What’s the big-picture message from the outcome of the polls?
The Congress entered into an alliance with the National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time since 1987
The one-line answer to this question is that politics of cordon sanitaire (broadly, ideological containment) against the BJP still has traction but the Congress must wait to declare itself the vanguard-in-chief of this project.
The Congress entered into an alliance with the National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time since 1987. While the Congress has done worse in the UT than it did (in what was then a state) in 2014, the combined seat tally of the alliance is significantly higher than what it was last time. In Haryana, where the Congress decided to contest the elections on its own rather than have an alliance – it allied with the Aam Admi Party (AAP) in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections – it has lost vote share in 76 assembly constituencies (ACs) between the Lok Sabha and assembly elections held just four months apart.
How does the former follow from the latter? Here are three charts which explain this in detail.
The Congress has misread the jump in its seat tally between 2019 and 2024
A lot of the reading of the 2024 general election results has described the increase in Congress’s seat tally from 52 in 2019 to 99 in 2024 as the beginning of some sort of trend reversal in Indian politics where the BJP will keep going downwards and the Congress upwards. A more careful reading of the results would caution against any such conclusions. The Congress’s vote share increased by a modest 1.7 percentage points between 2019 and 2024, significantly less than the 8.7 percentage point rise in its seat share during these two elections. What really led to an increase in the Congress’s seat tally was a big increase in its seat share to vote share ratio between 2019 and 2024, the numbers being 0.5 and 0.9 respectively. This trend has to be read with the fact that the Congress contested the lowest ever number of parliamentary constituencies in the 2024 general elections. The short point is the Congress needs allies to strategically exploit its support base and convert it into seats or reduce the BJP’s strength. The Haryana results show that this is not a task the Congress can achieve on its own. That the party did have alliance talks with the AAP but could not reach an agreement, and the Maharashtra Congress is now asserting its dominance vis-à-vis the Shiv Sena UBT in alliance negotiations, perhaps shows that the national and state leadership of the Congress party are not on the same page on this issue.
The BJP’s electoral vulnerabilities should not be seen as a crippling weakness
The BJP lost 11.6 percentage point in terms of seat share between the 2019 and 2024 general elections ending up with just 240 PCs. While its overall vote share fell by less than a percentage point between 2019 and 2024, its median vote share fell by almost five percentage points between the two elections. The latter is what explains the sharp fall in BJP’s seat tally with its seat share to vote share ratio falling from 1.5 to 1.2 between 2019 and 2024. However, the point remains that the BJP still has a significantly larger footprint than what it used to have in the pre-2014 period and its electoral success or lack of it is a function of its ability to retain the floating voter rather than facing an attrition of its core support base which is among the highest it has been for a political party in India in a long time. (See Chart 2)
Read more: BJP clinches hat-trick in Haryana, Cong-NC victorious in J&K| 7 Big Takeaways
Congress needs to overcome its class-caste contradictions
The Congress’s electoral rhetoric in the past few years has been based on two key pillars. The first is economic populism with an eye on getting maximum votes among poorer voters. The second has been its newfound emphasis on mobilising the socially weaker castes which is epitomised by the Congress’s demand for a caste census and expanding the current cap of 50% on SC-ST-OBC reservations.
The problem which the Congress faces is aligning these two goals with its existing social base in different states. The best way to understand this contradiction is to compare the Congress’s result in the 2023 Karnataka elections and the 2024 Haryana assembly elections.
In Karnataka, the Congress did really well in the poorer regions of the state as was pointed out in these pages. The Haryana results, show no such advantage for the Congress when districts are sorted by their asset scores in the latest National Family and Health Survey. What explains this disjoint in Congress’s traction among the poor in Karnataka and Haryana?
The answer lies in the difference in Congress’s social base in different states. In Karnataka, there was a congruence between the economic and social underclass for the Congress as it went to polls under Siddaramaiah with an AHINDA plank. However, in Haryana, the Congress’s core support base are the socially dominant Jats who alienate the social underclass. It is eminently arguable that the Congress would have done even worse had it ditched the Hoodas and hence the Jats in Haryana to attract the socially weaker groups. Unless the Congress can resolve this contradiction – it is not an easy problem to solve – it will continue to face headwinds to its dual plank of mobilising the social and economic underclass to win elections.
