Opinion Lessons from BJP’s win in Gujarat 2022
Christophe Jaffrelot and Sharik Laliwala write: Experiments with political hegemony in the state have helped Modi’s BJP become the only game in town at the national level
Modi’s brand of national populism, like elsewhere in the world, tends to transform cultural majorities into political majorities, making alternation in power more difficult. (AP Photo) 
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The BJP’s victory in Gujarat was a foregone conclusion and so, the lessons that analysts could have learnt from it have been largely missed. It needs to be revisited. First, because no party has ever won 156 seats out of 182 in the state. Second, the state’s political trajectory has been followed by most of the rest of northern and western India since 2014, with Narendra Modi’s BJP dominating the Lok Sabha elections. In that sense, Gujarat is more than a model. It is a laboratory — the state where Modi has experimented with developing political hegemony.
In the last Gujarat election, this hegemony found expression in the BJP’s capacity to attract voters from every social group in equal proportion. Certainly, it remains an upper/dominant caste party, with 62 to 64 per cent of Brahmins, Vaishyas, Rajputs and Patels voting in its favour, according to the CSDS exit poll. But OBCs are not far behind. About 59 per cent of Kolis (the largest OBC jati of Gujarat) supported the BJP this time (9 percentage points more than in 2017). Even Adivasis and Dalits rallied around the BJP at 53 per cent (plus 8 percentage points) and 44 per cent (plus 5), respectively. This spells trouble for Congress, which has traditionally been the political outfit for OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis in Gujarat. The role of caste as the only variable for explaining voting patterns is clearly eroding – like in the last Lok Sabha elections.
Interestingly, the BJP is improving its electoral performance in, a priori adverse circumstances as most social indicators showed no improvement. While Gujarat continues to register remarkable growth rates and attract industrial investments, these achievements do not benefit society at large. The percentage of underweight children — already very high at 39.3 per cent in 2015-16 — increased to 39.7 per cent. As a result, Gujarat ranks 29th out of 30 states on this indicator. The Adjusted Net Enrolment Ratio in elementary education is not improving either and Gujarat is ranked 21 here. Besides, Gujarat has been badly affected by Covid and the Morbi bridge catastrophe, which could have dented the BJP’s popularity. But the party is above accountability in socio-economic terms — like at the national level.
Gujarat and India have one thing in common, Narendra Modi, who has invented in the former a modus operandi that he has been able to replicate in the latter. This relies on techniques of concentration of power, which include the sidelining of opponents not only on the political scene but also within the party. Simultaneously, rivals like Hardik Patel or Jyotiraditya Scindia are co-opted. Power is also concentrated thanks to state capture, with independent-minded civil servants being replaced, as evident from the careers of R B Sreekumar, Ashok Lavasa and Alok Verma.
Besides this deinstitutionalising process, Modi has won elections one after the other by saturating the public sphere with the message: I am here for you. “I have made this Gujarat” was Modi’s slogan in 2022; it was “Gaurav Gujarat” in 2002. Both convey the same message: “I am Gujarat!” Similarly, in 2014, Modi tweeted “India has won!” (because he had won).
This trope works because there is an Other — the Muslim and/or Pakistan — against whom or from which the “Hindu Hriday Samrat” can protect his people. The nomination of BJP candidates who were connected directly or indirectly to the 2002 communal violence reflects the continuation of the BJP’s polarisation strategy. Muslim political representation is a collateral casualty of this narrative: There is only one Muslim MLA in Gujarat now, the lowest in the history of the state where 9 per cent of the population belongs to the community.
Modi’s brand of national populism, like elsewhere in the world, tends to transform cultural majorities into political majorities, making alternation in power more difficult. But, of course, this is also made possible by the deinstitutionalisation process mentioned above — and among the institutions which play an important role there, the media occupies an important position.
The argument that has been made here needs to be qualified, however. First, the division in the Opposition is helping BJP establish its hegemony, as evident from the entry of AAP in Gujarat and the shrinking of UPA on the national scene. Second, BJP is not attracting voters from each and every caste only because of Hindu majoritarianism. The party selects its candidates in a very sophisticated manner. For instance, at the national level, it nominated non-dominant OBC and Dalit candidates and got most of the votes of these jatis, which resented the Yadavs’ and Jatavs’ domination. In Gujarat, last month, it picked a large number of Kolis (19) and they all won. Of the BJP’s candidates, 26.5 per cent came from the OBCs this time, more than Patels (26 per cent) and upper castes (17 per cent).
The BJP’s sense of social arithmetic suggests that caste still needs to be factored in. It may play a more significant role again because the BJP concentrates ministerial power in the hands of dominant caste politicians. In Gujarat, it has appointed 10 ministers from OBC-SC-ST backgrounds, but it continues with a Patel chief minister and the most influential ministries, like home, finance, revenue, energy-petrochemicals, roads and buildings, remain in the hands of forward castes. Executive power is still with the forward castes, while others are accommodated only in the legislature.
Laliwala is an independent scholar on politics and history of Gujarat; Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, and professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s India Institute, London
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