Beyond Binaries: What the recent assembly poll results suggest for national politics
KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)
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Summary
The larger picture remains the rise of the BJP, which has increased its seat tally 26-fold and its vote share four-fold, suggesting that a north Indian party has now reached Bengal as a major political force.
What larger message do the recently-concluded elections in four states and one union territory bring us, particularly after the dust of breaking news has settled?
The answer to this depends on how we wish to make sense of it.
There are two ways of reading election results. One, to see each result as an atomistic event, with the simple question of who won or who lost being the end of the analysis.
The other is to see an election as part of a process and see whether it captures a larger trend.
It is the second method that actually helps understand politics. As for the first, many news reports and WhatsApp messages regarding the results have done to death the atomistic analysis.
BJP: the larger picture
The most important trend that the present round of elections captures is the gradually deepening eastern expansion of the BJP, which exactly a decade back was seen as a party of north, central and western India, with the sole conquest of Karnataka in the south.
Exactly 10 years back, the BJP was virtually non-existent in Bengal and Assam, two important states of the east. In the 2011 assembly elections, the BJP secured 4-percent votes in Bengal and 11-percent votes in Assam. It won five seats in Assam in 2011 and drew a blank in Bengal.
It was just three years after this that the expansion of the BJP began and it swept north India—particularly populous Uttar Pradesh—in what is called the Modi wave in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. While north India stayed with the BJP, the impact of the wave gradually radiated towards the eastern states, which the BJP had been focusing on.
In 2016, the BJP won Assam for the first time. It has retained Assam for the second time now, securing about 43-percent votes per seat it contested. In a sign that national convergence is now fuelling politics in India, the BJP is the prime party in Assam while the AGP, which had risen in the heady days of the AASU agitation, plays second fiddle to the national party.
Many see the Bengal elections as symptomatic of strong regional sentiment, but they are off the mark. The strong insider-vs-outsider discourse in Bengal was actually a result of the emerging national convergence, which made an entrenched TMC take recourse to regionalism to resist BJP expansion. To read it as growing regionalisation of politics is as fallacious as reading the beginning of casteism in the public sphere in Mandal: the Mandal Commission just disturbed the status quo of upper caste hegemony, making caste visible, rather than infusing casteism in public discourse.
The pattern of the north Indian wave radiating to Bengal has been slower than Assam but a clear phenomenon. Scoring a blank in 2011, the BJP could win just three seats in Bengal in 2016, securing 10-percent votes. However, in 2021, the BJP has breached Bengal and made it bipolar. With the left and Congress together drawing a blank in Bengal, the BJP has secured 38-percent votes, winning 77 seats. The transfer of left and Congress votes seems to have made the TMC surge ahead in the polls, increasing its vote percentage to 47-48 despite Mamata Banerjee losing her own election in Nandigram.
This paradox suggests that a lot of last-minute vote transfer—and the stronger organisation of the TMC—ensured that Mamata Banerjee could return as Chief Minister for the third time. However, the larger picture remains the rise of the BJP, which has increased its seat tally 26-fold and its vote share four-fold, suggesting that a north Indian party has now reached Bengal as a major political force.
In sync with what I wrote in an earlier piece for this news organisation, a unique Bengal model of Hindutva is visible this time. A party that took cities and the upper castes first in the north, central and western India has entrenched itself better among subaltern caste groups in the eastern states. The final results show that about half of the seats the BJP won have come in SC/ST reserved constituencies, suggesting that while it could sway Dalits and tribals, it failed to move the greater Kolkata region, which houses not just the state’s only mega-city but is the hub of the Bhadralok, a category that is on the surface suggestive of some genteel traits but is largely upper-caste heavy as it primarily captures the cultural aspirations of Brahmins, Kayastha and Baidyas.
However, contrary to what many are claiming in the euphoria of the election results, Mamata Banerjee is unlikely to emerge as a challenger to the BJP. There are two reasons for this. One, Banerjee is a quintessential regional leader who cannot influence any state bordering Bengal on any side. Second, even if the BJP were to decline in 2024 and the coalition era returns, other regional parties are likely to choose a low-profile regional leader rather than an ambitious and high-profile Mamata Banerjee. This is what happened in 1996-97, when HD Devegowda and IK Gujral, rather than a high-profile regional leader, became Prime Minister.
The challenge to the BJP is not Mamata Banerjee at present. The real challenge is the raging pandemic, which seems to have spiraled out of control even as elections and the Haridwar Kumbh took place. The reverses the BJP has suffered in the Uttar Pradesh Panchayat polls are the real warning sign for the party, though it is too early to say whether these will result in reverses in the UP assembly elections next year.
Muslim votes
The Modi wave has also been marked by Hindu-Muslim polarisation on a large scale. In Assam, the Congress entered into a tie-up with the AIUDF to ensure that Bengali-speaking Muslims, found in large numbers in the Barak Valley and Lower Assam, did not split. However, given the deep unease among Assamese Hindus who see Bengali speakers as a threat to what they consider the cultural specificities of the state, a counter-polarisation of Hindus ended up seeing the BJP through. Ajmal is often seen by Assamese speakers as a symbol of what they consider the Bengali ‘invasion’ of the state. The sentiment is more linguistic than religious, but the Congress-AIUDF alliance helped in polarisation that helped the BJP.
In Bengal, a recent trend witnessed in Bihar was bucked. If Muslims chose the AIMIM of Asaduddin Owaisi over the RJD in five constituencies in the Muslim-heavy Seemanchal region, they stuck to the prime challenger of the BJP, the TMC, in Bengal, completely ignoring the Indian Secular Forum of Abbas Siddiqui, the cleric of the Furfura Sharif shrine. This suggests that Muslim voters are sticking to the prime ‘secular’ challenger to the BJP rather than trying out parties that are perceived as ‘Muslim-centric’.
The CPI (M)
This election brought both good and bad news for an embattled CPI (M). But, on the balance, the good news trumps the bad news. While the party drew a blank in Bengal, once its bastion where it had been in power for 34 years, it won Kerala, bucking the trend of the state alternating between the CPI (M)-led LDF and the Congress-led UDF. Perhaps Pinarayi Vijayan’s handling of the COVID crisis in the state—and his effective communication of the handling— helped the party. It is being widely reported that while many states are running short of oxygen, Kerala had taken timely steps to ramp up oxygen supplies to face the second wave.
The Congress
The woes of the Congress continued even in this round of assembly polls. It lost both Kerala and Assam, where it has been a force and drew a blank in Bengal, where its traditional votes in the Malda-Murshidabad region shifted to the TMC in a bipolar contest.
The Congress can take some solace in Tamil Nadu, as it is part of the DMK-led alliance, but the engine of the alliance is undoubtedly the DMK.
If the Congress does not get its act together to become an alternative to the BJP as a national party, the Hindutva wave may continue in India in the coming years, unless the pandemic damages the prospects of the ruling party.
Only time will tell how the pandemic—which has made health infrastructure collapse—affects the BJP in the coming months.
—Vikas Pathak has been a political journalist for a decade-and-a-half and teaches at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. The views expressed are personal
Read his other columns here
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