Meta narrative of poll results: BJP retains hegemony over support base

Despite the fact that the main contenders scored a victory each, it is only the BJP which has managed to retain its vote share in all the three polls, even where it lost in Delhi and Himachal Pradesh

On the face of it, the results of the Assembly polls in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, and the municipal corporation elections in Delhi (MCD), gave every contender what they wanted — an even-stevens draw, with the BJP winning its seventh straight, record-breaking victory in Gujarat; the Congress wresting Himachal Pradesh; and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) finally capturing the MCD. But the lessons to be drawn are in the details.

The BJP’s spectacular win in Gujarat was the peak of its “Gujarat Model” under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi, with the organisational heft of the party and the micromanagement of all resources available by Home Minister Amit Shah. Its loss in Himachal Pradesh, however, was largely due to the fact that the party, facing anti-incumenbency, was unable to manage rebels and a hyper-local campaign by the Congress, which stayed on message. The AAP, which made much of its entry into Gujarat, came a cropper in Himachal Pradesh.

The disparate results, however, do have a common theme: despite the BJP having lost Himachal Pradesh, the scale of its victory in Gujarat, its seventh in a row, and with a record-breaking majority has only reinforced its hegemony over India’s politics.

In Gujarat, votes for the AAP and the Congress together do not add up to 40% of the total, while the BJP increased its vote share from 49.1% in 2017 to 52.5% in 2022, even in an elections that saw a 4% drop in turnout.

In Himachal Pradesh, the BJP’s tally came down from 44 in 2017 to 26 in 2022 (at the time of writing), but its vote share only came down from 48% to 43%, equal to the winning Congress’ vote share. The AAP clocked a measly 1.1% vote share in the State. The decimation that the Congress suffered in Gujarat contest is not apparent with regard to the BJP in Himachal Pradesh.

In the MCD polls too, the BJP clocked 39.09% of the total votes polled, while in the 2017 municipal polls, the party had secured 36.08% of the votes.

The numbers demonstrate that, in a large meta narrative sense, there is no significant political challenge to the BJP in ideological or governance terms. Even the AAP’s by no means insignificant achievement, of attaining the status of a national party within a decade of its founding, shows that it mostly queers the pitch for the non-BJP parties in the States that it chooses to enter. The distribution of seats won by the three parties in Gujarat shows that the AAP has only cut into the Congress’ votes and aided the BJP in that State. This is despite the AAP trying to match the BJP in terms of Hindutva politics, lobbying to put pictures of the god Ganesha and the goddess Laxmi on Indian currency notes.