The Quiet Path to History

IF A LIST OF unprecedented and unexpected electoral verdicts in India is prepared, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) victory in the Haryana Assembly elections on Octo­ber 8 will find a place in it. BJP has returned to the helm in Chandigarh for a third time, an event unheralded in the state’s history.

Going by exit polls and the spate of reports from Haryana, it was widely expected that BJP would lose badly. Congress, going by the noise of its campaign in the Deshwal region—Sonipat, Rohtak, Jhajjar, and parts of Jind districts—and the pronounce­ments of its public face there, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, seemed to be on a strong wicket. BJP, in contrast, appeared to be down, if not entirely out. The party had lost five Lok Sabha seats in the parliamentary elections just months ago, down from its tally of 10 in 2019. Then there was the alleged anger of Jats, the dominant caste in the state, for not appointing a chief minister from their community. Other communities, including Dalits, were said to be restive and badlav (change) was being bandied about as a campaign theme against BJP.

Analysts also looked at BJP’s performance in the 2019 As­sembly elections when it had witnessed a decrease in its seat tally from 2014. This and the ‘election fog’ made them conclude that the party was on its way out. The past, however, is no guide for the future and the 2024 Assembly polls sprang a surprise for election watchers. BJP increased its vote share for the third consecutive time in the state, going up to 39.94 per cent (from 36.49 per cent in 2019), even as its seat tally recovered from the low of 40 in 2019 to 48.

The theory that in the absence of the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP)—a party formed from the fissioning of the Indian Na­tional Lok Dal (INLD)—which brought a slice of the Jat vote to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) fold, BJP would be trounced, was decisively discredited along with many other claims in this round of elections. BJP not only improved its vote percentage and seat share but also found favour with all communities in the state.

Every election in India—across state Assemblies and those at the parliamentary level—has two narrative parts. The first is before the actual voting and outcomes when narrative wars and explanations play out in the press. Often, these elements have a sand-castle quality to them and any bearing they may or may not have on the political processes on the ground is purely a matter of chance. After the results are declared, either these narratives and explanations are confirmed or the hunt for new ones, after the earlier ones stand discredited, acquires a frenetic pace.

Something of that kind has occurred in the case of Haryana in the past three to four days, beginning within hours of the trends rolling out on October 8. By midday, it had become clear that BJP, the un­derdog in these polls, had won outright and with­out any need for support from independents or the decimated regional parties. On earlier occasions, such as in 2019, BJP either had to rely on JJP or was a junior partner to INLD. INLD, once a ruling party of Hary­ana, has been reduced to two seats in its bailiwick, Sirsa, while JJP is almost defunct.

At that point the ‘explanation’ changed from “Jat anger” against BJP to “counter-mobilisation against Jats” that favoured the party. It is interest­ing that almost no one among the reporters and analysts who swooped down on Haryana from New Delhi even made a whim­per about the latter explanation before the results were declared.

The reality is that, even after the results, the latter interpreta­tion—counter-mobilisation against Jats across the state—is of questionable value. So is another favoured explanation—that of “farmer anger” working against BJP. A closer look at the results highlights the dangers of facile narratives.

There are 14 seats in Haryana that share a border with Punjab, both along the latter’s southern and south-eastern peripheries. The seats that abut Punjab’s southern borders have continued to witness political ferment due to the farmers’ agitation from 2020 onwards. Of these 14 seats, one can exclude three—Kalka, Nara­ingarh and Panchkula—as they were not on the map of farmers’ agitations. Among these 14 seats, five are re­served for Scheduled Castes (SCs). Together, they allow a neat separation of claims about Dalit counter-mobilisation and farmers’ agitation affecting the fortunes of the BJP and the Congress. Of the five reserved con­stituencies—Kalanwali, Ratia, Narwana, Guhla and Shahbad—BJP won only one (Narwana) and the rest were bagged by Congress. Similarly, of the “farmer-facing” 11 constituencies, Congress won eight, BJP two and INLD one.

All these constituencies are contigu­ous and have a mix of farmers and Dalits. Counter-mobilisation against Jats in favour of BJP should have led to a larger number of these seats coming into BJP’s bag. But the party won just one seat. If the explanation is that it was the farmers’ agi­tation in Punjab and Haryana as well that played a decisive role in these seats going to Congress, surely there are districts such as Hisar, Jind and Kurukshetra, among others, with an overwhelming presence of farmers where BJP should have lost seats heavily. Instead, BJP romped home in places like Uchana Kalan, Safidon, Pundri and Tosham to list just a few constituencies.

THE FACT IS that the nature of Dalit politics and its social reality in Haryana escaped commentators and pollsters alike. In constituencies that are unreserved but where Dalits have a significant presence, they are unlikely to openly express their political choices. This is unlike Jats who proudly display party flags at their homes and on their vehicles, some­thing taken as a rough marker of political choice. The result is that, in those constituencies where Jats had an outsized voice, Dalits quietly voted against candidates of the dominant com­munity. This went against Congress in large parts of the state. But in the state’s northern part—abutting Punjab—Dalits voted for Congress. Simple narratives fell flat in Haryana.

If one looks at the map of electoral results for Haryana, it shows a regionally variegated pattern, one that defies simplis­tic narratives like a state-wide counter-mobilisation against Jats that allegedly favoured BJP.

Along Haryana’s urbanised and semi-urban belts, along Na­tional Highway 1, or what is known colloquially as GT Road, and on the southern periphery around Gurugram and Farid­abad, there was a clear wave in favour of BJP. In the deep south of the state, in the Muslim-dominated Mewat region, BJP has been trounced. In another part of the south, the Ahirwal belt, too, BJP did very well. Congress did well in the old Rohtak district and the northern flank of Haryana. But while its aggressive mobilisation of the Jat vote in Rohtak helped it dramatically in one part of the state, the poor results in other Jat-dominant parts (such as Bhiwani, Jind and parts of Hisar) showed the limits of such mobilisa­tion. By overlaying the political choices of Dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) on what Congress did, it is clear that the strategy was ill-thought and ill-starred.

In contrast, BJP’s quiet and underap­preciated efforts, such as fairness in job selections, its non-sectarian approach to governance that did not favour one com­munity over another, and its commitment to encouraging economic development, worked in all the areas where it won, in­cluding those dominated by Jats, the sup­posed nemesis of the party.

In September, Congress released a se­ries of election-eve promises that included `2,000 per month for women, 500 units of free electricity, legalising Minimum Sup­port Prices (MSPs) for crops (it had made the promise earlier during the Lok Sabha campaign), restoration of the Old Pension Scheme, LPG cylinders at `500, a caste census, and two lakh gov­ernment jobs. These promises did not click with voters even as BJP refused to make a matching offer to counter Congress. It does not require much imagination to see that, had these promises been implemented if Congress had come to power, they would have spelt ruin for the state in the same manner as is being ex­perienced in Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh.

It is also worth pointing out that the electoral rhetoric of Con­gress’ national leadership, such as apportionment of resources along caste lines—exemplified by rhetorical devices like ginti karo (carry out a caste count) and jitni abadi, utna haq (rights in proportion to a community’s population)—did not go down well with Dalits and Jats alike in Haryana. On the one hand were these slogans specifically tailored for underprivileged groups and on the other hand was the almost abrasive Jat mobilisation in the Rohtak area. The national-level signalling was lost in the local noise. In the end, virtually every community—the chhattis biradari—went for BJP.

Haryana is one of the better growing states and its geographic advantage of being in the proximity of the National Capital Re­gion (NCR) has helped it. The state government and its residents know that. From that perspective, it is not surprising that Con­gress’ populist pitch failed to attract voters even as BJP’s ‘quiet work’ helped it come back to power for a historic third term. It is a cautionary tale that political campaigns have to be realistic and cannot be expected to run on the basis of alleged momentum from previous elections. It is clear that Congress was under the illusion that wresting five Lok Sabha seats from BJP in Haryana would carry it through in the Assembly elections as well. It did not. Today, Congress is left clutching hard at straws to believe the excuses for its dismal performance.

Assembly elections 2024Bhupinder Singh HoodaBJPHaryanaNayab Singh Sainithird term