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Grand Tamasha: Decoding the impact of state polls’ verdict on 2024 battle
BJP won in three states — Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The lone Congress victory came in the southern state of Telangana, where it displaced the once-dominant regional party—the Bharat Rashtriya Samithi. Neither national party figured prominently in Mizoram
New Delhi: Last week, votes were finally tallied in five states which went to elections in November — the last electoral test parties and candidates will face before next year’s general elections.
In a big setback for the Congress and the Opposition alliance more broadly, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won decisively in three big Hindi belt states — Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The lone Congress victory came in the southern state of Telangana, where it displaced the once-dominant regional party—the Bharat Rashtriya Samithi. Neither national party figured prominently in Mizoram.
To discuss the results — and what they tell us about the race for 2024 — Hindustan Times’s political editor Sunetra Choudhury and deputy national editor Dipankar Ghose joined host Milan Vaishnav on “Grand Tamasha,” a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Asked to reflect on the key differences between the way the BJP and Congress approached elections in the Hindi belt, Ghose remarked that the BJP has a much more acute political reading of danger. “Because they’re connected to the ground, the red flags in the BJP go up much faster. So, if you were to imagine a conversation among the BJP leadership, you would imagine a party that is constantly worried they’re going to lose and is, therefore, looking for ways to correct and improve all the time.”
Contrasting images of leadership also played a role, not least in the BJP’s sweep of Madhya Pradesh. According to Ghose, the BJP got a lot of mileage out of juxtaposing the images of current CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan and former Congress CM Kamal Nath.
“Over the last three months, Shivraj Singh Chouhan went to rally after rally. He would take the mic on the stage, almost like this rockstar, walk to the edge of the stage where he’s with the people and come back. He is directly speaking to the people,” noted Ghose. “Juxtapose that with Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh. Digvijay Singh is an erstwhile king of a small principality. Kamal Nath, whenever there is a crowd, he gets irritated. There is no accessibility with people. And because of this connection with the people, you see Shivraj Singh Chouhan and the BJP fundamentally course correct.”
While many analysts are writing the Congress off in the general elections in 2024, Choudhury cautioned that the party does retain some strengths. “One, they have a talent pool. You know they have a talent pool because you saw that work in Karnataka.” The change in the Congress high command is also a positive sign, remarked Choudhury. “The best thing that the Congress did for itself is to ensure the Gandhis were not anywhere near the top of the leadership and Mallikarjun Kharge became president.”
Asked whether these polls hold any silver lining for the opposition, Ghose mentioned that the Congress’s big losses in the Hindi belt could facilitate alliance-building ahead of next year’s general elections. “One of the things that might end up being good for the Congress is that chastening is good. It breaks hubris. After Karnataka, they had this one imagination of themselves as rising and, therefore, the INDIA bloc members had to coalesce around them.” Going forward, said Ghose, “The only way the INDIA alliance can conceivably come together and arrive at a seat-sharing agreement across states is if the Congress were to sit at the table as equals, not big brothers.”
