum total of the BJP machinery, when it plays to form, easily attains the unstoppable and all-conquering momentum of a juggernaut. And the Congress caravan, when it runs to form, finds it difficult to hold even a straight line at a sustained speed. Psychologically, it seems to behave like an ADHD patient, moving in sporadic bursts, then relaxing its vigil, becoming easily satisfied at transient markers, starting to relish its chicken kolhapuri before it is cooked. As a combat unit, it often appears to be like an artist drafted hurriedly into a war it would have rather dodged: it jaywalks like a window-shopper, almost disinterestedly, stopping to watch its own reflection in the glass pane.
Even if the portraiture is unfair, it would appear as if the BJP fought in Maharashtra, the JMM fought in Jharkhand, and the Congress fought in Wayanad! Priyanka Gandhi’s 4 lakh victory margin eclipses even her brother Rahul’s but pales when you consider the big picture. Here you had the BJP fighting as if to secure its very future, Chief Minister Hemant Soren and his wife Kalpana resolutely holding out for Adivasi autonomy and pride, and the Grand Old Party in geriatric self-dissolution. Look at the numbers. Together, INDIA has won six seats less in the 288-strong Maharastra assembly than it did in the 81-seat Jharkhand house! It won less than a quarter of the seats the BJP combo pocketed. It’s a wipeout of such a scale as to have never been registered in Maharashtra’s 70-year political history.
Any number of explanatory factors can be advanced in hindsight. One, a crippling lack of cohesion within the Maha Vikas Aghadi, flowing down from the layers of leadership to the cadre and voter base, turning ticket distribution into a game of mutually assured destruction and thus blocking vote transfer. The Mahayuti, by contrast, accomplished near-magical levels of synergy in vote transfer. What else can explain the incredulous scenario that has come to pass: a big tree like Sharad Pawar falling to 10 seats in his emotional sunset battle, and his prodigal nephew Ajit Pawar, who has not often been accused of being the darling of the masses, walking off with 41 seats with his breakaway NCP.
Two, caste identity-based mobilisation can work in a complex cross-pollination with Hindutva, rather than always hindering or negating it, as the simplistic reading would have it. It’s not yet fully clear who introduced the element in the shape of Manoj Jarange Patil, a pixie-like figure that came, roiled up the scene with a demand for Maratha quotas, and mysteriously vanished into the blue. Perhaps it was Sharad Pawar, as suggestions of past fealty would indicate. Perhaps it was Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, who needed to build a robust and viable base independent of the BJP (even as he swam with them).
At any rate, with his benevolent caste patron-like moves, Shinde seems to have walked away with the Maratha votes. Forget his competition with Uddhav Thackeray, his tally of 57 seats is individually higher than even that of the Congress, Sena (UBT), NCP (SCP) MVA trio put together! As the one man who has organically grown in stature in terms of political craftsmanship in the last two years, he looks set to complete the journey from a stopgap CM installed by others to one who has created his own hypersonic ballistics.
Something else was created in the wake of the Maratha agitation. A non-Maratha OBC consolidation, veering back to the BJP in a revival of its old ‘Madhav’ formula. The Mali, Dhangar and Vanjari communities have a combined population that easily exceeds 25 percent of the state’s total. Add to this the Kunbis, the antagonised caste brethren of the Marathas with existing reservations, and the rest of the OBC spectrum, and one is talking of nearly 40 per cent of the electorate. Lay the Hindutva rhetoric ‘batenge toh katenge’ on top of this as a catalysing ‘co-factor’ rather than an unconnected or even opposing one.
The final pieces in the puzzle are the Dalit and Muslim votes. Rather than cohering as they did in summer against the BJP, they scattered and dissipated their energies. The Congress, repeating its caste census catechism almost robotically with no feel for the ground nuance, also lost the chance to play up livelihood issues, the only real opposing factor with universal relevance. The mitigation on that front, as it happened, was equally universal. Simply pair the Ladki Bahin Yojana with the surge in women’s franchise from 59.26 percent to 65.21 percent. Add to this a tactical closing of ranks between the RSS top brass and the BJP, leading to active frontline work and booth management, and read that alongside the 4 percent surge in overall turnout.
Do not also discount the plethora of alliance-agnostic rebels and small parties confounding the field, especially the Vanchit Bahujan Party of Prakash Ambedkar. His words, “We will choose power”, adds a pithy summation of one line of Dalit politics that resists easy cooption into the Congress’s new emancipatory fold. Paradoxically, it’s only in Jharkhand that INDIA’s portrayal of itself as a pro-people political umbrella succeeded, the very place where that umbrella had failed to open during the Lok Sabha election. Jharkhand is fairly complex in terms of its social composition and its interrelations but regionally far more homogenous than Maharashtra, and the Sorens have found a hard-won redemption.
Even election results with such a ring of finality do not abolish the open-endedness of politics. Will the Thackerays survive as a political currency? The Pawars? Has Devendra Fadnavis ring-fenced himself against diminution? How will the RSS-BJP negotiation on the next party chief pan out? Will the Congress still stay hands-off from the EVM debate, as it did after Haryana, when its MVA allies show no compunction in raising it? But the meta truths will get constructed from an aggregation of chaotic facts and stand over all else, whether you read it in terms of personalities or of parties and ideologies.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor
Follow her on X @santwana99
