From Mahayuti’s big comeback to JMM’s powerplay: What the election mandate means

The election cycle of 2024 – from the Lok Sabha polls to a slew of assembly polls – has been relentless, with one poll after the other. So has been the drill of extracting takeaways from each of these polls, despite their fleeting relevance.

Only a month and a half after the Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir state polls, the results of the Maharashtra and Jharkhand assembly elections will also be seen through the dual prisms of provincial politics and their impact on the national scenario. This is why the results add another subtext to the electoral face-off between national rivals – the BJP-led NDA and Congress-led INDIA, which is the Mahayuti and the Maha Vikas Aghadi in Maharashtra, respectively.  

The emphatic victory of BJP-led Mahayuti in a big state like Maharashtra and a regional force like JMM powering the Congress-led INDIA bloc to retain power in Jharkhand carry different meanings for the key alliances. Even if the scoreline of this round of duel reads 1-1, there is no prize for guessing that the BJP-led NDA will be far happier with the bigger prize in the bag, and also because of the scale of its win in Maharashtra. 

In a quick reversal of the BJP-Mahayuti’s lacklustre show in the 48 Lok Sabha seats of Maharashtra this summer, the alliance’s resounding tally of 227 seats (at the time of writing this piece) in the 288-seat state assembly is a tale of resilience. 

At the same time, it reflects the decoupling of the Lok Sabha poll outcome from the assembly polls. 

The Mahayuti allies – the BJP, Shiv Sena Eknath Shinde faction, and Ajit Pawar’s NCP – could grasp that the vote share difference between them and the MVA was only around one percent in the Lok Sabha polls. Even within a short duration of five months, this gap could be closed by organisational push, targeted welfare programmes, and better coordination among allies. 

The alliance also had to quell the effects of the MVA’s bogey-raising campaign about constitution-backed quotas and the Maratha reservation agitation led by activists like Manoj Jarange Patil. The Mahayuti’s response to these challenges was two-fold: clear messaging to dispel doubts and reaching out to some social groups to strengthen its support base. 

The second set of responses included OBC vote consolidation to counter the losses that Mahayuti had suffered in the Marathwada region in the Lok Sabha polls, partly because of Jarange’s Maratha quota stir. It also meant that the Mahayuti’s strategy worked on regaining support of sections of 17 percent Dalit vote in the state. 

The BJP, for instance, reached out to caste groups like the Mahar, which is largely Buddhist and has traditionally not supported the party. Union Minister Kiren Rijiju, a Buddhist himself, led this initiative by trying to dispel misgivings about the party at community meetings. The alliance also pitched the sub-quota issue within scheduled castes with an eye for the traction it could have among some groups within the Dalit community.

To add to that, the late dole push, in the form of Chief Minister Eknath Shinde-led state government’s Ladki Bahin Yojna, a direct cash transfer scheme for women, seems to have helped carve a support base among millions of beneficiaries. 

These elements of continuity and even recalibration were put through a strategy of making it a 288-constituencies poll by sheer organisational push. The BJP’s campaign was reinforced by the RSS, while the party cadre of Shinde’s Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar’s NCP could only benefit by making the rival alliance spread thin across all constituencies. The strategic synergy, despite minor irritants among key leaders of the alliance — including the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis, the NCP’s Ajit Pawar, and Eknath Shinde — was deployed to offset the charges of opportunism that saw the formation and toppling of state governments in Maharashtra in the last five years.

In Jharkhand, CM Hemant Soren-led JMM again became the regional nucleus for the INDIA bloc to retain power. In the process, the regional party seems to have harnessed the sympathy that it sought for its leader as a victim of the purported witchhunt by central agencies like the ED. The party also deployed a blend of dole politics for women beneficiaries, like the Maiya Samman Yojna, and the invocation of the nativist identity. 

The rival BJP-led NDA, which lost power in the state in 2019, seems headed for a tally of 25 seats in the 81-seat assembly, almost the same as the 2019 polls. In fact, its vote share also remained mostly unchanged at around 33 percent, reflecting a lost chance to build on the voter base and make foray into new voter groups. 

Along with this, the by-poll results in some states were more or less on predictable lines, with only a few exceptions. The BJP-led NDA will see the by-poll outcomes in UP, Bihar, and Assam as a popular endorsement of the alliance, while the TMC in West Bengal and the Congress in Karnataka also got favourable results. 

Priyanka Gandhi’s win from Wayanad, almost a foregone conclusion once she came into contest after her brother vacated the seat, will possibly be the first occasion when three members of the Gandhi family will be in Parliament at the same time – Sonia Gandhi in the Rajya Sabha and Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi in the Lok Sabha.

In scoring a resounding win in Maharashtra, the BJP-led NDA has shown resilience in reclaiming pole position, even if the rival Congress-led alliance has rode on a regional player’s appeal to hold on its turf in Jharkhand. That is one of the parting notes of a hectic electoral year like 2024, which saw many poll battles fought in the national and provincial arenas. The summer brought mixed results for the rival alliances, and it now seems the early days of winter have brought more provincial cheers for the governing alliance at the centre. 

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