There is little doubt that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena would have won a comfortable majority in Maharashtra had they not >broken their 25-year-old alliance and contested together. In Haryana too, the BJP would have been in a much stronger position if it had contested along with the Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC). Only a few months ago in the Lok Sabha election, the BJP and the Shiv Sena had swept Maharashtra along with their smaller allies winning 42 out of the 48 seats. The National Democratic Alliance had polled 51.3 per cent of the popular votes. In Haryana, the BJP-HJC combine had won 7 out of the 10 seats and polled 40.9 per cent of the votes. The BJP led in 52 Assembly segments in the State while the HJC led in seven Assembly seats. As only a few months have passed since the Lok Sabha election, the BJP and its allies continue to enjoy a honeymoon period.
These Assembly elections would have hardly been a contest had there been no >political realignment . Instead of a near certain victory with its allies in the two States, the BJP seems to have chosen a relatively difficult path by going it alone.
Coalition era and mandates
The fact that senior leaders of the party hardly made an attempt to avoid the breakdown of the alliance in Maharashtra indicates that the party was probably looking for an excuse to break the alliance and wanted to ensure that it doesn’t come across as the culprit. Even in Haryana, the BJP decided to dump its ally soon after the Lok Sabha election. The question is what prompted the BJP to take this gamble?
In election rallies in both Maharashtra and Haryana, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressed the end of the coalition era in Indian politics. The 2014 Lok Sabha election saw the BJP coming to power on its own with a majority. It was the first party to achieve this in three decades. Mr. Modi had appealed to voters to vote decisively and give a clear majority to the BJP. While it might be too early to conclude that the coalition era is indeed over, one could argue that compared to earlier years, parties have got more decisive mandates in recent Assembly elections. The graphic shows that in many States the proportion of seats won by the winning party/alliance in the latest Assembly election has been much higher compared to the average in elections held post-1989. For example, in Assam, the Congress won almost 62 per cent of the seats as compared to the average of less than 50 per cent. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam and Odisha saw clear mandates despite multi-cornered contests.
Projecting a leader It was perhaps this emerging trend that the BJP had kept in mind while deciding to take this gamble. We believe that it is incorrect to take this pattern as a definite trend and expect a clear majority in each State. If one looks at the States closely, one realises that the incumbent government had been re-elected in most of the States in which the winning party got a decisive mandate. What contributed to the magnitude of the victory was probably the high popularity which Chief Ministers such as Nitish Kumar, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Naveen Patnaik enjoyed in their States. Thus, in the absence of a strong State leader in both Maharashtra and Haryana, it might be incorrect to automatically assume that the BJP could be heading towards a clear majority. What remains to be seen is the impact of the party’s inability to project a clear leader in Maharashtra following the death of Gopinath Munde and the lack of a strong Jat face in Haryana. It has failed to project anyone as the party’s leader in the two States. Even if the voters want to vote for the BJP and see a BJP government in power, they would nevertheless like to also have an idea of who their Chief Minister would be. Will voters still vote for the party which does not have any chief ministerial candidate or will they get attracted to Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray in Maharashtra and a Jat Chief Minister in Haryana?
Voters’ choices
The anti-BJP votes are likely to be split among various parties
Also, there is a need to study the merits of the argument that individual voters have now started delivering decisive mandates. A basic problem with this argument is that a voter decides who to vote for at the constituency level and has multiple choices in terms of parties. In the post-poll survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies during the 2014 Lok Sabha election, almost one-fourth (23 per cent) of voters decided whom to vote for a few days before the election, and voted for a party which they thought was most likely to win. Being a sizeable proportion, it is indeed difficult to believe that this group will swing mainly towards a single party. Some of these voters may vote for the party they consider more likely to win in their constituency, while some others may vote for the party they consider more likely to win in the State. The real problem is that the “others” in this case could end up being the entire electorate.
We are in no way ruling out a possibility of the BJP getting a clear majority in Maharashtra and Haryana. The party stands to be the default beneficiary of the multi-cornered contest. The anti-BJP votes are likely to be split among various parties and only the BJP stands to gain in such a situation. Whether this will be enough for it to gain in terms of seats is yet to be seen. Nevertheless, this election will definitely help the BJP in expanding spatially and in its endeavour to becoming the centre of Indian politics.
(Sanjay Kumar is professor and director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and Pranav Gupta is a researcher with Lokniti, a research programme of CSDS.)
