There are clear risks in writing a column about elections days before the result. Exit poll results notwithstanding, this edition of the column is not interested in predicting what will happen when the votes are counted for this election cycle on December 3. Based on this author’s field reporting in Rajasthan and the reporting from other states by my colleagues, there is an issue concerning the two national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress, which needs to be underlined.
Both parties are facing what can only be described as a growing gap between national and state-level politics. The most definite and quantifiable sign of this — at least from 2014 onwards — is the fact that the BJP underperforms at the level of states compared to national elections and the Congress cannot translate its state-level victories at the national level.
What explains this disjoint? The easiest — and correct — answer is the national premium that Narendra Modi brings to the BJP in a national-level election. There is also good reason to believe that there is more to this issue than this.
Let us look at the BJP first. Nobody in the BJP today perhaps even thinks of challenging Modi’s supremacy within the party. While a palace coup is out of the question, there do seem to be issues of what can be termed as insubordination or exceeding one’s brief by state-level leaders in what is clearly India’s most dominant political party today. BJP’s relationship with B S Yeddyurappa in Karnataka can be described as a case of insubordination vis-à-vis the party's high command. He has been removed and rehabilitated many times because the party has realised that he is still critical for the party’s fortunes in Karnataka. Vasundhara Raje Scindia’s relationship vis-à-vis the high command is also on similar lines and she is seen as one of the few state leaders who is not completely pliable to the party's high command. We will know after the Rajasthan results how indispensable Scindia is for the BJP in the state.
Beyond these personality-centric issues, BJP leaders in states face a more important dilemma. What role does a BJP chief minister have in the so-called "double-engine" formula of the BJP where the central government, read Modi, is always in charge? Most state-level leaders across the political spectrum in India have realised that populism (read welfare benefits) is the best bet at winning elections at the current juncture. The problem for the BJP, however, is that everybody has learnt this lesson and the Opposition is happy to outdo the BJP in this game. How does the BJP differentiate itself from other parties on this front?
This is where the BJP would like to export the Yogi (Adityanath) model to the rest of the states. The ideal BJP chief minister must be hard on Hindutva rhetoric, seen as a tough administrator, especially on law and order, and ideally mix administration with Hindutva rhetoric. The only other chief minister for the BJP who has been remarkably successful in imbibing this model so far seems to be Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam. Others, especially those who have been chief ministers in the pre-2014 era, will have to unlearn a lot of their old political praxis to excel in this script. Shivraj Singh Chauhan, who flirted briefly with the “bulldozer” model of law and order after regaining power in 2020 found it too difficult to maintain and pivoted back to a more familiar welfare pitch by the time of elections. Unsurprisingly, the Congress has outmatched most of his promises. Jyotiraditya Scindia in Rajasthan and Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh did not even make any visible efforts to adopt this model. Little wonder then that they are not the high-command’s favourites this season.
Why has the BJP not done a complete purge of such leaders from its ranks? The simple answer is it is still wary of the costs of such a purge. As long as such leaders do not challenge Modi’s authority at the national level, they will continue to hold legitimacy among BJP’s supporters at the state level. After all, these leaders have played a crucial role in building both the BJP organisation and support base in these states over decades.
Let us come to the Congress now. Why can’t the Congress get a united party organisation in states even where it wins elections? Ashok Gehlot versus Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan, Siddaramaiah versus D K Shivakumar in Karnataka, (what was) Kamal Nath versus Jyotiraditya Scindia in Madhya Pradesh and Bhupesh Baghel versus T S Singh Deo in Chhattisgarh are examples of this absence of unity. One can say with a lot of conviction that almost all of these factional fights in the Congress are more organisational (and thus, related to garnering the spoils of power) than ideological in nature.
In fact, grassroots reporting suggests that the Congress is paying a bigger cost because of such fights than the occasional threat to its state governments. The Congress’s leadership would like to portray itself as the party that stands for the socio-economic underclass against what they term as a pro-rich BJP. This narrative loses a lot of credibility once you look at Congress’s local-level leaders and candidates who are still mostly a part of the entrenched political elite in these states. This was more than apparent in Rajasthan, where the elections for the Congress are as much about local political battles focused on candidates as they are on Gehlot’s welfare plank.
In many ways, the Congress and the BJP are facing a similar problem. Their central leadership would like their state units to change themselves to suit the new requirements of national politics. However, the state-level leaders are selective about this prescription and are only picking the instructions which can help them retain power at the level of the states rather than make uncomfortable adjustments for the sake of national politics.
To blame this entirely on a handful of state-level leaders in both these parties will be a blinkered take on the matter. What this tension essentially reflects is the tension between the old and new political economy in India. The former was built around local patronage networks while the latter seeks to bypass all such networks and build a direct-benefit-transfer model between the highest levels of political leadership by eroding the agency of local actors in politics. It is unlikely that this conflict will go away anytime soon in India’s political economy.
Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.
The views expressed are personal
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. His weekly column for HT Premium Terms of Trade appears every Friday. ...view detail
Terms of Trade | The conundrum facing Congress and BJP
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01.12.2023
There are clear risks in writing a column about elections days before the result. Exit poll results notwithstanding, this edition of the column is not interested in predicting what will happen when the votes are counted for this election cycle on December 3. Based on this author’s field reporting in Rajasthan and the reporting from other states by my colleagues, there is an issue concerning the two national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress, which needs to be underlined.
Both parties are facing what can only be described as a growing gap between national and state-level politics. The most definite and quantifiable sign of this — at least from 2014 onwards — is the fact that the BJP underperforms at the level of states compared to national elections and the Congress cannot translate its state-level victories at the national level.
What explains this disjoint? The easiest — and correct — answer is the national premium that Narendra Modi brings to the BJP in a national-level election. There is also good reason to believe that there is more to this issue than this.
Let us look at the BJP first. Nobody in the BJP today perhaps even thinks of challenging Modi’s supremacy within the party. While a palace coup is out of the question, there do seem to be issues of what can be termed as insubordination or exceeding one’s brief by state-level leaders in what is clearly India’s most dominant political party today. BJP’s relationship with B S Yeddyurappa in Karnataka can be described as a case of insubordination vis-à-vis the party's high command. He has been removed and rehabilitated many times because the party has realised that he is still critical for the party’s fortunes in Karnataka. Vasundhara Raje........
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