Opinion: A Likely Formula For Opposition's 2024 Success, With Big "Ifs"
NDTV
A familiar maxim of American politics holds that in any election, the challenger hopes to turn the contest into a referendum on the performance of the incumbent, while the incumbent would rather present it as a choice.
This "referendum or choice" framing might be American, but the underlying logic is native to Indian politics as well. What we call "anti-incumbency" is a form of negative voting in which the identity of the challenger is at best secondary. With only one real exception, every Indian general election in which a full-term incumbent has suffered significant losses has followed the referendum-not-choice pattern: 1967, 1977, 1989, 1996, 2004. The one exception is, of course, 2014, thanks to a presidential-style opposition campaign unlike anything India had previously seen.
The BJP's re-election in 2019 stemmed, in part, from its success in turning that campaign into a choice, between not ideologies but personalities. The Opposition - then the Congress-led UPA - fell more than willingly into the trap, focusing its campaign on the person of the Prime Minister ("Chowkidar Chor Hai") rather than on his government's record.
