New Delhi, India – An alliance led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept elections to India’s second-largest state, Maharashtra, on Saturday, dramatically regaining ground it had lost just five months ago in a parliamentary election setback.
Maharashtra, with its capital Mumbai, is India’s wealthiest state – its gross domestic product of $510bn is larger than that of any other state and is also bigger than that of major global economies like Norway and South Africa.
On Saturday, the BJP-led alliance won more than 230 of the 288 seats in the state’s legislative assembly, with Modi’s party alone triumphing in 132 seats, giving the prime minister complete control over India’s economic powerhouse.
The party’s win marks a stunning resurgence in a state that has long been politically critical in India, but where, in Lok Sabha (House of the People) elections results in June, the BJP and its allies were trounced by the opposition, said analysts. The BJP and its partners had won just 17 out of 48 parliamentary seats in Maharashtra, with the opposition, consisting of the Congress party and its allies, winning 30 seats.
Saturday’s results left the opposition licking its wounds, even though the Congress-led alliance did win elections to the tribal-dominated state of Jharkhand after the BJP drove a shrill anti-Muslim campaign there. In Maharashtra, the Congress won just 16 seats.
“[The] Congress did not consolidate and frittered away gains of the parliamentary elections,” said Sandeep Shastri, a political scientist with the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). “There is a deep disconnect between the ground and their leadership.”
Yet despite the Hindu majoritarian BJP’s win in Maharashtra, what worked for it was not necessarily religious polarisation, said analysts. In fact, in Jharkhand, the BJP’s anti-Muslim rhetoric might have backfired on it.
Where the BJP won Maharashtra was with its shift away from a focus on Modi – whose face has been synonymous with all party campaigns over the past decade – to local factors.
More women, less Modi
Maharashtra, a coastal state with more than 125 million people – nearly double the United Kingdom’s population – was one of the bleeding wounds for the BJP when it lost the parliamentary majority in June this year. Five months on, the BJP scored its best-ever performance in the state’s election while the Congress – which counted Maharashtra among its strongest bastions for decades – recorded its worst numbers.
Both the national parties forged pre-poll alliances with regional parties. But while the BJP won 132 of the 149 seats it contested – a success rate of 89 percent – the Congress only secured 16 of the 101 seats it contested, a win rate of just 16 percent. The state legislative assembly has a total of 288 seats, with a majority mark of 145.
“The BJP remained more focused and managed its coalition much better than the Congress,” said Shastri of CSDS. “The opposition camp was divided on campaign issues and focused more on power-sharing setup.”
But analysts also credit the dramatic turnaround of the incumbent BJP-led “Mahayuti” alliance to its female-centric welfare schemes, like the “Laadki Bahin Yojna”, a cash transfer scheme of 1,500 rupees ($18) a month to women aged 21-65.
A survey conducted by CSDS in October revealed that seven in 10 responders had benefitted directly from the scheme. As per the government, the scheme has 23.4 million beneficiaries, in a state with 46 million women voters.
“Another trick under our sleeves was to downplay the face of Modi in this election and rather fight them on local issues by pushing our weight behind local candidates,” said a political strategist hired by the BJP to manage Maharashtra polls, requesting anonymity.
The strategist pointed to another important part of the puzzle behind the BJP win: the support of its ideological fountainhead, the Sangh Parivar, an umbrella term for more than three dozen ultra-Hindu-nationalist groups.
“The Sangh organisation conducted thousands of meetings with women, and godmen, and just went door-to-door to meet everyone in Maharashtra,” said Sriraj Nair, a senior spokesperson of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an organisation that is part of the Sangh.
“We are strong cadre-based organisations that have a presence in every village in the state. Our entire machinery came together to recover from the losses the Hindu-friendly party suffered in the national election,” Nair added, referring to the BJP.
Shastri agreed, adding that, Sangh organisations ran “well-oiled campaigns” that played a “crucial role” in the BJP’s success.
Where polarisation backfired
But the BJP lost Jharkhand, a state of 32 million people.
There, too, the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)-led government initiated a women-centric cash transfer scheme, providing 1,000 rupees ($12) a month to women aged 18-25 years, reaching nearly 5.2 million women in the run-up to the polls. The state has 12.8 million female voters.
“A plain look says that incumbent government-funded welfare schemes in both the states won the landslide victories for ideologically opposing parties,” said Rahul Verma, a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR).
“But that is only a part of the explanation. A lot else happened,” he added.
In January this year, national investigative agencies arrested Jharkhand’s chief minister Hemant Soren, widely seen as among India’s most popular tribal leaders, on corruption charges. He denies the allegations and says the cases against him represent a political vendetta by the BJP.
The head of the JMM was released on bail after six months and campaigned before the election. Now, he is poised to return as chief minister, after the alliance he leads – which includes the Congress – won a majority in the state election.
The state’s tribal communities – 26 percent of the population – and Muslims – 14.5 percent – backed the JMM-led alliance. The BJP brought Himanta Biswa Sarma, a divisive Hindu nationalist leader from northeastern India, to lead its campaign in Jharkhand. The BJP campaign tried to paint Muslims in the state as “Bangladeshis” and “Rohingya outsiders”, including through an Islamophobic advertisement that it had to pull down on the orders of election authorities.
“The hatred they spread in the campaign backfired a lot,” said Minakshi Munda, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Kolhan, Jharkhand, who said that among the state’s tribal communities, “the BJP are still seen as outsiders.”
Jharkhand’s tribal communities ended up voting to “keep the BJP out of power … to safeguard the [state’s] tribal identity”, Munda said.
Verma, the CPR researcher, agreed, saying the BJP’s campaign ended up consolidating votes behind the JMM-led alliance.
A decimated Congress
Meanwhile, the country’s principal opposition party, the Congress, appears in disarray after the election results – which come on the back of recent setbacks in two other elections, in Haryana and Indian-administered Kashmir.
The Congress, Verma said, appears to be still struggling to “figure out a strategy for its revival.”
Both Verma and Shastri said the Congress had been “piggybacking” on its regional alliance partners to fight the BJP. But with its own numbers dwindling, “the Congress also struggles in its ability to negotiate with regional parties,” Verma added.
Two more important states, Delhi and Bihar, are expected to hold their elections in the next few months. But they will now vote in a political atmosphere fundamentally different from what it was earlier this year.
The BJP is no longer down – it has bounced back from losses in the parliamentary election that now look like aberrations. And the opposition, which appeared to be rising after a decade in the wilderness, is back to picking up the crumbs.