New Delhi: The data on the Haryana assembly election is revealing not only with regard to this election, but the deeper organisational and ideological problems that the Congress faces, which if left unrectified could lead to more losses for the party in the future.
How the picture changed in Haryana
For most part of the campaign, it appeared that a cross-section of voters were inclined towards the Congress, driven both by anti-incumbency against the BJP-led state government and the grand old party’s welfare promises.
However, it appears that a large section of lower OBCs retained their preference for the BJP amidst fears of an impending “Jatshahi” under a possible Bhupinder Singh Hooda-led government.
Data indicates that two factors seemed to have caused the Congress’s loss even though its vote share was only 0.85 percentage points less than the BJP’s. The first factor is anti-Jat mobilisation and the second is vote splitting.
Anti-Jat consolidation
The best indicator of this counter-mobilisation is that the BJP gained six of its eight additional seats compared to the 2019 assembly election in what the Trivedi Centre for Political Data-Indian Elections Dataset (TCPD-IED) data defines as ‘Jat land’.
In fact, if you add seats such as Uchana Kalan, which is Jat-dominated but which the TCPD-IED puts into the ‘Jat-Sikh land’ category, then almost all additional seats for the BJP came from Jat land.
This is because Jats don’t constitute a majority in any of the Jat land seats and the other communities combined can out-vote them. In all the other electoral sub-regions of Haryana, the Congress either gained seats or held on to the same number of seats – that is, in Jat Sikh land, Mewat, Ahirwal, NCR and the Ambala division.
The SC-reserved seats were split almost evenly between the Congress and BJP, with the latter winning one extra seat.
While all communities vote for all parties, a consolidation of 50% or so in favour of one can make a difference. This factor has helped the BJP win the last two elections, and as per the CSDS-Lokniti survey, has helped them this time as well.
Although the Jats did coalesce in favour of the Congress, the BJP held on to their traditional social base of “upper” castes and OBCs much more strongly. On the other hand, the CSDS-Lokniti survey reveals that around 28% of Jats voted for the BJP – possibly because of their inclination towards Hindutva.
The Jatav Dalits favoured the Congress while the non-Jatavs, who are more numerous, favoured the BJP. The paroles for Ram Rahim may have helped here, or it could be the fear of Jatshahi.
The survey seems to have an interesting finding where six out of ten respondents felt that the tussle between Kumari Selja and Hooda adversely affected the Congress’s prospects. As lower caste villagers told The Wire, “Had the CM been of any other caste than Jat, we would have voted for Congress.”
Splintering of the Congress’s vote
The splitting of the Congress’s vote proved very damaging as well; on 17 seats, Congress rebels took away enough votes to defeat the Congress candidate. Four of these fall in Jat land and another four in Jat Sikh land.
In Rai, for instance, rebel candidate Prateek Rajkumar Sharma, contesting as an independent, polled 11,555 votes and finished third, while the winning margin of the BJP candidate was 4,673. A similar situation was seen in Gohana and Assandh.
In Bahadurgarh, rebel Rajesh Joon even managed to win as an independent, with a whopping margin of 41,999 votes, while the Congress candidate polled only 28,955 votes, finishing in third place.
Moreover, on five of these 17 seats, the rebel candidate beat the official Congress candidate and finished as a runner-up or winner.
In several seats, multiple independent candidates of the same caste as the Congress candidate ate into his or her vote, and many of these candidates were reportedly funded by the BJP.
Weak organisational machinery
Defective ticket distribution (80% of tickets were reportedly distributed by Hooda himself, 31% of the total, that is 28 out of 90, went to his own caste), created an impression of impending Jatshahi among non-Jats.
The Congress’s failure to represent caste groups proportionately points towards bad local intelligence and poor ground management, revealing a multi-layered organisational weakness.
The BJP had better caste calculations (they gave tickets to only 16 Jats) and had reliable intelligence on ticket distribution, which helped it outmanoeuvre widespread sentiment against it and register its strongest victory even with an insignificant 0.85 percentage point extra votes compared to 2019.
Moreover, the fact that this was such a close election after ten years of BJP rule and the resulting anti-incumbency reveals that the Congress was unable to enthuse a large enough section of voters because Hooda and by implication Jats were front and centre at the cost of other castes.
This is revealed by the fact that total voter turnout was 67.9% as compared to 76.1% in 2014, when the Congress faced anti-incumbency after ten years in power.
Why the Congress loses
The lessons for the Congress from Haryana are similar to the lessons from Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where too the Congress had a good chance but fought against a more professional setup whose strategy, ticket distribution and party organisation were not left to a local strongman or one individual and where each constituency was drilled down and the largest possible number of constituents were accommodated.
The RSS provides the BJP with ground intelligence that is independent of the factional struggles within the party. They also provide it with organisational robustness.
The workers of the BJP/RSS and its core Hindutva constituents were more motivated as compared to the Congress, revealing a weakness in the latter’s ideological core. This is why even when the Congress comes to power, it does so narrowly and usually only for one term, whereas the BJP is able to beat anti-incumbency.
Rahul Gandhi is trying to fix this and he has made the Congress stand for the deprived against the rich as well as for all communities, but this has not percolated into the organisation. His efforts at organisational reform have been sabotaged by entrenched interests.
How it can win
The Congress will have to be more of an umbrella party, more professional and oganisationally robust, as well as ideologically clear. It should be clear by now that anti-incumbency will not be enough to bring it victory. At this juncture, it really needs more OBC and lower-caste leaders to be thrown up from the grassroots.
It needs organisational and ideological reform from someone who understands the Indian voters’ ideological makeup and how to convey ideas through mass language and convert them into symbols.
Mohsin Raza Khan is a professor at O.P. Global University, Sonipat, Haryana; Pavan Korada is a data analyst and staff writer.