Does this mean there is nothing macro about the Karnataka results? Not necessarily. If there is one conclusion which the Karnataka results have underlined further, it is that the BJP’s narrative of “double-engine governments” (read electing the BJP at the state to maximize the benefits from the BJP government at the Centre) does not have much traction among the voters. This holds for states where the BJP lost power after its 2014 victory – Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in 2018, Jharkhand in 2019 and Himachal Pradesh in 2022 – and states such as Bihar in 2015, Odisha in 2019 and West Bengal in 2021, where it has not been able to dislodge a non-BJP party from power despite seeming to be within striking distance of victory. Some commentators see this as evidence of the theory that the only possible challenge to the BJP can come from reviving a federal kind of politics where sum of the states forms the nation and by extension its polity.

There are two problems with this kind of an agreement. The first is the obvious seat-sharing problem. Regional parties do not have to sacrifice anything to ally with the Congress where it is in a direct fight with the BJP because there are just not present there. But the Congress will have to give up a significant number of seats in states such as Kerala and Maharashtra and shut its shop in states such as West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. It is useful to reiterate that no such all-in-unity alliance existed even in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections and attempts to try something like this did not work very well in 2019 (the SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh, a grand alliance in Bihar and Karnataka are some such examples).

The second problem is more structural in nature. The all-in-unity federal front theory assumes that there are no federal conflicts in India. Nothing could be further from the truth. As India’s demographic structure gets more skewed, tensions are bound to increase between relatively prosperous southern states which have done well to limit their population growth and their poor counterparts in the north and east which expect more resources in keeping with their rising share in population. These tensions will rise even further when the long postponed question of delimitation of parliamentary seats is opened up. Such as exercise could make southern states completely irrelevant in the national political arithmetic. A 2019 essay by Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson in these pages had discussed these issues in detail.

Even if opposition parties were able to iron out their seat-sharing differences for 2024, it will take more than a leap of faith to believe that growing faultiness in India’s federal structure will not undermine such an alliance in the future. This is not to say that there is no common ground among the states to align against a hegemonic party ruling at the centre. Opposition ruled states have been complaining about the use of too much (discriminatory) discretion in centre-state dealings including things such as welfare schemes, investment projects, and deployment of central investigative agencies in opposition ruled states. But this is more an agenda for the political leadership than the masses.

Does this mean that the BJP’s inability to win many key states despite leveraging prime minister Modi’s personal political capital does not have any far-reaching political economy implications? One aspect which has not received enough attention in this debate is the inner dynamic within the BJP.

Nobody will disagree that the fortunes of current day BJP have surged by riding piggyback on the popularity of the prime minister. The 2019 Lok Sabha results, where the BJP overcame upsets in many big states by making it an election about Modi are a clear proof of this fact. While the BJP is happy to take advantage of this fact in every election, this also means an erosion of power (in the realpolitik sense of the term) for every concentric circle of BJP leadership around the political core of Modi. In fact, the argument is particularly strong at the level of states where the BJP has been promoting (historically) lightweight leaders who draw their legitimacy more from the top (party hierarchy) than the bottom (a strong mass appeal). In the long-term, this amounts to putting the BJP in a trajectory which is comparable to what Indira Gandhi did to the Congress as was argued in an earlier edition of this column before the Karnataka elections. While counter-factual questions are always problematic, it is interesting to ask whether the BJP would have done as badly as it had if BS Yediyurappa continued as the chief minister in Karnataka.

The earlier column did not elaborate on one part of this argument, however, and this is where the Karnataka results are particularly enlightening. There is a widespread agreement that the five guarantees given by the Congress party played a major role in its victory in Karnataka. Essentially speaking, these guarantees promise a direct or indirect cash transfer to a large section of voters in the state and include things such as subsidized provision of food, LPG cylinders, electricity and cash transfers to women and unemployed. It is widely believed that the promise of restoring the old pension scheme played a major role in the Congress’s victory in Himachal Pradesh. What is the larger political economy import of such victories? A brief recap to the 2014 election campaign is useful here.

The BJP pretty much promised the moon to the voters in its Achhe Din campaign for the 2014 elections. The actual economic performance -- exogenous (pandemic), endogenous (twin balance sheet crisis) and self-inflicted (demonetization and hastily implemented GST) shocks notwithstanding -- has been nothing compared to what was promised. The BJP government has mitigated a political fallout of this underwhelming economic performance in two ways: committing itself to the idea that low inflation is the biggest political insurance and making a big deal out of asset generating welfare schemes. On the first front, it had more success in its first term when the international commodity price cycle was more benign. The second continues to be a work in progress but needs to be complemented with income support top-ups when the political situation becomes challenging. PM-KISAN after the 2018 Rajasthan-Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh loss and PMGKY after the pandemic are some examples of this strategy.

If the BJP had it way, it would want the voters to accept this package of first-generation asset transfer schemes with counter-cyclical income support for the poorest and continue voting for the BJP in both Centre and the states. However, these plans do not seem to be working for two reasons. One, a large number of voters across the country continue to face acute material deprivation/inadequacy (let us not get into semantics over the poverty numbers here) and even a few thousand rupees per month, which is what all of Congress’s guarantees can provide to voters in Karnataka, matter a lot for them. Two, regional parties and the Congress at the state level have realized that the way to defeat the BJP in the states is not to wax eloquent on secularism or liberalism but to offer tangible material gains to the voters which the BJP’s state governments cannot offer given the in-principle political economy aversion of the current day BJP to sustained income-support programmes. Any state leader/chief minister investing too much in such programmes will be seen as trying to undermine the Prime Minister’s economic philosophy.

What the voter wants in a state government is not a second economic engine which will fire in sync with the one at the Centre, but a booster engine which brings additional income support ballast to add to the benefits of the Centre's asset transfer schemes. The two are actually complements rather than substitutes (as the BJP would like to see them). The BJP and a section of economists are rightly complaining that such promises will undermine the already fragile health of state finances and by extension overall fiscal health of the country. However, electoral politics is hardly a game which is played with a regard for rules or the future health of the pitch (read long-term interests of the nation-state). The BJP, which has built its present-day on the back of the sharply polarising Ram Temple movement, and continues to push the envelope on polarisation in every election campaign, can claim anything but high moral ground to preach rules-based politics.

Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.

The views expressed are personal