Battle for the Hindi Heartland: Whose year will 2019 eventually be?

It is difficult to estimate the difference that Modi would make in a general election campaign

In December 11, the Congress evicted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from office in three substantial Hindi-heartland states. It was a good day at the races. It was also a necessary outing. The minimum that the party needed to fend off political extinction was two out of three provinces in the cow-belt corridor. A sweep of all three was better than the bare minimum, but after its rout in Telangana, the landslide in Chhattisgarh felt like solvency, not riches.

At the beginning of 2018, the Congress ruled Mizoram, Puducherry, Punjab and Karnataka. With general elections less than a year-and-a-half away, the party wasn’t just demoralised and headless, it was in some danger of bankruptcy. With two tiny statelets and one medium-sized state as its political portion, the Congress lacked lucrative office and rent-seeking opportunities. Simply put, the Congress couldn’t take on the Narendra Modi juggernaut without the administrative and financial resources that provincial office brings. 

There were two mortal challenges that the Congress faced in 2018. The first of these was the mid-year Karnataka election. If it lost the election, Messrs Modi and Amit Shah would have achieved a Congress-mukt Bharat inside one term of winning office. And the Congress did lose the election…or at least its majority. When the BJP emerged as the single largest party in the Vidhana Soudha, India’s grand old party was a heartbeat away from what cardiologists call a massive infarction. In a feat of escapology worthy of Houdini, the Congress ate crow, made up with the Janata Dal (Secular), ceded the chief ministership, moved the Supreme Court, thwarted the BJP and held on to office in Karnataka by its fingernails. 

The Karnataka elections proved something that many had come to doubt: they showed that the Congress was desperate enough and street-smart enough to be a survivor. The end-of-year assembly elections constituted a different sort of do-or-die moment, one that would determine if Rahul Gandhi’s Indian National Congress was a political contender or just a resilient, hard-to-kill-off rump with a name too grand for its diminished footprint. 

The landslide in Chhattisgarh and the hard-scrabble majorities in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Congress was a contender. The political map of India after these elections illustrates this graphically. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh pictured together make up a swathe of heartland, a broad, diagonal sash drawn across the body of the republic. Images matter: in place of islands of control marooned and diminished by a sea of saffron, Congress-yukt India is a substantial political principality in its own right. 

But graphics, however morale-building, won’t win the 2019 general election. With heartland bastions and a war chest, the Congress needs a campaigning strategy, a message, a story to tell. Encouragingly for the party, Gandhi’s press conference after the election results suggested that he recognised that the Congress’s principal task is to channel the massive rural distress caused by a near-terminal agrarian crisis. Inside a week of taking office, the new Congress governments in these states had redeemed a campaign pledge to waive agricultural loans. 

Agrarian populism is one answer to the Congress’s anxiety that the BJP has successfully painted it as a party of the minorities. The other, less good answer is Gandhi’s temple tourism, his born-again Hinduism. But if there is a coherent Congress strategy, these could be its two components: one, defensively flaunting the party’s connection with the faith and culture of the majority to correct a perceived bias towards minorities and two, grounding its politics in the idiom of rural grievance, a broad populism that both sidesteps identity politics and resonates with an aggrieved and ignored hinterland. This is not to claim that the Congress has a fix for the agrarian crisis but merely to suggest that pro-peasant populism serves the double purpose of wooing a rural population potentially alienated by the BJP’s policies (demonetisation, the Land Acquisition Bill, and so on) and placing the party in the mainstream of Indian politics rather than some meandering tributary.

There was a time when the Congress was good at populist nationalism: Lal Bahadur Shastri’s “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” is an early example of its rhetorical suppleness. The Congress in office never completely abandoned agrarian populism: the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is the defining example of this aspect of its political pitch. The Congress’s failure lay in not being able to integrate this act of policy into an attractive campaign narrative. This was mainly because the Manmohan Singh tendency in the party disliked MGNREGA on ideological grounds but partly also because the civil society left within the National Advisory Council that lobbied for it was temperamentally incapable of re-imagining MGNREGA’s beneficiaries as voting citizens, not just suffering subalterns.

If MGNREGA targeted marginal peasants and India’s vast population of landless agricultural labourers, loan waivers address indebted peasant farmers. If the Congress manages to harness these two commitments as evidence of its good faith (walking the talk) and its commitment to giving voice to an India still rooted in its villages, it will speak to both those left stranded in a rural hinterland that can’t sustain them and those who have migrated to the cities to look for livelihoods that haven’t materialised.  

The willingness of otherwise rivalrous opposition parties to appear on a shared platform provided by the Kisan Mukti March in support of loan waivers for peasants and better agricultural support prices in late November this year suggested that peasant protests offer opposition leaders a neutral, non-denominational reason to come together. Given the diversity of the core social bases of these parties, the peasant cause offers a rare opportunity for solidarity and a possible basis for political cooperation.

All successful populist parties need to frame the enemy. The Congress doesn’t want to campaign on the BJP’s record as a divisive, communal government for fear of being typed as an anti-Hindu party. Luckily it was handed the opportunity to produce an alternative anathema early in this government’s career when Modi staked considerable political capital on passing the Land Acquisition Bill. By seeming to place the interests of land-hungry corporations over land-owning peasants, Modi handed Gandhi an opportunity, which he accepted with rare skill. 

In the annals of Indian politics, Gandhi’s characterisation of Modi’s government as a “suit, boot ki sarkar”, a hosed and shod government careless of the poor, will be remembered as a precision strike. It forced a dominant prime minister at the zenith of his popularity to abandon a cherished piece of legislation. It also offered the Congress a narrative that Gandhi has, after a few stutters, owned with enthusiasm: the BJP as the party of crony capitalism. 

The studied insolence of “chowkidar chor hai” in the context of the Rafale deal is part of a bid to contrast the Congress’s championing of populist causes with the alleged corruption and opaqueness of a Pharaonic prime minister. Quite apart from Kamal Nath’s 1984 baggage, this is what makes his appointment as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh hard to understand. As a rich family loyalist known for his corporate connections, Nath makes it harder for the Congress to differentiate itself from the BJP. Since he isn’t a charismatic, vote-mobilising neta (his electoral clout is confined to reliably winning his Chhindwara seat), his elevation is almost perversely baffling. 

The earlier pessimism in the opposition induced by the BJP’s many victories in state assembly elections, its success in flipping Assam and the Northeast, its ability to overturn Congress pluralities in state elections such as Goa by hoovering up small parties and independents, has, in some quarters, been replaced by an optimism born of extrapolation. Pundits and pollsters have spent considerable time calculating the BJP’s parliamentary losses in the forthcoming general elections if those elections were to replicate the voting patterns of the recent assembly elections. Since the BJP’s absolute majority in 2014 was largely made up of its sweep of parliamentary seats in the Hindi heartland states, the temptation to see the assembly election results as straws in the wind for 2019 is understandable. 

Given the seeming difficulty the BJP faces in increasing its tally in the southern states and in West Bengal, any significant swing against it in the BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh) provinces seems to entail the loss of its absolute majority. The BJP won 62 out of the 65 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Were it to lose 10 seats, it would dip below 273, the minimum number for an absolute majority. Were it to lose 30, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) would change from being one-party rule in all but name to a genuine coalition government with all the political constraints that would entail.  

Reducing the strength of the BJP in the Lok Sabha from an absolute majority to a plurality of seats would mark a significant change in the political climate of the country. The Sangh Parivar and Modi have never made any secret of their determination to reconstitute the republic and a second term in office with an absolute majority would bring them a step closer to the special majorities needed to amend the Constitution. The appointment of Yogi Adityanath as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in the wake of the BJP’s massive victory in the UP assembly election was a public affirmation of the party’s commitment to the Hindu supremacist project. 

If Bihar-style grand coalitions were to make a significant dent in the NDA’s tally of 73 MPs (out of a possible 80) in UP and 31 out of 40 in Bihar, the BJP would have to find coalition partners outside the ranks of its ideological confrères like the Shiv Sena and the Akali Dal. There is some warrant for this electoral speculation. Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar did defeat the BJP with their mahagathbandhan before their falling out and in the parliamentary by-elections held in UP after Adityanath’s elevation, the BJP was soundly beaten by an alliance between the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The fire-eating Adityanath couldn’t help the BJP retain even the Gorakhpur parliamentary seat he had vacated to become chief minister. 

So the possibility of the BJP falling significantly short of 273 seats certainly exists, but its probability depends on two things: the forging of crucial opposition alliances to unify the anti-BJP vote and Modi’s standing and name recognition in a general election environment likely to encourage voters to think in pan-Indian, not provincial, terms.

As far as alliances are concerned, the Congress and the BSP failed to agree on terms before the recent assembly elections. Congress sources suggested that Mayawati had overplayed her hand and asked for too much. However, the SP and BSP’s willingness to extend support to the Congress in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan when the electoral math became tight, and the emollient words of Congress spokespersons after the results came in, indicated that the one lesson that parties beyond the NDA’s fold have learnt is that if they don’t hang together, they are likely to hang separately.

What makes the general election impossible to predict is the difficulty of estimating the difference that Modi would likely make in a general election campaign. His approval ratings in the eyes of polled voters remain high. Pollsters reported that voters in Rajasthan, even as they declared their determination to vote for opposition parties, simultaneously declared that they would vote for the BJP in a general election. Given how narrow the winning margins were in several dozen seats in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, it is entirely possible that Modi’s personal standing might swing competitive parliamentary constituencies towards the BJP. 

In the assembly elections in Rajasthan, the Congress’s failure to win a decisive majority was widely attributed to Modi’s success in blunting anti-incumbency by campaigning energetically in the final days of the run-up to the election. The absence of a national party led by an experienced politician allows Modi to benefit from the TINA syndrome to an unusual degree. India’s battle-hardened opposition netas lead provincial parties, while the one credible national party in opposition, the Indian National Congress, is led by a man with no governing experience.

Still, it has become harder to patronise Rahul Gandhi and dismiss his party’s political prospects after their assembly election victories. The Congress’s successes in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh shouldn’t be glibly extrapolated into general election results. It is, however, no longer fantastical that the Congress and the powerful regional parties of UP and Bihar might, between them, turn the Hindi heartland, so recently Modi’s karmabhoomi, into political terrain where the BJP’s juggernaut falters in 2019. If that were to come pass, if it fell to the cow-belt to put Narendra Modi’s political ambitions on hold, that would be an irony worth a headline or two.