Lessons from BJP’s hat-trick in Haryana

“The Congress ran a 400-metre race like a 100-metre sprint,” Satish Poonia, key Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader in charge of the Haryana campaign, told me. “The Congress may have thought they had more heavyweight leaders, but our workers were better,” he said. The BJP’s win in Haryana should give pause to pundits and pollsters and their proclivity to overinterpret election results.
It is accurate to say that politics after the 2024 Lok Sabha verdict is less one-sided, more fiercely contested, and to that end, by definition, healthier. But the sweeping conclusions about the beginning of the end of the BJP made by several analysts since the party slipped below the majority mark and in anticipation of its Haryana defeat were clearly premature.
This does not mean that the BJP can ignore the issues that are creating discontent on the ground. The rallying cry of “pehelwan, kisan and jawan” (wrestler, farmer, soldier) was not without merit. Else, the Congress could not have clocked an 11% increase in vote share (compared to a little over 3% for the BJP).
But in the first-past-the-post system, winning elections is as much a science as it is an art. And without a committed cadre and organisational cohesion, results are way tougher to pull off. The BJP is clearly not just better at micromanagement, it also has an army of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) volunteers. And if the absence of full-throated RSS support cost the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections, the Haryana campaign seemed to bring them back to the fold. That has been another lesson for all those who saw permanent damage in RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s seeming swipes at Narendra Modi in more than one speech. The BJP and the RSS may have had to manage some frictions and redraw some lines. But their common goals keep them on the same side of the fight. And I doubt you will hear JP Nadda suggest a second time that the BJP has grown independent of the RSS.
The same cannot be said of the Congress campaign in Haryana. When Kumari Selja stayed away from the campaign for 13 days and then went public in multiple interviews, including one with me, about how long she had not spoken to Bhupinder Hooda for, how she was not allowed to contest the assembly elections, and how she still expected to be considered for the post of chief minister (CM), it would have sent a message to Dalit voters in Haryana.
It may not have been the only reason for the division of the Dalit votes, but it is one explanation. Rahul Gandhi and the Congress should be especially concerned by this division because the Samvidhan (Constitution), which was the centrepiece of the Lok Sabha elections clearly did not have the same potent resonance among Dalit voters in the assembly elections. “The intensity of that issue had dimmed by the time these polls came around,” Poonia told me. The domination of the Jat community, personified by the all-powerful Hooda family is likely to have also had an impact on the Dalit voter.
This, in particular, calls for reflection by the Congress leadership. Rahul Gandhi’s central mobilising tool to counter the BJP’s Hindutva politics is the plank of social justice. But in Haryana, it was the BJP that was able to tap into the non-Jat OBC vote and at least a part of the non-Jatav Dalit vote. The BJP pitched “35 biradaris against one” while the Congress ended up looking like a one-family, one-caste party.
The Congress overread the depth of anti-incumbency. There was public discontent, and the BJP responded to it by changing its CM and keeping him away from all publicity material. They also dropped nearly half of the sitting legislators. By contrast, the Congress retained 29 of its 31 sitting MLAs. The party obviously believed itself to be the favoured underdog to such a degree that it believed its incumbents were popular enough. And then the large number of independents played their part.
For the Congress, whose performance in Jammu and Kashmir has also been dismal — it won just one seat in the Jammu region where it was expected to take on the BJP — the small state of Haryana has brought big lessons.
Going into the next round of assembly elections, it has lost some of its negotiating power with its allies. But more than that, the Haryana results have shown that ideological positioning by itself is not enough. Rahul Gandhi’s focus on caste census and politics of representation may have many supporters but unless the Congress is able to build a more agile organisational approach, the messaging may well miss its mark.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author.The views expressed are personal