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How India voted in 2022

Dec 30, 2022 11:53 PM IST

For the BJP, 2022 was about sustaining power in its two most important states. For the Congress, repeated failures have led to political experiments. And for AAP, a win outside Delhi triggered national ambitions

When India’s three main parties in the news this year— the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) — look back at 2022, they will all have reasons to see it as a pivotal year that may shape their respective fortunes for years to come.

India’s three main parties in the news this year— the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) — look back at 2022 (Hindustan Times)
India’s three main parties in the news this year— the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) — look back at 2022 (Hindustan Times)

For the BJP, 2022 was the year where it won the two states most important to the party leadership and there was a sense of inevitability that crept in about its return to power in the Lok Sabha elections two years from now.

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For the Congress, 2022 was the year when repeated failure led to experiments, both at the level of organisational leadership and in terms of pulling together the most ambitious political yatra of recent times.

And for the AAP, 2022 was the year that the party finally articulated its national ambitions in political practice.

BJP: Sustaining the success

Uttar Pradesh (UP) has always mattered in Indian politics. But it matters even more for the BJP, since it marks the difference between the party having an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha and getting confined to the low 200s in the house of 545. It also matters because the governance of the state is central to India’s aspirations. If UP modernises agriculture, welcomes industry, creates jobs, improves social development indicators and maintains rule of law, India prospers; if UP lags behind, all of India’s global ambitions, of which the BJP is a forceful champion, will, sooner or later, hit a glass ceiling.

For three elections in a row — 2014, 2017 and 2019 — the BJP had succeeded in UP. It defeated the Samajwadi Party when it was an incumbent; it defeated an SP-Congress alliance; it defeated an SP-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance. But till this year, the BJP had not succeeded in retaining power at the state-level in UP; for that matter, no chief minister had succeeded in completing a full term in office and returning to power in the state’s modern political history.

The biggest political event of the year was, therefore, BJP’s UP win. It won a comfortable majority on the back of the combined appeal of Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath; a carefully maintained social coalition of upper castes, backward communities and Dalit sub groups; a forceful campaign on the plank of law and order (or as this writer prefers to call it, order at the cost of law, for the government has quite often deployed extrajudicial mechanism to impost its writ; welfare delivery, particularly the provision of free ration; and communal polarisation with the cultivation of anti-Muslim prejudice to unite the Hindu vote. The fact that the SP was unable to move beyond its social base of Muslims and Yadavs, the BSP has shrunk, and the Congress achieved the impossible by dipping from seven out of 403 seats to two seats.

The win decisively put an end to speculation about the impact of the pandemic, particularly the mismanagement of the Delta wave, on BJP’s political fortunes. The win shored up Modi’s domestic capital. It elevated Yogi Adityanath as the third most important campaigner in the BJP, and has given birth to his leadership ambitions for the national stage. Adityanath appears to be emulating the Modi model, of retaining his Hindu image while wooing corporate capital and projecting an image of being a competent administrator with mastery over details. The next test for him however, will be delivering UP’s 80 seats to the party in 2024 and then retaining power in 2027.

If the year began with the UP win, it ended with the unprecedented Gujarat victory for the BJP, with the party winning more seats than any party had in the state’s electoral history.

The win in Gujarat wasn’t a surprise, but the scale of the victory was. The BJP increased its vote share; it won across all pockets of the state; it was able to leverage its deep organisational imprint in the state; Modi’s image as the son of the soil leading the nation helped; and the combined effort of Amit Shah and state unit president CR Paatil ensured that the party machinery was well-oiled, down to the booth level, in securing the electoral win. An absent Congress — Rahul Gandhi used the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ as a justification to skip the Gujarat campaign — and the presence of AAP — which didn’t do as well as it hoped but did enough to divide the anti-BJP vote — helped.

The win cemented Modi’s reputation as the tallest Gujarati leader in post-independence India and buttressed Shah’s election-winning credentials. Given the margin of victory, it is also very likely that the BJP will win the next state election in Gujarat in 2027 (it will win even if it loses 70 seats) — already in power for 27 years, the next win will see it emerge as the longest serving state government in India, beating the Left’s 34-year old record in Bengal.

Besides the two big states, the BJP also succeeded in retaining power in Uttarakhand (where it had to change its chief minister twice and faced severe anti-incumbency), Manipur and Goa — in a sign that absent an effective opposition, even a weaker than usual BJP machine is hard to beat.

But the year also exposed the party’s vulnerabilities. In Himachal Pradesh, internal discord within the party and anti-incumbency saw the Congress prevail. In Punjab, the one state in north India which the BJP hasn’t been able to penetrate successfully, the perception of being a Hindu majoritarian party coupled with the backlash over the farm laws, prevented the party from being able to take advantage of the political vacuum in the state as the AAP stormed to power.

But beyond the electoral setbacks, the party will have to introspect about two structural vulnerabilities. The first is the overwhelming dependence on Modi — take him out of the equation, and even with a robust organisation, the BJP struggles. This poses long term questions about the durability of the party’s success. The second is the emerging sense within party and Sangh circles that there is a dip in support among younger voters, particularly those in the 18-24 category, for whom the BJP is the establishment and memories of Congress misrule are distant. Young urban Gujaratis, of course, backed Modi — but dealing with the generational transition was a challenge for the party and this will be an even greater problem on the national stage as the years go by and voters begin looking at options.

But that is for the future. 2022 showed once again that the BJP is politically hegemonic in wide swathes of India.

Congress: Setbacks and experiments

The Congress’s rough patch continued over the year — and the party’s chronic illnesses once again came to the fore, with nothing quite seeming to work.

In Punjab, the party had experimented by ousting its veteran leader, Captain Amarinder Singh, with a new leader, Charanjit Singh Channi months before the election while first encouraging Navjot Singh Sidhu and then clipping his wings. The experiment failed and the party lost. In UP, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra led the organisation and embarked on a women-centric campaign by giving a large share of tickets to women candidates. The experiment failed — not only did the party lose miserably, a majority of women votes went to the BJP. In Gujarat, the party leadership barely campaigned and came up with a theory of how it was relying on localised micro-campaigns. Its vote share dipped by over 15 percentage points and it lost five dozen seats compared to its 2017 tally. In Uttarakhand, a state which even the BJP thought it would lose, the party’s inability to resolve state leadership issues led to a defeat. Goa was yet another example of its ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Himachal Pradesh was a silver lining in the party’s otherwise bleak electoral record of the year — but the win had as much to do with the BJP’s failures as the Congress’s appeal, and it isn’t clear if the party will be able to retain the internal coherence to stay on in power for the full term with those who lost out in the leadership race already expressing discontent.

The continued crisis in the Congress led to two experiments on the national stage this year.

One, the party finally held internal elections. After the 2019 loss, Rahul Gandhi had quit as party president and Sonia Gandhi had taken over as interim chief. But the leadership crisis was visible — Sonia was formerly in charge but Rahul continued to take key decisions, and many issues slipped between the cracks. The party also saw a mini rebellion by a group of leaders, informally called G23, asking for internal elections and an organisational overhaul. Meanwhile, the exodus from the party continued, as many key young leaders left for the BJP. All of this prompted the leadership to finally concede to internal polls.

But the polls, while a positive step, didn’t go far enough. Despite assurances that the family would stay out of the race entirely, the Nehru-Gandhi clan and the party establishment firmly threw its weight behind Mallikarjun Kharge, a veteran Dalit leader from Karnataka, who stood in opposition to Shashi Tharoor. Tharoor managed a credible 1,000 plus votes in an electoral college of over 9,000, despite the family ranged against him. Tharoor’s elevation would have infused a fresh lease of life in the party and helped it make inroads among the urban young, the one constituency that the BJP is understood to be worried about. But Kharge’s reputation as a family loyalist prevailed. The perception in the party is that the family remains in control, while Kharge is a token face.

The second experiment was Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, an ambitious Kanyakumari to Kashmir march.

The march has helped the party infuse energy in what had become a demoralised and almost defunct organisation. It has seen organic crowds, in addition to Congress workers, applaud the yatra. And it has helped win Gandhi respect, even from critics, for the work that he has put in after years of being seen as an erratic and inconsistent leader.

But the biggest flaw of the yatra is the divorce between what is framed as an ideological battle from the electoral battle. For a party suffering from its gravest electoral existential crisis, to publicly claim that the march has nothing to do with elections appears politically myopic — and to privately think that the yatra will automatically translate into electoral dividends may be an over-interpretation of the response on the street.

The basic fact that the Congress must grapple with is that it is only in power in three states. In all three states — Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Himachal Pradesh — it is grappling with serious internal discord. In the coming year, the party has a fair chance of winning power in Karnataka but unless it is able to win more states, it will walk into 2024 with low morale, depleted funds, and stare at its third consecutive electoral loss.

AAP: Making a mark

2022’s other big political story was AAP’s win in Punjab, giving what was only a city party a presence beyond Delhi and reins of a full state government with power over law and order and land.

AAP was able to leverage the complete disarray among traditional parties in Punjab. The Congress was in self-destruct mode with leadership changes and anti-incumbency; the anger against Akali Dal’s misrule had persisted; the BJP is the weakest in the state among all North Indian states. AAP, building on its success in 2017, was able to tap into the yearning for change. But over the year, the party has had to confront governance and perceptional challenges — from law and order to allegation of corruption, from fiscal mismanagement in a state already in the throes of a financial crisis to the sense of a chief minister being remote controlled from Delhi in a state with a proud and strong sub nationalist tradition.

But even as AAP deals with governance challenges in Punjab, its political success led to ambitions for a national role. Arvind Kejriwal appears to believe that there is a vacuum on the national stage — with the Congress shrinking and regional parties and leaders boxed into their specific geographies and identity backgrounds. Kejriwal has the advantage of speaking a political language that resonates with middle class India. True or false, his claims of the success of the Delhi model, particularly in the realm of education and health, has sparked curiosity in other parts of the country. He is media-savvy and understands the power of mainstream and social media. And his politics isn’t defined by his social identity.

And he has adopted what many see as an ideologically compromised but tactical centre-Right platform — this has meant that the party supports all or a majority of Hindutva causes and remains silent when it comes to issues of minority rights and livelihoods. In AAP, this is seen as a clever way to win over the BJP’s Hindu votes, while retaining Muslim votes, for the assumption is that Muslims have no choice but to vote for the strongest alternative to the BJP. AAP’s political strategy is to now enter the states where the BJP and the Congress are in direct competition — based on the assumption that disillusionment with the Congress will see voter loyalties shift to the AAP. In the short term, like in Gujarat, this suits the BJP just fine for the opposition vote gets divided.

But as the year ended, the success and limits of the party’s ambitious plans became clearer. The AAP won Delhi’s municipal elections, but with a lesser margin than it would have liked. It won five seats in Gujarat, much less than the 40 seats that party leaders privately thought they could win. Its strategy of support or silence on Hindutva is risky, for Hindu voters are staying with the BJP (like in Gujarat) and the Muslim voters may well consolidate behind the Congress (like in Delhi). Corruption allegations against AAP ministers, if credible charges are framed and convictions occur, could erode the party’s image of being against corruption. And replicating early successes in states with a long history of caste politics and mobilisation, without a robust organisation, will be much harder than AAP currently anticipates.

Nonetheless, Kejriwal remains a leader to watch out for on the national stage, for he has age on his side and has displayed political smarts in converting what was a start-up ten years ago to a key player in the politics of north India.

Put it together and it is clear that 2022 has set the stage for the multilayered political competition India is embarking on over the next 18 months. 

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  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    Prashant Jha is the Washington DC-based US correspondent of Hindustan Times. He is also the editor of HT Premium. Jha has earlier served as editor-views and national political editor/bureau chief of the paper. He is the author of How the BJP Wins: Inside India's Greatest Election Machine and Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal.

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