The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the largest party in the Lok Sabha, has formed the government, albeit with allies. But their supporters do not feel victorious, at least for the moment.
The sense of deflation is because the BJP's narrative for the last six months has been that the party will win an overwhelming majority. 'Ab ki baar, 400 paar' was their rallying cry.
This was the single narrative mainstreamed on both traditional and social media.
It's an inversion of the anchoring effect that Steve Jobs employed in his presentations: once you've thought about the high figure, the lower one feels worse.
ALSO READ: View | A tale of two EM elections
It would be helpful in the party, therefore, to dissect the reasons for the surprising results and draw lessons for hereon:
Lesson 1: Brand Modi may have peaked
The BJP won only 85 of the 151 seats where PM Modi addressed rallies – a strike rate of 56%.
Notably, the seat where he delivered his most controversial speech, Banswara in Rajasthan, was won by the candidate from the opposition coalition, I.N.D.I.A, by nearly 2.5 lakh votes.
This is a striking contrast with 2019, when Modi won 86 of the 103 constituencies where he addressed rallies in 103 seats - a strike rate of 85%.
Even Prashant Kishor — criticised for projecting at least 300 seats for the BJP — saw the writing on the wall. "Brand Modi is a brand in decline," he repeatedly said, even before polling began.
Modi has been central to the BJP's spectacular rise over the last decade, and this approach appeared to have maxed out in the 2019 election. Either Modi did not face up to it, or the party was not prepared with a plan B.
Like in previous elections, Modi marketed himself as though it was a presidential election: a personal vote for him.
However, the opposition, INDI Alliance, resisted turning the election into a presidential contest between Modi and Rahul Gandhi and continued to harp on local issues.
Being a loose coalition of regional leaders, this was easy for the opposition.
ALSO READ: Akhilesh Yadav has stepped out of multiple shadows
This forced Modi to constantly fight on uncertain terrain. As the election wore on, his interviews became increasingly bizarre (he called himself of 'non-biological' descent) and self-contradictory (he denied that he had ever referenced Muslims negatively in his speeches, only to do so the next day).
On economic issues like inheritance tax, the reference to it as a tax on "Mangalsutra" didn't work.
In fact, it was tough for Modi to harp on India's potential for 8% GDP growth while becoming increasingly aware of the pain of high food prices or unemployment at the grassroots.
Inordinate reliance on Modi to deliver the election victory may have overwhelmed the party machine.
Many fundamentals were jettisoned in the process. District party chiefs who protested the choice of candidates were told that the Modi wave was so compelling that local considerations could be ignored. That brings us to the second lesson.
Lesson 2: Local issues are as relevant as national priorities
In many regions, the BJP appears to no longer have its ear to the ground as it once did.
For years, the party prided itself on being plugged into India's mains, on reading the nation's pulse better than the disconnected "Lutyens elite," but it was caught off-guard in the three most populous states in India: Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Bengal.
For the past few months, many small Hindi-language YouTube channels have been reporting that the BJP's support was eroding across UP and that there was widespread anger across many sections.
This problem was magnified by PM Modi's reluctance to talk about local issues in his rallies.
The opposition turned the election into simultaneous state-specific contests rather than a broad national campaign.
Local issues were foregrounded wherever possible: farmer issues in Haryana, caste-based reservation issues in UP, and the breaking up of regional parties led by Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra.
This lurch away from grassroots issues crossed a line at some point and the more decentralised I.N.D.I.A was quick to capitalise. The BJP found it hard to fight a multi-front war.
At any given time, they were combating allegations of Gujarati parochialism, fears about the Constitution being rewritten, the Agniveer controversy, the farmers' protests, and many others.
The party secured 40% of the national urban vote but only 35% of the vital rural vote.
Lesson 3: BJP cannot wish away the RSS
In a recent interview, BJP president JP Nadda claimed that the party had outgrown the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and was capable of winning elections on its own.
Nadda's comments seemed to confirm an attitudinal change. After a decade of unprecedented success, the BJP leadership was confident it could win elections on its own, with or without the support of ideological fellow travellers.
And RSS workers responded to this change in attitude. Reports from UP indicated that the RSS felt affronted by the growing assertiveness of the BJP and had decided to sit this one out.
By all accounts, this confidence was misplaced. The RSS plays an important role in creating and sustaining a pro-BJP atmosphere.
Its lack of involvement proved detrimental to the party in several seats. RSS is not only the BJP's ideological heartbeat but also its practical link to the grassroots.
In many states, years of painstaking work by RSS volunteers have paved the way for the BJP's subsequent electoral success. Not recognising the feedback loop from the ground level to the BJP elite may have been a seminal error.
Lesson 4: Do not take Dalit voters for granted
The most surprising aspect, perhaps, of the election was that the Constitution became an unexpectedly significant factor.
In the past, ideologues sympathetic to the BJP have raised the idea of amending or even overhauling the Constitution.
But when BJP MPs – specifically, Lallu Singh and Ananthkumar Hegde - raised the topic in the run-up to the elections, they could hardly have foreseen that it would backfire so massively.
In a shrewd move, the opposition claimed that this rewrite would eliminate reservations from the Constitution and dredged up old statements by the RSS chief and others to reinforce their claim.
Reservations are almost a fundamental need for lower castes, and this claim took on a life of its own.
Try as they did, the BJP could not counteract it successfully and lost large sections of the Dalit and OBC vote.
This had some unexpected consequences. Take the Faizabad constituency, which includes Ayodhya, the site of the Ram Temple that was projected as a big win for the Hindu community led by Modi.
Many claim the temple narrative proved counter-productive, while others ascribe it to a fully mobilised minority vote.
A third theory, put forward by the journalist Omar Rashid, is more prosaic.
Dalits (Scheduled Castes) are a floating vote bank in the area, and the Samajwadi Party offered them better options than the BJP.
This theory makes sense when you consider that Faizabad has voted for five different parties in the last 35 years, including the Communist Party of India (CPI).
As an aside, the Faizabad result also teaches us about modern Dalit politics.
In the 1990s, the emergence of Mayawati marked the rising demand for Dalit representation in positions of power.
The newer generation of Dalit voters may be focused on delivery in addition to representation, and no party can take them for granted.
Lesson 5: Congress needs more room in its heart for allies
This time, a less-lauded element of the INDI alliance was the Congress' willingness to give up as many as 100 seats to ensure that non-BJP votes are not splintered.
Unsurprisingly, the BJP lost the most where the seat sharing was perfect – U.P. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu.
Incidentally, these are three of the five largest states. It is important to note that the BJP has lost only 1% of its vote share, from around 37% in 2019 to around 36% this time. However, its seat count fell by 20%.
The BJP probably did not discount this seat sharing adequately in its calculation and strategy.
In conclusion, it's important to emphasise that the Modi wave has receded and not disappeared.
He remains the most popular politician in the country, but his brand has unquestionably lost some of its sheen.
The election results show that a competent opposition with a strong grassroots presence can out-manoeuvre Modi and the BJP's slick marketing machine.
ALSO READ:
Resurgence of Regional Parties | What helped the Telugu Desam Party and Chandrababu Naidu to a double victory
UP Lok Sabha election verdict | Ram Mandir to PDA — the strategic shift behind INDIA bloc's win and BJP's setback
11 ministers in the new Modi cabinet who continue to head the same ministries as before
The sense of deflation is because the BJP's narrative for the last six months has been that the party will win an overwhelming majority. 'Ab ki baar, 400 paar' was their rallying cry.
This was the single narrative mainstreamed on both traditional and social media. It's an inversion of the anchoring effect that Steve Jobs employed in his presentations: once you've thought about the high figure, the lower one feels worse.
ALSO READ: View | A tale of two EM elections
It would be helpful in the party, therefore, to dissect the reasons for the surprising results and draw lessons for hereon:
Lesson 1: Brand Modi may have peaked
The BJP won only 85 of the 151 seats where PM Modi addressed rallies – a strike rate of 56%.
Notably, the seat where he delivered his most controversial speech, Banswara in Rajasthan, was won by the candidate from the opposition coalition, I.N.D.I.A, by nearly 2.5 lakh votes.
This is a striking contrast with 2019, when Modi won 86 of the 103 constituencies where he addressed rallies in 103 seats - a strike rate of 85%.
Even Prashant Kishor — criticised for projecting at least 300 seats for the BJP — saw the writing on the wall. "Brand Modi is a brand in decline," he repeatedly said, even before polling began.
Modi has been central to the BJP's spectacular rise over the last decade, and this approach appeared to have maxed out in the 2019 election. Either Modi did not face up to it, or the party was not prepared with a plan B.
Like in previous elections, Modi marketed himself as though it was a presidential election: a personal vote for him.
However, the opposition, INDI Alliance, resisted turning the election into a presidential contest between Modi and Rahul Gandhi and continued to harp on local issues.
Being a loose coalition of regional leaders, this was easy for the opposition.
ALSO READ: Akhilesh Yadav has stepped out of multiple shadows
This forced Modi to constantly fight on uncertain terrain. As the election wore on, his interviews became increasingly bizarre (he called himself of 'non-biological' descent) and self-contradictory (he denied that he had ever referenced Muslims negatively in his speeches, only to do so the next day).
On economic issues like inheritance tax, the reference to it as a tax on "Mangalsutra" didn't work.
In fact, it was tough for Modi to harp on India's potential for 8% GDP growth while becoming increasingly aware of the pain of high food prices or unemployment at the grassroots.
Image: Shutterstock
Inordinate reliance on Modi to deliver the election victory may have overwhelmed the party machine.
Many fundamentals were jettisoned in the process. District party chiefs who protested the choice of candidates were told that the Modi wave was so compelling that local considerations could be ignored. That brings us to the second lesson.
Lesson 2: Local issues are as relevant as national priorities
In many regions, the BJP appears to no longer have its ear to the ground as it once did.
For years, the party prided itself on being plugged into India's mains, on reading the nation's pulse better than the disconnected "Lutyens elite," but it was caught off-guard in the three most populous states in India: Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Bengal.
For the past few months, many small Hindi-language YouTube channels have been reporting that the BJP's support was eroding across UP and that there was widespread anger across many sections.
This problem was magnified by PM Modi's reluctance to talk about local issues in his rallies.
The opposition turned the election into simultaneous state-specific contests rather than a broad national campaign.
Local issues were foregrounded wherever possible: farmer issues in Haryana, caste-based reservation issues in UP, and the breaking up of regional parties led by Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra.
This lurch away from grassroots issues crossed a line at some point and the more decentralised I.N.D.I.A was quick to capitalise. The BJP found it hard to fight a multi-front war.
At any given time, they were combating allegations of Gujarati parochialism, fears about the Constitution being rewritten, the Agniveer controversy, the farmers' protests, and many others.
The party secured 40% of the national urban vote but only 35% of the vital rural vote.
Lesson 3: BJP cannot wish away the RSS
In a recent interview, BJP president JP Nadda claimed that the party had outgrown the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and was capable of winning elections on its own.
Nadda's comments seemed to confirm an attitudinal change. After a decade of unprecedented success, the BJP leadership was confident it could win elections on its own, with or without the support of ideological fellow travellers.
And RSS workers responded to this change in attitude. Reports from UP indicated that the RSS felt affronted by the growing assertiveness of the BJP and had decided to sit this one out.
By all accounts, this confidence was misplaced. The RSS plays an important role in creating and sustaining a pro-BJP atmosphere.
Its lack of involvement proved detrimental to the party in several seats. RSS is not only the BJP's ideological heartbeat but also its practical link to the grassroots.
In many states, years of painstaking work by RSS volunteers have paved the way for the BJP's subsequent electoral success. Not recognising the feedback loop from the ground level to the BJP elite may have been a seminal error.
Lesson 4: Do not take Dalit voters for granted
The most surprising aspect, perhaps, of the election was that the Constitution became an unexpectedly significant factor.
In the past, ideologues sympathetic to the BJP have raised the idea of amending or even overhauling the Constitution.
But when BJP MPs – specifically, Lallu Singh and Ananthkumar Hegde - raised the topic in the run-up to the elections, they could hardly have foreseen that it would backfire so massively.
In a shrewd move, the opposition claimed that this rewrite would eliminate reservations from the Constitution and dredged up old statements by the RSS chief and others to reinforce their claim.
Reservations are almost a fundamental need for lower castes, and this claim took on a life of its own.
Try as they did, the BJP could not counteract it successfully and lost large sections of the Dalit and OBC vote.
This had some unexpected consequences. Take the Faizabad constituency, which includes Ayodhya, the site of the Ram Temple that was projected as a big win for the Hindu community led by Modi.
BJP's loss in Faizabad has triggered a storm of self-doubt in the BJP. (PTI Photo)
Many claim the temple narrative proved counter-productive, while others ascribe it to a fully mobilised minority vote.
A third theory, put forward by the journalist Omar Rashid, is more prosaic.
Dalits (Scheduled Castes) are a floating vote bank in the area, and the Samajwadi Party offered them better options than the BJP.
This theory makes sense when you consider that Faizabad has voted for five different parties in the last 35 years, including the Communist Party of India (CPI).
As an aside, the Faizabad result also teaches us about modern Dalit politics.
In the 1990s, the emergence of Mayawati marked the rising demand for Dalit representation in positions of power.
The newer generation of Dalit voters may be focused on delivery in addition to representation, and no party can take them for granted.
Lesson 5: Congress needs more room in its heart for allies
This time, a less-lauded element of the INDI alliance was the Congress' willingness to give up as many as 100 seats to ensure that non-BJP votes are not splintered.
Unsurprisingly, the BJP lost the most where the seat sharing was perfect – U.P. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu.
Incidentally, these are three of the five largest states. It is important to note that the BJP has lost only 1% of its vote share, from around 37% in 2019 to around 36% this time. However, its seat count fell by 20%.
The BJP probably did not discount this seat sharing adequately in its calculation and strategy.
In conclusion, it's important to emphasise that the Modi wave has receded and not disappeared.
He remains the most popular politician in the country, but his brand has unquestionably lost some of its sheen.
The election results show that a competent opposition with a strong grassroots presence can out-manoeuvre Modi and the BJP's slick marketing machine.
ALSO READ:
Resurgence of Regional Parties | What helped the Telugu Desam Party and Chandrababu Naidu to a double victory
UP Lok Sabha election verdict | Ram Mandir to PDA — the strategic shift behind INDIA bloc's win and BJP's setback
11 ministers in the new Modi cabinet who continue to head the same ministries as before
First Published: Jun 11, 2024 11:49 AM IST
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