As 2018-2019 showed, the outcome of the state assembly elections in critical Hindi heartland states, four months before the Lok Sabha elections, is not an accurate window into the popular mood at the national level. The Congress won Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh comfortably in December 2018; the BJP won 62 of the 65 seats in the Lok Sabha from the three states in 2019.
Still, while the results were never going to be a guide for what will happen in 2024 , especially if the BJP lost, the nature of the outcome, where the BJP swept the three states, does suggest the party has a huge advantage heading into the national polls.
Modi Puzzle On State Elections
When it comes to Modi and state elections, there is a conundrum. Even during Modi’s campaigning, Indian politics has seen a trend in which voters have not hesitated to vote for the Congress or regional forces in state elections after the 2018. Because the same voters tell reporters and pollsters that they will vote for the PM during the Lok Sabha elections, these outcomes have been accurately explained as the dominance of local factors over national factors. In addition, Modi’s appeal indeed continues to assist in state elections, as it did in this round.
Party Organizational Muscle
But the party’s careful attention to the issue of organizational leadership at the state, district, constituency, block, and booth levels; its ability to motivate workers at the right time; its enormous resource advantage, propelled both by central and local funding; its clinical assessment of caste dynamics at the local level; its ruthless strategy of ticket distribution (think of its decision to send top national leaders, including central ministers, to contest elections in Madhya Pradesh or remove incumbents to introduce fresh blood in elections,
BJP Narrative Advantage
To be fair, in the past two years, Congress has attempted to politically reinvent itself. It has, in a historic break for the party, backed a caste census, running the risk of alienating upper castes. Rahul Gandhi completed an ambitious Bharat Jodo Yatra. The Congress has presented its own welfarist counter to the BJP. It has sought to build a wider Opposition alliance. It has tried to avoid getting ensnared in the BJP’s trap of being viewed as a party that believes in the “politics of appeasement” with its brand of soft Hindutva