Six states to watch

While this election looks predictable in large swathes of our political landscape, it is also more keenly contested than 2019 in some states

How well-contested is this election going to be? If you are a Narendra Modi or Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporter, you would say this is the least unpredictable election ever and 400 should be expected for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). If you are an Opposition backer, you might say this election will turn out like 2004, where Vajpayee’s NDA, the favourite, lost.

There’s a curious buildup as the votes in the first phase are cast. There are so many “opinion polls” on TV channels — whose methodology you know nothing about — predicting the same thing: A BJP tally bigger than in 2019. The most successful pollster lately, Pradeep Gupta (Axis My India) has not spoken yet. Or maybe he has. There was that tweet, apparently from him telling Moneycontrol, that the NDA was having a tough time in 13 states. The tweet was deleted shortly afterwards. He did not claim that he had conducted an opinion poll.

When a champion pollster hedges his bets, the best a journalist can do is to merely “read” an election. Could it be therefore, that both sides are somewhat right on this — and Mr Gupta, too, in what he said in that deleted tweet?
 

An Indian election, even with Mr Modi at his peak, is a net outcome of contests in different states. In the 25 years of coalitions (1989-2014) I had argued that an Indian general election is like a best-of-nine-sets tennis match. The side that wins five will grab this electoral grand slam.

The nine were: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh (before division), Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Kerala. These added up to 351 seats. The side winning five would get close to 200, which for coalition-making was effectively 272. That ended in 2014.

For this election, we will revise that theory and look at six: Maharashtra, West Bengal, Bihar, Karnataka, Jharkhand and Odisha. These states, accounting for 193 seats, are where a tougher contest is on. These will determine the tally for the BJP on June 4. All the seats it wins beyond around 225 will need to come from these states.
 

For voters born after 1977, if we take the first non-Congress government as the starting point, the idea of a Lok Sabha majority was alien until 2014. The Modi victory in 2014, therefore, looked like a sweep to them, though with 282 seats he had a narrow majority. Indira Gandhi’s default number (after she broke from the Congress old guard in 1969) in a smaller Lok Sabha used to be in the 350 ballpark. Now, if 2014 was taken as a sweep, 2019 became a landslide.

While the nationalistic upsurge fuelled by Pulwama-Balakot in 2019 gave the BJP a much higher vote share than 2014 (37.7 per cent compared to 31.34 per cent), the number of seats rose by 20 to only 303. Why “only”? Because landslides in India, we told you earlier, used to be in the 350 range.

What this tally of 303 tells us is that even when one leader commands such devastating appeal, India’s is still an election fought state by state. Mr Modi won almost everything in 12 states: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Assam, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh (278 out of 320). It was a hard slog to a mere 25 in the rest. The party did well in West Bengal and Odisha, but was way behind the leader. The total sweep in 12 states and unheard-of margins exaggerated the extent of that victory.

History shows how the BJP secured more than 50 per cent of the vote in 224 seats in 2019. Crossing 50 per cent is the Holy Grail in a first-past-the-post system. We can understand this better if we remind ourselves that even with his 414 seats, Rajiv Gandhi had secured a vote share of only 48.12 per cent.

Two conclusions follow. One, that in these 224 seats, the bulk of which fall in the BJP’s 12 sweep states, the mountain its 2024 challengers must climb is much steeper — in spite of Opposition alliances, some angry castes and a missing Pulwama-like trigger. Take Haryana, where many of these negatives exist, including double anti-incumbency against the BJP state government. Then we remember that the BJP secured 58.21 per cent of the vote in 2019. It is that tough for the Opposition, however resurgent.

Two, the same data tells you that while the BJP took these 224 seats in one almighty sweep, it won only 79 in the rest of the country — that is, out of 319 seats. Of course, it didn’t contest all of those, but I am talking about the entire catchment beyond the 224. That is a strike rate of less than one-fourth. Start from this base if you are a BJP supporter, feel free to take 224 for granted, and count how you reach 370. It will have to win almost half of these remaining 319.

This is where the battle is on. One side looks very dominant in much of India, and yet elsewhere it is a contested election. And, for Mr Modi to retain his sway, his first target is to cross 303 again.

That brings us back to our idea of the six key states. These add up to 193 seats. Four of these — Karnataka, Bihar, Maharashtra and Jharkhand — featured among the 12 Modi swept in 2019. New political challenges now confront him in these states. The remaining two — West Bengal and Odisha — had already offered him varying degrees of resistance. Another 100 seats or so — in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala — are still mostly distant for the BJP. It will need another 100 or so from these six states to go well past 303.

There are two reasons we pick these six. One, the BJP has strength in each. And two, Mr Modi faces a different reality in each. In Maharashtra and Bihar, his stalwart allies are much weakened. The Shiv Sena has split, and the Janata Dal (United) looks a fading force with its ideology-free and feckless leader. Mr Modi has the double challenge of also swinging votes for them in his name.

In Jharkhand and Karnataka, the state governments are with his rivals. That shifts the balance a little. Odisha no longer has the air of the friendly-if-not-fixed match of 2019, when a trade-off between the state Assembly and the Lok Sabha was seen. Naveen Patnaik would worry that if he comes out weaker and vulnerable, he might have to spend his old age in political decline, protecting his flock from the “agencies” if not having to answer to them himself.

These are the reasons why we say that while this contest looks predictable in large swathes of our political landscape, it is also more keenly contested than in 2019 in some. That’s why the six states we list are the ones to watch if Mr Modi wants to better his 2019 mark. Or if his rivals hope to stop him short of 272.

By special arrangement with ThePrint