Number Theory: Why is 2023 different from 2018? And what of 2024?

The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has won elections in three out of the four states for which results were declared on Sunday.

The Congress has registered a victory in the state of Telangana. Apart from the state-level results, is there any larger message in the outcome? Here are three things which are worth highlighting:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi being felicitated by top BJP leaders after the assembly election results on Sunday.

Why is 2023 different from 2018? And what of 2024?

• 
  What do the results tell us about 2024?

  The 2024 Lok Sabha elections are now just four months away. What do these results tell us about them? We have previously pointed out in these pages that even a Congress victory in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh against the BJP – the BJP was not in the reckoning in Telangana – in this election cycle, should not be read as an advantage for the party going into 2024, given the significant difference between the 2018 assembly election in these three states and the 2019 Lok Sabha results. The BJP lost the three Hindi heartland states in 2018 but registered massive victories in all three in the 2019 elections. But Sunday’s BJP victories in these three states have made this caveat irrelevant. The only other way to look at the national importance of these results is to compare them with 2013 when the BJP won all of these three states and went on to register massive victories in all of these states in the 2014 elections. A comparison of 2023 results in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh with the 2013 results shows that the scale of BJP victory in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh this time is actually bigger than what it was in 2013, which was the beginning of the Narendra Modi wave in Indian politics. This puts the BJP in a very comfortable and the Congress in a very difficult position as far as the 2024 contest is concerned.
• 
  What happens to INDIA alliance now?

  The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), which was announced in July, has been dubbed as the Opposition’s grand strategy to take on the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Its 2024 performance notwithstanding, the group has seen discernible friction between the Congress and other constituents of the grouping in the run-up to this election cycle. Some regional parties in the INDIA block have accused the Congress of delaying discussions on the Lok Sabha strategy and not accommodating other INDIA partners in the states where it was in power. The Congress’s loss of power in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and its failure to wrest Madhya Pradesh from the BJP is going to squeeze its bargaining power in the INDIA bloc both in terms of number of seats it gets to contest in states dominated by regional parties, and even in terms of leadership, including who can be positioned against Modi. A comparison of number of Congress and rest of INDIA bloc partner MLAs before and after yesterday’s results shows why the party is now weaker. The BJP and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on the other hand, have added to their lead vis-à-vis the Congress and INDIA bloc as a whole in terms of total number of MLAs in the country.
• 
  Is lack of rural distress helping a BJP revival?

  Why did the BJP do badly in the 2018 assembly election cycle? Actually, the BJP’s vulnerabilities started from the 2017 assembly elections in Gujarat as well, when it came very close to losing its strongest state. An HT analysis of rural-urban assembly constituency (AC) results in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in 2017-18 and 2022-23 is illuminating. Both in 2017 in Gujarat and in 2018 in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP lost to the Congress in the more rural ACs. While it managed to win enough urban ACs in Gujarat to scrape through, this was not the case in Madhya Pradesh. The BJP has won a majority of rural ACs in both 2022 Gujarat and 2023 Madhya Pradesh even as it has increased its dominance in the urban areas in both states. Two things are different. One, farm prices in 2022-23 are much better than what they were in 2017-18 . Two, the informal economy had suffered back-to-back shocks of demonetisation and goods and services tax (GST) back then. Clearly, the BJP is not facing rural headwinds now as it was five years ago. To be sure, the BJP has been anything but complacent about the rural economy which is evident from the fact that it did an about-turn on its policy of not giving bonus to paddy farmers in Chhattisgarh this time. This also reflects the Opposition struggle in drafting a coherent economic narrative against the BJP this time.