Terms of Trade | What really happened in Haryana?
Hoodas are far from a liability for Congress, but they approached the elections with a sectarian agenda rather than widening the cordon sanitaire against the BJP
Almost everybody was of the view that the Congress had Haryana and it was only after a couple of hours of counting that it became clear that this was not going to be the case. So, what really happened? This edition of the column is a post-mortem of the Haryana results with only one motivation: does it hold any lessons for politics outside Haryana?
Let us begin with a provocative claim. There was anti-incumbency against the Modi government during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections but no such thing against the BJP government in Haryana. Numbers would support such a theory. The BJP’s Lok Sabha vote share in Haryana fell from 58% to 46% between 2019 and 2024. Its assembly election vote share increased by more than three percentage points between the 2019 and 2024 elections to reach almost 40%. The anti-incumbency against Modi in 2024 theory is not confined to Haryana alone. We highlighted this fact after the 2024 Lok Sabha election results by showing that the quantifiable ‘Modi premium’ – the BJP’s vote share advantage in national elections over state elections – had fallen significantly in most states.
All this is in the realm of the facts. The question is what was the cause of this anti-incumbency?
There is a section of commentators who attribute it to what can be described as some sudden bottom-up awakening among the social underclass in most parts of the country of constitutional vanguardism against the BJP's designs to change the Constitution. Of course, there is no way to concretely prove or refute this theory. We have always had patchy survey data on elections in India, and after the fiasco of the 2024 Lok Sabha and the Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir cycle, where almost everyone got it wrong, one might have to completely abandon using pollsters’ findings.
However, if one were to believe in this constitutional vanguardism theory, it is easier to reconcile with the Congress’s Haryana loss. The Congress’s campaign was pretty much monopolised by the Hoodas in the state who have been known to champion the interest of the Jats, a dominant peasant community, often seen as oppressors by lower castes and nuisance value by the upper castes.
Almost one-third of the Congress and its ally CPI (M)’s candidates (27 out of 90) were Jats, my colleague Nishant Ranjan found in an analysis of the candidate-caste matrix of BJP and Congress in Haryana. Congress’s Jat candidates did better than the others, but they could not take it past the majority mark. So, is the Congress’s loss to be ascribed to the Hoodas overplaying the Jat-card? Reports of Hooda’s rift bordering on mistreatment with Dalit leaders such as Kumari Selja in the state would support such a theory.
One needs to ask only one counterfactual to answer this question though. Would the Congress be in a better position than it is today in Haryana if the Hoodas were not there? Going back five years is a useful way to answer this question. Until a couple of months before the 2019 assembly elections, Hoodas were sidelined in the Haryana Congress and the party was being led by a Dalit leader Ashok Tanwar, who has since changed many parties to come back to the Congress (at least at the time of writing this column) on the last day of the campaign. It was only at the last minute that Tanwar was gotten rid of and Selja made the state president and Bhupinder Singh Hooda the chairman of the election management committee. The Congress improved its vote share by eight percentage points compared to the 2014 assembly elections and the running refrain was it would have won the state had the Hoodas been given charge much earlier. The improvement continued even in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections with the Congress adding a massive 15 percentage points in terms of vote share. Even in the 2024 assembly election, the Congress has added more than ten percentage points to its vote share compared to 2019.
The takeaway of all this is simple: The Hoodas are far from a liability for the Congress and any other leadership arrangement from the existing cohort would perhaps see the Congress performing worse, not better, than under the Hoodas. But they have hit a dead end when it comes to getting the critical couple of percentage points of floating voters which can win them the elections.
They are not the only politicians to face this problem in the current political milieu. Tejashwi Yadav from the RJD in Bihar has been suffering the frustration of being the single largest party but not large enough to get a majority. Akhilesh Yadav got the highest-ever vote share for the SP in the 2022 assembly election, but could not even come close to the majority mark. The BJP suffered the same frustration in Bihar in the 2015 elections when it lost badly against a grand alliance of the RJD, JD (U) and the Congress despite getting its best-ever vote share. It has since learnt its lessons and is always willing to do business with Nitish Kumar, the king of political somersaults.
The larger point as far as most of these anti-BJP politicians and political parties are concerned is that the electoral game has changed and is very different from what it used to be when they were at the peak of their success. A big reason for this is the BJP significantly expanding its footprint among both upper caste and lower caste Hindus using three pillars of power-sharing to hitherto unrepresented communities, evoking retrospective anti-incumbency (return of the Yadav or Jat rule) and a larger ideological appeal of Hindutva, which holds this otherwise untenable coalition of social extremes together. While the primary opposition is still surviving, fence-sitters such as the INLD in Haryana or the BSP in Uttar Pradesh are facing political extinction.
What does the Opposition need to do to better its electoral game vis-à-vis the BJP? Social inclusion is key. The biggest reason the INDIA bloc performed better in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections is a much more representative candidature. A similar story can be found in the caste-wise strike rates of the BJP and the Congress in the latest Haryana elections. But this is not something which can be forced on the local leadership by the high command. It is more about how the local leadership understands the challenge.
The biggest political mistake that the Hoodas made in this election was that they approached it with a plank of restoring the status-quo-ante of Jat dominance – essentially a sectarian project – which existed in the 2000s when the BJP had a less than 10% vote share in the state rather than building the widest possible cordon-sanitaire and getting everyone together against a party with a core vote share of almost 40% on all ACs. This is pretty much the crux of the problem of regional parties and regional leadership of the Congress party in states where they are locked in a head-to-head contest against the BJP.
The socially woke theorists would do well to realise that any such cordon sanitaire would be redundant without mobilising communities such as the Jats in Haryana or even the proverbial upper castes in places like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Why did the Congress field a Brahmin to wrest Amethi back from the BJP?
How can such a coalition be held together one would ask? The only common link has to be a class appeal.
This is the biggest mistake the BJP made before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections by selling fiscal prudence to an economically distressed electorate. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at the BJP headquarters on the day of the Haryana results, he categorically mentioned the cash transfer scheme the BJP has promised in Haryana. It is unlikely that we would hear the Prime Minister or the BJP rant against freebies in the upcoming Maharashtra and Jharkhand election campaigns too. Seen that way, the Opposition is serving its purpose for the electorate even without winning elections, namely, making the BJP realise that it must do more to alleviate the economic pain of the underclass. This is the biggest and perhaps most underappreciated strength of Indian democracy.
Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fallout, and vice-versa