Set for a poll vault
To succeed in the electoral arena, a party needs three things- narrative, organisation and leadership. For the BJP all three appear sorted; for the Opposition, all remain work in progress
The year before general elections is always politically fraught – parties try out narratives and dust off issues to see what’s clicking with the public; the government makes a push on schemes that it thinks are working and applies salve to what it feels are festering public grievances; the Opposition sharpens its attacks on what it feels are the government’s weak flanks and dusts off its organisational lethargy to hit the ground. And in this melee, voters get a glimpse of what issues will frame their political choices in the world’s largest democratic exercise.
2023 was all this and more. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) maintained its dominance in the Hindi heartland even as chinks in its electoral armour helped the Opposition south of the Vindhyas. Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushed for a reinvigorated narrative of a developed India by 2047 – Viksit Bharat – as the core of his messaging appeal for 2024. The Opposition made its most serious effort yet at forging a common platform to take on the BJP behemoth. And it started testing out an alternative narrative of social justice centered around the promise of a caste census, and consequent hike in reservations for marginalised groups, though its electoral salience remained unproven.
But if all this action in the electoral arena underlined the resilience of the Indian democratic experience, sobering checks were offered from other arenas – the impasse in Parliament and deepening fault lines between the government and Opposition ensuring that important bills were passed with little discussion, the political and administrative failure to douse the simmering fires in Manipur that claimed 187 lives and displaced a generation of people, and the sheer apathy that allowed the climate crisis to inundate our cities, trigger tragedies in the mountains, and shroud our Capital in noxious blankets of smoke.
First, the politics. The year began with a clutch of elections in India’s northeast – Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland. In all three states, the BJP and its allies won convincing victories, further cementing the party’s grip on this far-flung and fascinating region whose cultural, religious and tribal diversities help the party make the argument that it stands for all segments of India and can appeal to disparate cultural strands beyond its core strength in the heartland.
This juggernaut suffered an abrupt jolt in July when the party stumbled in elections in Karnataka, handing the Congress its most impressive victory in a generation in the prosperous state that is also the only southern province to ever have had a BJP government. Laden by corruption allegations and a divided state leadership, the party found itself outgunned by an uncharacteristically disciplined Congress campaign that cashed in on popular discontent with the state government and didn’t allow internecine conflict kneecap the party the way it had thrown during the Punjab elections in 2022. It smartly packaged a raft of social and economic programmes in the form of “guarantees” and corralled marginalised castes into a potent coalition.
But the next six months showed just how quick-footed the BJP is on political strategy. By the time elections to five states, including three major Hindi belt states were announced, the BJP had branded its own set of welfare promises as “Modi guarantees” – successfully playing off the PM’s personal appeal in heartland states. It worked like magic, the BJP won its highest vote share in Madhya Pradesh in decades, kept alive the tradition of incumbents being voted out in Rajasthan, and unexpectedly knocked the Congress out in Chhattisgarh. The Congress posted a strong performance in Telangana and won against a major regional outfit for the first time in two decades – it now rules two of the five south Indian states and is part of the governing alliance in a third – but its problems in north India will seriously handicap its 2024 campaign.
To succeed in the electoral arena, a party needs three things – narrative, organisation, and leadership. For the BJP all three appear sorted – strong messaging blending Modi’s popularity, last-mile welfarism and Hindutva, an expansive grassroots network that can tap into considerable resources for voter outreach, and a leader whose personal appeal and ground connect remain unmatched.
For the Opposition, all three remain works in progress. Its narrative appears centred on welfare and the promise of a caste census – built on the back of arguably the biggest development on the social justice sphere this year, the release of the Bihar caste survey that showed that other backward classes form 63% of the state. The backbone of its organisation is the 28-party Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), which was formed this year and is the most serious attempt by the Opposition to force the BJP into a one-on-one contest on each of the 543 Lok Sabha seats. The question of leadership remains an open one, and might be the most vexed one of yet for the INDIA bloc. For it to have any salience, it will have to quickly learn lessons from its drubbing in the December polls.
But 2023 also saw plenty of political action far away from the electoral arena.
In Manipur, ethnic clashes between the dominant Meiteis and tribal Kukis have convulsed the state for an unprecedented seven months now, with the state administration appearing complicit at times, and compromised at others. In Parliament, the inauguration of a new home for Indian democracy and the passage of a historic bill setting aside a third of seats for women in state and national legislatures was marred by the shocking breach of security in the Lok Sabha. More concerning was the apparent breakdown of communication between the government and the Opposition in the House that allowed a bundle of key bills pass with little scrutiny. 2023 was an important legislative year that saw tectonic changes in India’s environmental regime, birth-and-deaths registration and selection of top poll officials, apart from laws to replace British-era criminal codes. That such crucial bills were insufficiently discussed – the final week of the winter session even saw the suspension of the highest number of Opposition members in India’s history – doesn’t augur well for Indian democracy.
In the long term, though, what will really matter is the ability of our political class to battle the vagaries of the climate crisis, and stave off its worst impact – be it urban floods, water crisis in some states, more intense natural disasters and more frequent cloudbursts in the mountains. 2023, unfortunately, showed that Indian administrators were ill prepared to combat this multifaceted crisis. For India’s democratic promise to endure and flourish, this needs to be remedied, and fast.