Three key takeaways from today’s results in Maharashtra and Jharkhand | Latest News India

NEW DELHI: There is more than one way to look at the assembly election results for Maharashtra and Jharkhand. And it is worth looking at each of them in some detail. Here are three questions that can help us understand the results.

The incumbent party/alliance returns to power with a larger majority in both Maharashtra and Jharkhand. What explains this? The question is interesting because the results in both these states are in stark contrast to what happened in the Lok Sabha elections less than six months ago. What really happened in this short period? The other important issue is identity-based ideological affiliation with parties and its role in shaping the judgment.

Let’s look at them one by one.

What is one thing that both the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) led government in Jharkhand and the Mahayuti government in Maharashtra did before the elections? They announced cash transfer schemes for women; Ladki Bahin in Maharashtra and Maiya Samman Yojana in Jharkhand. Hemant Soren and Eknath Shinde were not the first chief ministers to do this. Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh have won landslide victories in their states with tailwinds from similar plans. Even the BJP government in Haryana promised a cash transfer scheme for women. It was important enough to find a mention in the speech Narendra Modi gave from the BJP headquarters on the night of the Haryana results.

The key takeaway is simple. Welfare, freebies, doles, whatever you choose to call it, are becoming an indispensable part of the electoral strategy in most parts of India. It does not matter whether it is a poor state or a rich one – Jharkhand and Maharashtra are extreme examples of each – the underclass expects tangible, though seemingly insignificant to the well-off, sums of money in return for votes. Fiscal hawks may scoff at this trend, but it is the Democratic response to what has otherwise been an extremely uneven trajectory for economic growth in the country, as argued in an earlier edition of this column. This trend isn’t going anywhere. Both the government and the markets should take note.

What was one thing that Narendra Modi did right when the BJP had its back against the wall after losing to the Congress in the 2018 assembly elections? National security hawks may say that the Balakot airstrikes in the wake of the Pulwama terror attack changed the narrative. This writer would like to argue that it was the Retrospective Farmer Cash Transfer Scheme or PM-KISAN that was a bigger factor. Rural distress, thanks to worsening terms of trade for agriculture, had played a major role in creating headwinds for the BJP in not only Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in 2018, but also Gujarat in 2017. Modi realized that this anger had to be pacified, which is exactly why he announced a retrospective — send money now verify eligibility later — scheme before the 2019 general election. The rest, as they say, is history. Congress collapsed even in states where it had formed governments less than six months earlier.

Fast forward to the 2024 Interim Budget and this is exactly what Modi got wrong. There was absolutely nothing for the underclass in the 2024 interim budget, which was not just hawkish on fiscal consolidation but actually cut revenue expenditure (if interest payments were to be excluded) even in nominal terms. Revenue expenditure is what matters if you want to swing an election a few months away.

If the mid-budget of 2024 had been more like 2019, would the BJP have done better? In retrospect, there is more evidence to suggest that it would have. The 2024 Lok Sabha verdict was more against the BJP’s fiscal stance – not its ideological stance. This is exactly what this column argued after the Lok Sabha results.

“They (voters) believe that they and their peers, who do not even have basic financial security despite endless toil in the name of work, deserve better. They know that the government cannot solve all their economic problems. But they expect that it strikes when things get tough.And they are upset when it pulls the ground from under their feet and talks down to them.Maybe this time Narendra Modi, the master politician, was wrong he agreed with the fiscal hawks within its economic policy establishment and did not announce any economic palliatives in the interim budget for 2024”, it read.

Last but not least is the question of identity. Does it really work in elections? Ask different people and you will get a different answer.

Hemant Soren is now the most successful Scheduled Tribe (ST) leader in not just Jharkhand but almost all of India outside the Northeast. He has not only swept the ST reserved ACs in the state but built a coalition which has broken down the historic fault line between ST and non-ST voters in the state.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and almost the entire BJP leadership tried very hard to convert the ST versus non-ST binary – the BJP made a non-ST chief minister in 2014 and did not name a CM candidate in these elections – into a Hindu-Muslim in Jharkhand. They failed miserably.

The two Shiv Senas are an even bigger example. Uddhav Thackeray’s faction tried to do an ideological somersault by joining the Congress. He first lost most of his legislative party to Eknath Shinde and then almost all of his popular support.

What is the most important thing about these examples?

Identity may help your politics, but promiscuity dulls the edge. And identity-based projects are not built in a day. JMM has been a party of STs from the day it was born. Shiv Sena embraced Hindutva along with nativism decades ago. The only contradiction in this alliance was whether it was willing to become a junior partner of the BJP. Uddhav Thackeray did not want to do that. Today’s results – the BJP’s MLA tally is double that of its partner Shiv Sena – should settle that question.

Amorphous, friction-ridden identities also do not work. This is exactly why things like caste census or Maratha reservation policy have had very little traction in these elections.

Is there a larger lesson to be learned here? Prominent electoral politics in India requires economic pragmatism and ideological consistency. You cannot force voters to accept an economy that suits the elite and an ideology that is ignorant of ingrained social contradictions in the constituency. The former is mostly uniform in India and the latter is extremely diverse. This is what makes Indian democracy fascinating.

Roshan Kishore, HT’s data and political economy editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political outcomes and vice versa