Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were delivered a wakeup call by voters in the 2024 elections, with a mandate of just 240 seats, well short of the halfway mark of 272. The Congress-led INDIA (Indian Nationalist Democratic Inclusive Alliance) bloc, won 234 seats and posted 41.4 % vote share against the 43.9 % won by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition. The big surprise came from Uttar Pradesh (UP), where the BJP and its allies got fewer seats than the INDIA bloc partners, Congress and the Samajwadi Party (SP), with the latter emerging as the biggest gainer. No other state exemplifies the BJP’s disappointment more than UP, which had propelled it to power in the 2014 and 2019 elections.
The BJP assumed that the election was a sealed deal in UP after the Ram temple’s consecration in January, billed as the ultimate triumph of Hindutva. Far from gaining more votes or seats on the strength of the temple inauguration, the BJP’s vote in UP declined by eight percentage points. The SP-Congress combine won 43 seats in comparison to the BJP’s 33. Of the 24 seats of the Awadh region, BJP won 11 against a clean sweep in 2019. Faizabad-Ayodhya, where the temple is located, rejected the BJP in favour of a SP leader from the Dalit community. SP’s battle cry, “Na Mathura, na Kashi, abki baar Awadhesh Pasi (Neither Mathura nor Kashi, this time Awadhesh Pasi”) triumphed over the Ram temple move in Ayodhya, much to the discomfiture of the saffron camp. The BJP’s defeat in Ayodhya could also be related to the loss of livelihoods owing to demolition of shops and houses as part of the government’s construction drive to remodel Ayodhya as a major tourist destination.
The election results speak to a wider political divide in UP politics after the BJP’s rise. Much of the Hindu Right’s dominance in Indian politics today can be traced back to the movement to destroy the Babri Masjid and build a Ram temple where the mosque once stood. Congress contributed significantly to this process by getting directly involved in the Ayodhya controversy, and that too at a time when Hindutva politics was on the rise. It changed the dynamics of electoral politics, undermining Congress’s own monopoly over political power in the country and most significantly in UP. Henceforth, UP was the site where the Hindu nationalism’s most important projects were executed.
UP has been at the heart of the project to build a Hindu Rashtra by foregrounding conquest and conflict as well as a politics of historical vendetta to invigorate Hindu nationalism. The capture of UP laid the groundwork for a political majority in the Hindi heartland, which, given its overwhelming size, helped the Hindu Right gain a strong base to offset its weakness in other parts of the country.
Also read: Bulldozers in the Modi Decade: A Symbol of Quick ‘Justice’ and Collective Punishment
The 2024 elections have moved the needle of the political compass from the right to the centre. This, despite the BJP’s concerted effort to consolidate Hindutva politics, using communal polarisation as a mobilisation strategy, to shore up the Hindu vote bank. However, Hindu voters were keen to promote the aspirations and interests of their caste groups and communities, which they felt were not being addressed by the BJP, in its high-pitched narrative centred on the Ayodhya temple, renovation of Kashi Vishwanath Dham, aggressive pursuing of the Gyanvapi case in Varanasi and the Krishna Janmabhoomi-Shahi Eidgah case in Mathura.
The narrative of social and economic justice articulated by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, during his election campaign and two Bharat Jodo Yatras, provoked the BJP leadership to communalise the Congress’s manifesto. The prime minister tried to stoke irrational anxieties in Hindu voters from the moment the Congress released its manifesto or ‘Nyay Patra‘. He claimed that the Congress, if elected to power, will seize the property and assets of Hindus, hand them over to Muslims and that he was the only leader capable of stopping this. But his speeches cut no ice. The party’s campaign could not strike a chord in the politically crucial state. In fact, the polarising speeches proved to be counter-productive. Regardless, the real intent behind this rhetoric was to bring about a change in discourse that could obscure issues like unemployment, inflation, welfare and the decline of democratic rights. The voters saw through the vitriol and the divisive campaign. The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)-Lokniti post-poll survey published in The Hindu confirms the exhaustion with Hindutva politics, especially among the marginalised sections in the Hindi heartland.
In the 2024 election, the BJP’s electoral project of dominance – though not necessarily its larger ideological project of Hindutva – has been challenged by the opposition’s counter-narrative of social justice. This was bolstered by Akhilesh Yadav’s promotion of PDA – the unity platform born out of shared consciousness against the exploitation and oppression of ‘pichre’ (backward), Dalit and ‘alpsankhyak’ (minority). As caste emerged as an important antidote to communal politics, reservation was resurrected as a major issue in this election with the prime minister accusing the opposition, especially the Congress, of stealing reservations for OBCs, Scheduled Castes (SCs), and Scheduled Tribes (STs) and give it all to the Muslims along with mangalsutras as bonus. This narrative, too, didn’t work. The prime minister referred to Muslims as infiltrators. More importantly, the Muslim community did not react to the bigoted campaign. Instead, they delivered a fitting response at the ballot box by voting for their self-respect and security.
Also read: Why the Congress Must Embrace ‘Bahujanisation’ to Take on the BJP in Uttar Pradesh
The opposition landed an early punch by using the BJP’s own campaign slogan, seeking 400 seats, against them. The saffron camp failed to recover from the narrative that if it wanted 400 seats in parliament so it could change the Constitution. This fear was exploited by the opposition, which turned the election into a battle for saving the Constitution. This also destabilised the BJP’s cross-caste Hindu coalition – the key to its success in recent elections – as backward castes politics regained momentum. The INDIA bloc addressed caste aspirations, with the demand for a caste census, coupled with SP’s smart candidate choices in giving a larger number of tickets to economically backward OBCs. Congress fortunes were boosted by the return of Dalits, in favour of its agenda of social justice and protection of the Constitution, as well as Muslims who gravitated en bloc to the Congress and its alliance partner.
Finally, it is significant that the most striking decline of the BJP has occurred in UP – the hot seat of Hindi-Hindu nationalism. That’s the remarkable story of this election. The BJP’s defeat in Ayodhya is symptomatic of their decline. The defeat in Faizabad and the surrounding constituencies in Awadh, the epicentre of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, was part of a broader discontent among millions of people left behind in India’s growth story.
Economic development hasn’t taken off in the state despite the existence of a “double engine sarkar” since 2017. UP is one of the most poorly performing economies in the country and the state’s economy hasn’t improved much under BJP rule. This election pointed to the gross neglect of economic issues that matter to the people. In the process, it tested the resilience of Hindutva and majoritarian political ideas, which stand in contrast to the pluralist ideas and bonds of composite culture, friendship, and belonging that defined UP in the early decades after Independence. This period was followed by an ideological vision focused on social and economic justice through democratic reform in the state. The stunning verdict was a revolt of the common people against the failure of the Hindutva Raj – much like the uprising of 1857 against the British Raj in Awadh, when peasants deserted army men under the leadership of Ahmadullah Shah on June 30 to demolish the arrogance of the mightiest Empire at Chinhat in Lucknow – to address livelihood issues combined with fear of the dilution of the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Dalits and OBCs and the subordination of Muslims.
Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
