Decoding election results 2024 in today’s world can be hazardous. Electoral democracy is a stretch, one can say perhaps, given the rulers we have been seeing the world over. Especially now, when someone like Vladimir Putin would like his country to be seen as a democracy and goes through the ritual periodically, and you have Trumps and Orbans everywhere.
But seeing what totalitarianism does to the society, one has to perhaps go with electoral democracy, warts and all. With that caveat, let us try to decode the election results 2024.
Most agree that Narendra Modi’s wings have been clipped – he can’t anymore strut around as a “non-biological” being and has to break bread with much lesser mortals. His BJP has failed to secure a majority for itself and hence it will have to please various coalition partners to survive in power, from a party that has 16 seats in the Lok Sabha to one that has no more than five. Whether Modi, used to having his way on everything in the last two decades, can really succeed in running a coalition like his BJP predecessor Vajpayee did is open to doubt.
India votes against hate, Modi will have to depend on Muslim-friendly parties, screamed headlines the day after the elections. That is perhaps the biggest message
Most certainly though one can say that the anti-minority tilt of the previous two terms of Modi will be corrected and egregious exercise of state power could come down a notch or two.
But that is all into the future. Here let us try to examine why the overweening Modi has landed himself in such a mess.
Also Read: How Modi avoided India Shining by not being Vajpayee
India votes against hate, Modi will have to depend on Muslim-friendly parties, screamed headlines the day after the elections. That is perhaps the biggest message.
Another one was also there – Billionaire-Friendly Modi Humbled by Indians Who Make $4 a Day.
That was from Bloomberg, essentially a business portal, gloating. Thus secularism triumphed, and so did the subalterns. Such is the narrative, but is it indeed the case?
The Congress might have dramatically increased its tally, nearly doubling, but the fact that the BJP still emerged the largest single party, with 240 seats, clearly shows it remains top drawer.
If people were put off by Modi’s hate campaign and were concerned with bread and butter issues, how come the result is seen unevenly?
As a noted journalist wondered – How come the people in UP, Rajasthan, Haryana voted to save the constitution but the people in MP, Odisha, Gujarat, UK, Karnataka, HP, voted for abki baar 400 paar? And Bihar, people tried to save the Const but ended up 370+. How come people in Delhi didn’t save constitution?
Questioning the reading that those who earn four US dollars and less a day have had their revenge on the corporate-friendly Modi, a post-poll survey by the prestigious think-tank, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), insists that people in larger urban centres remained more loyal to the BJP, compared to those in small towns, but it remains strong in rural areas too.
Among the urban poor, 38% opted for it, and only 22% for the Congress. In rural areas the respective figures are 37% and 21%, no major difference there. No clear urban-rural divide at all.
Only the voters in towns, not urban, not rural, but in between, have contributed to the significant victory of the INDIA bloc, says the survey. So why would the urban and rural poor not feel the pinch but only the ‘inbetweeners’?
Yet again there has been a steady rise in the vote of the poor in favour of the BJP, says the survey, while “there is a flatness to support for the Congress across economic classes” for all its aggressive campaigns.
Even in 2019, the Congress manifesto promised universal basic income, hailed as a radical measure, but not many were impressed, it may be recalled here.
Also if Dalits had supported the SP-Cong alliance in UP in a big way, why was it those of the adjoining state of Madhya Pradesh didn’t? One possible explanation is the Congress party machinery in the latter had been largely dysfunctional.
The Congress might have dramatically increased its tally, nearly doubling, but the fact that the BJP still emerged the largest single party, with 240 seats, clearly shows it remains top drawer
But why would not the Dalits of Bihar, where Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal was firing on all cylinders, vote down BJP? If they didn’t trust the Yadavs, why would they the Kurmis, to which community Chief Minister Nitish Kumar belongs?
The BJP swept the New Delhi region, bagging as it did all the seven seats, and thus despite the Aam Admi Party’s reasonably good governance and the targeting of the party and its leaders by the Centre. No sympathy for the jailed Chief Minister Kejriwal?
Also Read: BJP base in Karnataka is intact. Candidate selection was key
Did they all fall for the communal campaign and cost of living didn’t matter to them?
Down south, despite the alleged sexual atrocities of a scion of the JD(S), a poll partner of the BJP, the alliance emerged victorious, relegating the Congress to single digit.
One can go and on, without arriving at any convincing answer. Certainly this correspondent has been unable to.
So what does it all mean in terms of decoding? Well the CSDS has some explanation for the virtual collapse of the BJP vote-bank in the UP, but it reads more like rationalization post facto. In their pre-election scenarios the grimness of popular resentment was not brought out.
On the other hand, noted psephologist Yogendra Yadav who has proved more right than most others is unable to say why there was no equally tectonic shift in the voter preferences of Bihar.
One needs much stronger diagnostic tools to figure out why Indians vote the way they do. That might be a pretty lame end to this kind of an ‘analysis’, but that is how things are.
