In Haryana and J&K, BJP’s performance was not as spectacular as it being made out to be

This has happened before, both in India and elsewhere. Indeed, the vote-seat paradox of a first-past-the-post system means that results can be sensitive to the distribution of the overall vote. Basically, more than the Congress, the BJP successfully managed to get its voters to the booth in those constituencies where the contest was on a knife-edge. It is a booth- and constituency-level victory of a serious sort. That is where the BJP defeated Congress.

This result will undoubtedly boost the BJP and Hindutva. The game of interpreting a mandate is normally based on how many seats a party has won, not on the comparative statistics of vote shares. Indeed, in an ironic twist, the BJP would benefit from the same political logic that hurt it after the 2024 Lok Sabha results. The widespread expectation then was that the BJP would win. But the BJP, finishing short of a majority, felt remarkably deflated after June. In Haryana, most observers thought the Congress would win, but it finished second. The gap between expectations and results helped the Congress then and would lift the BJP now. The deflationary logic of the 2024 parliamentary elections will be temporarily arrested for the BJP, making the forthcoming elections in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi even more significant.

But whatever the political momentum of a particular time, a deeper story is sometimes hidden in election statistics that must be unearthed. It can alert us to the differences between momentary logic and longer-run tendencies.

Remarkably, compared to the 2019 state elections, Congress’s vote has gone up by as much as 11 per cent, whereas the BJP’s vote is up by only 3.5 per cent. If we compare these results with those of the 2024 parliamentary elections, the BJP’s vote is down by 6.1 per cent and the Congress’s vote by 3.7 per cent (though some allowance will have to be made for the AAP’s small vote). An even more dramatic comparison is with the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. At a whopping 58.2 per cent of the vote, the BJP had a victory of hegemonic proportions. There has been a massive 18.3 per cent slide in its vote share since then. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the Congress had only 28.5 per cent of Haryana’s vote. In comparison, its vote share this week was up by 10.6 per cent.

Of course, one can introduce assumptions about how Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha results should be compared and make the statistical analysis more technically demanding, but whatever assumptions we make, the larger point is unmistakable. In Haryana, despite this victory, the BJP has lost its outsize role. Of course, devoid of upper-caste social dominance, lacking a significant statewide Hindu-Muslim cleavage and possessing a heavy agricultural base, Haryana was not the BJP’s traditional habitat. But after 2014, arguments about the BJP’s natural homes have become less relevant. It has penetrated many relatively impervious political theatres and by obtaining 58.2 per cent of the state’s vote in the 2019 general elections, it had established a truly gigantic presence in Haryana.

In sum, in a momentary sense, it is a big victory, but if we apply the longer-run perspective, it is a qualified victory. If the Congress had played its alliance-making, its constituency management and its candidate selection better and acquired another 2 per cent vote, one can easily show that depending on the distribution, the results could have been very different. No great assumptions about how differently the caste game could have been played are strictly necessary to explain such a narrowly differentiated result. Any larger claims about ideological victory or defeat are also irrelevant, though that is how politicians would spin it. The gap between the two votes is so minuscule that the best argument accounting for the outcome is about the ground game, candidate selection and the logic of alliances.

We also need to bring Kashmir into our analysis. We will yet again see why the election results are not a thumping BJP victory.

On Kashmir, an enduring Hindu nationalist argument has been that its regional parties and separatist forces prospered because of Article 370 and the indulgence of Kashmir Valley in Delhi, especially by the Congress. Moreover, a necessary corollary of this argument has been that if Article 370 was removed and the benefits of development and modernisation were brought to the Valley, it would weaken the regional forces, Kashmir would join the national mainstream, and regionalism and separatism would give way to greater national unity. Often, another argument was always added to the claim about development making greater national cohesion possible. It was contended that a firm resolve on the part of Delhi and the use of force, instead of indulgence, would discipline the Valley. Use Lincoln’s hand, not Gandhi and Nehru’s heart, to generate order and peace.

A Hindu-majority Jammu has rarely been a problem for Hindu nationalists. This is certainly true since Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s 1953 movement. The movement established a Hindu nationalist foothold in Jammu. These elections, as well as those held earlier, continue to show that Hindu nationalism’s bastion in Jammu is intact. It is the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, which has always attracted the adversarial ideological attention of Hindu nationalists and provoked repeated arguments about how to alter its mansikta (psyche).

Since August 2019, Article 370 has not been in existence, the BJP government has done its best to promote investment and development in the Valley and even applied a large amount of coercion. Yet, a customary regional party, aided by the supposedly misguided and indulgent Congress, has returned to power. Despite August 2019, the Valley’s mansikta remains fundamentally unchanged.

The BJP would, of course, interpret Kashmir results expansively — as a victory of democracy, of people voting in large numbers. But the inherent weakness of its 2019 strategy should be obvious. Putting the two elections together, we can even more clearly see why the results are only a qualified victory for the BJP.

The writer is Sol Goldman professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute