The limits of welfarism
Outreach to the middle class helped the BJP win Delhi. The verdict will impact the Opposition’s tactic to forge a united front against the BJP
Welfarism works in Indian politics. It’s important to start from there. The BJP’s success after it rode to power at the Centre on a pro-development, anti-corruption platform in 2014, and till its subpar performance in the 2024 general elections, was built on a potent mixture of welfarism and Hindutva. It can be argued that the first helped it consolidate the Hindu vote across OBCs, SCs and STs. It can also be argued that the party’s performance in 2024 — it emerged as the single largest by a distance but needed allies to muster a majority — was the result of not doing enough on welfare in the interim budget of 2024-25 that was presented ahead of the elections.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was an early adopter of an extreme form of welfarism — and that, combined with an increasingly ambiguous stand on Hindutva, helped propel the political startup to power in 2015 in Delhi, and also helped it retain power in 2020. It was also one of the factors that helped the party expand (successfully) into Punjab, but the state’s political dynamic is complex and warrants a separate analysis. The last five years have not been kind to AAP. At one level, its position on issues such as the Citizenship (Amendment) Act put off some of its supporters — Muslim voters as well as middle- and upper-class liberals. At another, a corruption scandal surrounding the liquor excise policy (that saw the chief minister and the deputy chief minister of the day being jailed), and revelations about the expenditure on the CM’s house did not help the image of the party that had been built around clean governance and simplicity. At still another, continual clashes, in a variety of forums including the courts, between the elected AAP government and the Centre-appointed lieutenant governor, translated into a near-complete collapse of utilities and governance. This would have been bad for any city; for the Capital, it was a tragedy and a shame.
And finally, the AAP’s continued emphasis on freebies was beginning to bother the middle class. To be sure, this is a national phenomenon as evident in the rising chorus before the Union Budget of how honest taxpayers were being taxed more, receiving little in return in the form of quality of government services, and subsidising freebies targeted at more politically significant sections. It was this sentiment in the room that the BJP read ahead of the budget, announcing a tax rebate, and a redefinition of tax slabs, that effectively translates into a ₹1 lakh crore giveaway. The Union finance minister has maintained that while this could boost consumption, providing a fillip to a slowing economy, the main motive was to “honour” and “respect” the honest taxpayer. A rough calculation by this newsroom’s data team shows a 10 percentage point swing of the middle-class vote from the AAP to the BJP. That swing needs to be seen in the context of the respective vote shares of the two parties in these elections and in 2020. The AAP’s vote share declined from 53.6% in 2020 to 43.6% this time, even as the BJP’s i(including allies) rose from 39.8% to 47.2%.
It’s important to clarify that the BJP hasn’t moved away from welfarism — in Delhi, the party promised to retain all the schemes announced by the AAP, and since the 2024 national elections, it has won a big poll battle in Maharashtra on a strong welfarist plank — but only sought to balance it with a little something for the middle class. It’s also important to acknowledge that welfarism has now become an integral part of the ideology of all political parties. As that happens, it is only natural that elections are won by parties that manage to consolidate their base further, as the BJP has been able to do in Delhi with its outreach to the middle class, not just through the tax changes in the budget, but the promise of better governance through an alignment between the city-state’s government and the Centre.
Would an alliance between the AAP and the Congress have helped? It would have — the latter played spoiler in 12 seats for the AAP, which means its candidate secured more votes than the winning margin in 12 seats that the AAP lost. This includes New Delhi, where former CM and AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal lost to the BJP’s Parvesh Verma by 4,089 votes (the Congress candidate secured 4,568 votes), and Jangpura, where former deputy CM Manish Sisodia lost to the BJP’s Tarvinder Singh Marwah by 675 votes (the Congress candidate secured 7,350 votes). The Congress also played spoiler in seven seats for the BJP, although it can be argued that its votes are unlikely to shift to that party. Clearly, the Delhi verdict has a message for India’s opposition parties and a bearing on their willingness and ability to put up a united front against the BJP. But it has a louder message: in a compact, largely urban, and relatively rich province such as Delhi, welfarism has its limits.