As we have been projecting throughout this election season, NDA is increasing its vote-share in at least 4 states of the core-zone – Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi – while it is losing some votes in 5 states – Karnataka, Haryana, Maharashtra, Bihar and Rajasthan. Yet, our models indicate that in the core zone, BJP+ is net gaining about 1 percentage point from 2019.

Overall, in this zone, NDA should win 281 seats, though it must be stressed here that we haven’t polled Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, so our models are either using third party data or simply extrapolating current data of other parts on to past data to project the overall tally.

In a hyper-wave election, BJP may maximise its seats in 3 states, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh which could potentially open up the path for 400+ as there are at least 15 seats where NDA is currently trailing in our models but can flip them in a big wave like scenario.

The opposition INDI alliance is only showing minor improvement in the core zone in terms of vote-share but is not adding much in terms of seats. The problem for the opposition is that it is most certainly going to draw a blank in 6 states which itself makes the task uphill for the INDI alliance to make any meaningful recovery in this election cycle.

What could go wrong in our overall projection? There are 19 seats in this zone that are closely contested victories allocated to NDA. Even if NDA loses half of them on election day, there won’t be much impact on the overall result as Modi would still win a bigger mandate than 2019. If NDA loses all of them, then it would bring the 2024 Modi victory to the same level as the last time. Our models currently show greater confidence in an upside surprise for NDA rather than downside surprise because the data is pointing towards a wave election.

BJP’s domination in the East and huge growth in the south will be the stories of 2024 elections. We have already made the bold projection that BJP+ will be among the top two parties in all the 5 states and it is most likely inevitable now.

BJP’s domination of the east is another phenomenon we have been discussing throughout the election season. We have shown time and again how there is massive wave of anti-incumbency in Odisha and West Bengal, while there was pro-incumbency in Assam. The only difference between Odisha and Bengal is that in the former it is just fatigue with Naveen Patnaik’s BJD whereas in the latter it is mass Hindu anger against Mamata’s Muslim appeasement government.

In Andhra Pradesh also we had already projected an NDA wave sweeping out the YSRCP in the Lok Sabha election and in Telangana, we had projected BJP hitting double digit seats which was a stunning rise compared to just a few months ago when Congress had swept the state and BJP was nowhere. Our models are 77% confident that BJP will be the single largest in Telangana both in terms of votes as well as seats.

In Tamil Nadu, our models had projected 90 lakh plus votes for NDA and we still think this is the case, we have only converted 2 tossups into NDA wins now. Coimbatore could well become the 5^th BJP win on election day as Annamalai is not trailing by much and has a serious chance of coming through.

In Kerala, our models are a bit conservative and projecting 36 to 45 lakh votes for the BJP which should convert into 3 seats. It is the complete meltdown of the Left that will be the story of Kerala where Congress is expected to win all the remaining seats.

Despite such an improved performance by the BJP+ in the peripheral zone, there is still upside potential in almost all the states (except for Assam), as BJP can still improve upon this tally in Telangana, West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala where it can add more than a dozen seats in a wave election by winning even those seats where our models are currently projecting it to be trailing narrowly.

Overall, in the peripheral zone BJP’s (only the party on its own) vote share is projected to have improved by more than 3 percentage points at the national level as compared to 2019.

The peripheral zone was supposed to be the INDI alliance’s strong area but even here it is trailing the NDA by quite a decent vote-share. In fact, it is only in Kerala and Tamil Nadu that the INDI alliance is doing well which is bringing in 53 of the 78 seats the opposition is winning (TMC tally has also been added to the INDI alliance total).

What could go wrong to our projections? Actually there isn’t much that can go wrong. At worst, TMC may win 3-4 more seats where BJP is currently showing narrow leads, other than this possibility, most of the data from this zone is pretty much baked in. Once again, the upside surprise is more likelier than a downside revision on counting day.

Overall, nationally, BJP is projected to get 42% vote-share and the other NDA allies to add another 8%, taking the Modi vote to 50%. The Opposition INDI alliance is projected to be stuck at 33% which means it is closer to half of what NDA is nationally which obviously gets reflected in the number of seats.

Our models are projecting 334 seats for the BJP and 53 seats for NDA allies taking the total tantalisingly close to 400 at 387 seats overall. These 387 include Punjab, Jammu and other union territories apart from the two zones discussed above. Once again, it must be stressed that in a wave election, 400 is very much possible as there are multiple paths to reach that top.

INDI alliance (including TMC) should get about 135 seats with Congress winning about 50 seats on its own. These 135 also include Punjab, Kashmir and other union territories along with the tallies from the two zones discussed above. The “Others” and Independents column will probably the weakest ever with only 21 seats being allocated to them.

“According to all available evidence, Mughal Emperor Babur visited Ayodhya in 1528, destroyed the temple situated at the site believed to be Ram Janmasthan and constructed a mosque in its place”. This was the simple 2 line resolution that would change the course of history. It was adapted in the small nondescript Rotary club of Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, which could hardly accommodate a few dozen people. The Bharatiya Janata Party, the world’s largest political party today, was so small in its size back then on June 9^th 1989 that the entire party’s national convention could be held in that small rotary club.

Palampur resolution of 1989 though small in size and stature (missed by most media narratives back then) would have such far reaching consequences merely a few months later in the national elections when BJP would rise from a paltry 2 seat party to become the 3^rd largest national party with 85 MPs. History is made by a few words uttered at the right time. History also has a sense of its bearings. Such a momentous resolution couldn’t have happened anywhere else but on the Himalayan foothills of the Dauladhar.

Almost completely untouched by Mughal or Islamic influences, with no Azaan to be ever heard anywhere in the vicinity, with no Mughlai cuisine penetrating the local culinary habits that maintain their pristine purity from the times of Mahabharata, with no diluting of traditions that have remained ensconced within the mountains for many centuries, Palampur, nestled at the most beautiful confluence of the Kangra Valley understood her place in history. She was a small town that would redefine the character of Indian democracy without ever demanding larger recognition.

Deep sense of nationalism and historic pride about the Vedic civilization flows through the veins of Palampur. It is that nondescript smallest of small towns which has sacrificed two of her most famous sons in the defence of Bharat Mata. The very first and the very last Param Vir Chakra winners lived in and around Palampur, just 10 miles apart!

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“Coalition politics can never be reversed now because of the radical socio-economic changes at the grassroots due to deepening of democracy” had become one of the core intellectual arguments in the late 90’s and 2000’s when India seemingly produced ever more deeply fragmented verdicts along caste and regional fault lines. There was a smug sense of achievement among these intellectual class about how India will never become a single nation and will always remain a deeply balkanised federal state.

The western political scientists triumphally declared that this is how democracy always progresses, ultimately towards a liberal society with each caste ethnic group fending for itself through its own political infrastructure. “Political coalition creates enough pulls and pressures from different political parties, so India can never become a single cultural state like what the RSS envisages” declared Jefferlot. The three core philosophies of BJP, Ram Mandir, abrogation of article 370 and Uniform Civil Code, were dubbed as fringe majoritarian ideas that will never get mainstream acceptance. In fact, after the 2009 victory of Congress-led UPA, Vir Sanghvi declared that “BJP is a party of old ideas and terminally in decline which may never again come back to power as it will never get enough allies”.

Not to be left behind, the then Indian Express editor, Shekhar Gupta gleefully argued that “the chief minister is the most powerful man in India today and Prime Minister is merely a figurehead with no real powers”. At the heart of this argument was the idea that regional chieftains will be running India for the foreseeable future and will choose a symbolic Prime Minister like Manmohan Singh to simply manage day to day functioning. The lofty term “true federalism” was often bandied about to justify this balkanization of the Indian nation. The Congress party was seen as a natural benefactor of such a “federal polity”. In fact, the Sonia Gandhi model of sacrificing the Prime Minister’s post and belittling it by making Manmohan a mere figurehead was hailed as the best possible way forward for such blooming of a federal, liberal, secular state.

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In 1921, the total number of volunteers of Congress Seva Dal in the United Provinces (now mostly, Uttar Pradesh) was said to be around 90,000 spread across the then 36 districts. Congress mostly derived its electoral strength from this volunteer corps. By the time India had gained independence in 1947, the Seva Dal had lost all its sheen and virtually dissipated as an organization with less than 20,000 members who mostly never undertook any social work in the first place.

In 1947, there was another much stronger volunteer organization in UP known as the Muslim National Guards which had a strength of 37,000 and was keenly organizing the leftover Muslims after partition and polarising them against the Hindu populace. The core philosophy of Muslim National Guards was derived from Abu A’la Maududi, the Amir of Jamaat-e-Islami who used to propagate that “if just a few thousand Communists and Nazis could control Russia and Germany, why can’t 80 million Muslims control even a Hindu majority India?”. It is in this milieu that the RSS had begun to rise in UP in the 30’s and had grown by 1947 into the second largest volunteer organisation in the state with more than 31,000 swayam sevaks working for the Hindu socio-political interests.

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At around midnight, a dozen men had entered the Gohana government guesthouse of Sonipat district and had started beating up the two guests black and blue, using their lathis. Both the guests were nothing less than powerful ministers in the Haryana government and had actually been there on official duty. In fact, one of them was even a woman who later went on to become a powerful national leader but she had just made her debut then in the Haryana assembly. She was Sushma Swaraj and her ministerial colleague was the powerful Jan Sangh leader, Dr Mangal Sen.

The ordeal of both the ministers on that dark night of 1978 apparently lasted for a couple of hours and both had to be treated by local doctors before leaving. The men with lathis were only following the directions of their own Chief Minister, Ch. Devi Lal!

In fact, Ch. Devi Lal’s Lok Dal faction was popularly referred to as Lath Dal in Haryana and used brute force against other caste leaders of his own government from time to time to keep them in check. Different opposition parties had all come together on the Janata platform and had won a whopping 87 seats out of 90 in the 1977 post-emergency election and had formed a government with all the factions getting equal representation. The Jat community though was simply loath to share power with other castes and wanted Devi Lal to have full control of governance. Eventually, unable to take the highhandedness of the Lath Dal, all the other caste leaders came together and ousted the Devi Lal government in 1979 and anointed Bhajan Lal as the new chief minister. Then Jat anger came to the forefront and the state digressed into chaos and violence. The Jats would simply not let any of the ruling government’s ministers or MLAs enter in to their villages (sounds familiar today, doesn’t it?)

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“The price of fish has never been this cheap since the partition of Bengal!” was the common refrain on the streets of Kolkata. Fish, as you know, is one of the staples of Bengali diet. It was the year of the fish for the households in Bengal, after a long decade of struggle. Local folklore goes that the Bengali families had never celebrated their daily meals as much as they did that year, even as the price of fish kept crashing in the market. Happy with their dietary success, a whole generation of Bengalis had suddenly turned positive. The morale was supposedly so high that an industrial truce was achieved and long standing disputes between trade unions and employers had seemingly been solved overnight!

This was the winter of 1971, a far cry from the previous decade of grave instability, political violence, spread of Naxalism and pitched battles on the streets. In just the previous 2 years, Bengal had seen 4 sets of assembly elections and none had provided any political direction. So the winter of 1971 was a total anomaly to the prevailing atmosphere in the state. Who could have thought that all one had to do was provide them with enough fish and the wayward Bengalis would fall into line? Can you think about a more fishy morale booster than this… well? Think hard.

1971 was a year of hope. A year like this had not been witnessed since the dawn of independence in 1947. A year when the opposition leader Vajpayee with his unparalleled oratory skills had declared Indira Gandhi as “Maa Durga”. It was as if all those promises made long ago about the “new dawn of India when the world was asleep” were about to come true after all. India had liberated Bangladesh from West Pakistan and delivered it to the doorstep of Kolkata. Probably no one had anticipated the consequences of such a move. The opening of borders between West Bengal and Bangladesh had meant that Bangladeshi fishermen, long looking for a market, had suddenly found hundreds of thousands of households as a readymade market in Kolkata and all across West Bengal who had been deprived of “easy fishing” since the partition of Bengal. It was a symbiotic relationship. Pakistan had run a totally lopsided industrial policy, keeping East Pakistan completely dependent on West Pakistan for all manufactured goods. So, after the Bangladeshi independence, immediately, there was a massive demand of daily goods like Cigarettes, Match Box, Cooking oil etc. from the industries of West Bengal, particularly the Kolkata suburbs.

It is said that being in Kolkata in 1971-72 was an experience in itself. “There was so much hope in the air” explains a former industrialist at his home, a stone’s throw away from the commercial district of Park Street. “We were drawing plans to expand our factories everywhere, we wanted to diversify into everything… there was talk about the war ravaged Bangladesh requiring their entire rail network to be rehauled, think of all the opportunities it would throw up to Indian Railways contractors, the locomotives, the tracks and so many associated industries.” He reminisced. It is said that the Jute Industry which was the mainstay of Kolkata had virtually doubled overnight in terms of size “because a whole country was getting added as a client state to the industry”.

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Electoral politics in India underwent a dramatic transformation with the turn of the millennium that almost none of the so called intellectuals or political analysts noticed. Even the RSS which usually has a sharp sense of the socio-political trends in India took nearly a decade to understand this phenomenon. To this day, nobody has really made an attempt to decipher this change fully and make sense of this new India that we witness every day.

For the first 5 decades of our democratic existence, namely, the 50’s, the 60’s, the 70’s, the 80’s and the 90’s, electoral current in India flew from the villages to the cities. Many political leaders and parties used to face severe rural anger and wouldn’t even realise in their cocoons of urban dwelling that a massive anti-incumbency wave was sweeping against their governments. Rural anger or rural support was the most important factor that decided who would win or lose an election. There are dozens of examples of this, but let us just take two national elections as an example. The 1989 election which is widely regarded as the “Bofors” election was actually a rural anger election against the Rajiv Gandhi government’s handling of the severe 1988 drought. Similarly, in 1996, despite running a very successful liberalisation government, P.V. Narasimha Rao failed to anticipate the rural angst against his policies which were yet to bear any fruit to the villages.

After two generations of reforms – first by the P.V.N government and the second by the Vajpayee government – something had drastically changed in India in early 2000’s. Political current had begun to now flow from its cities to its villages. At first, slowly, then gathering steam from 2009 onwards. Why was this happening? There are essentially 3 parts to that answer.

1. With liberalization, there was far greater migration of labour from rural to urban India with much greater employment prospects.

2. The opening up of communication and Internet through the smart phones meant greater communication between the two Indias, urban and rural, that had hitherto lived in their own silos.

3. Through exposure to the world, the villages of India began to reflect as a microcosm of urban dwellings with similar aspirations and similar goals.

So, when Vajpayee led NDA lost power to UPA by a thin margin of seats in 2004, do you know what was the most peculiar feature of those results? BJP and NDA had lost virtually every seat in three of the largest metropolitan areas of India in terms of Lok Sabha seats – Delhi-NCR, Mumbai-Thane belt and the greater Kolkata region. That was the first demonstration of how the political current had begun to flow from the big cities to the villages.

In 2009, when Manmohan Singh returned back to power spectacularly defeating L.K. Advani, the same encore was repeated. BJP again failed to register any wins in the three largest metropolitan regions (by Lok Sabha seats). It was this status-quo that Modi challenged in 2014. He built a largely urban aspirational campaign and then scaled that model to the rural parts. This has been one of the least understood parts of his political journey but then Modi had a head start over the assorted intellectuals and political observers of the country, because he had witnessed this shifting current in Gujarat over the decade that he had presided over the state. He is an extremely astute observer of politics and had internalised this transformation long before he took stage at the national level.

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Pandu Shivaji, an ordinary mill worker stood up from the audience and requested that he be allowed to come on to the stage and speak. As soon as he was allowed to do so, he went on a tirade against the three leaders sitting on the stage. “Borkar is a stooge of the Congress and his two associates here, Kubal and Mayekar have never been with us mill workers, reject them all and support the hammer and sickle” he had shouted to a rising roar among the audience.

The year was 1937, this scene had unfolded during a campaign rally in Mumbai’s Lalbagh area which was then an out and out communist stronghold. Keshav Dada Borkar who was the uncrowned king of Ghodapdeo (which is now a non-descript neighbourhood of Byculla but was once home to hundreds of textile mills and thousands of chawls were workers lived) had been entrusted by the Congress party to make inroads into Communist strongholds of the city. On that day, after his diatribe, Borkar’s goons caught hold of Pandu Shivaji and thrashed him black and blue. Not to be left behind, the Communists then started pelting stones at Borkar and his gang. Soon a massive riot ensued and both rival factions fought it out, reportedly, for more than 5 hours.

This was the 1930’s when there was an undeclared war between Congress and Communists in the city of Mumbai. Keshav Dada Borkar was the right hand man of S.K. Patil and had a unique way of organising mill workers through a network of gymnasiums where he trained his goons to fight pitched battles against the Communists. These gymnasium networks were the precursor to today’s Shakha system in Mumbai. The city always needed such organising skills, then it was the fight between Congress and Communists, in the 80’s it got transformed into a fight between Marathas and outsiders and from the 90’s onwards it became a fight for Hindutva.

Bala Saheb’s Shiv Sena was therefore not a new invention, it was merely an adaptation of the Borkar-Communist organisation to newer needs of Mumbai. If he hadn’t bequeathed the Shakha system, Mumbai would have invented another Bala Saheb to do the same simply because the teeming millions couldn’t survive without such a socio-economic infrastructure.

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“This is the first election of 21^st century… slowly, in 20-25 years – maybe not in the next 5-10 years – roadshows, yatras, public meetings and other traditional forms of campaigning will all be done on the electronic media. How you present yourself on television, how you look, how you dress, how you talk will be the main thing.” Pramod Mahajan had explained right before the 2004 elections. BJP reportedly spent a whopping 65 Crore rupees for its media blitzkrieg in the 2004 campaign.

It turned out to be one of the biggest failed campaigns in the history of electoral politics. Mahajan’s entire assumption of “electronic media” replacing all traditional forms of campaigning was so deeply flawed that it has been virtually ridiculed by history. At that point of time when Mahajan made his blunder, the only form of electronic media that existed was satellite television; social media was yet to be born and internet was simply an urban geek network with under 5% penetration across India. Two decades later, the sheer expansion of the media-tech universe that we have seen today was virtually unimaginable back then – 80% of India uses smart phones and cheap data packages have penetrated across the entire rural landscape of India.

Yet, traditional campaigning has not disappeared at all. If anything, Narendra Modi has emerged as the greatest campaigner ever in India. His roadshows, public meetings, yatras and on the ground activities are the mainstay of BJP’s meteoric rise over the last ten years. Party spokespersons on TV channels, social media influencers etc are merely an addendum to the actual ground campaign of the party. For instance, one of the biggest reasons for BJP defeating the mighty combo of SP-BSP in 2019 was the way the party approached the labharthis of the state. In every polling booth, BJP workers were given a special voter list containing the names of people who had benefitted from either the central or state government schemes within their booth area and these workers went and directly sought support from these voters.

This is, in fact, the core Hedgewar philosophy which became the founding principle of the RSS – to build physical networks of Swayamsevaks by working on the ground. The Mahajan innovation of 2004 was merely an aberration, BJP and the Sangh went back to their natural state of existence with the rise of Modi. This is why when people make these lofty assumptions about the 2024 elections having the same vibes as the 2004 cycle, we must make the clear distinction. There are four broad areas in how these two election cycles are completely different, let us analyse each of them.

Unlike the 2004 top-heavy approach of the BJP focussed too much on messaging rather than working on the ground, this time around BJP is the only party that is working tirelessly on the ground in most parts of India – examples abound from Kerala, Andhra and Telangana to Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh where party workers are highly organized at the polling booth level and constituency level. In fact, we have observed everywhere that it is the opposition and Congress workers who are mostly missing from action leading to lower turnouts in their erstwhile strongholds – have personally heard at least on 3 occasions from poor Muslim voters complaining that there is nobody to “take them to polling booths, while earlier everything used to be organised days in advance”.

Prime Minister Modi’s popularity is still at its highest watermark and his campaign is pitch perfect, rising at the right time and peaking at the best time, unlike the Vajpayee campaign of 2004 which hardly ever took off due to his ill health. Everywhere you go on the ground you hear the same rhetoric – “after Modi’s rally here, opposition workers have gone silent and voters have shifted to lotus” – we have heard some version of this statement in dozens of constituencies in different geographies from ordinary people. Not once have we encountered a similar rhetoric for any opposition leader, including Rahul Gandhi. Today nobody in India has the unlimited capacity to alter the local narrative like Modi by just conducting a rally or a roadshow.

Unlike 2004 when there was a lot of drought related distress in rural India and general disenchantment in urban India, Modi and his governance models are immensely popular even today. Broadly five positives get mentioned everywhere; Ram Mandir, the DBT that gets into their accounts with zero corruption, free ration, infrastructure and better law and order (especially in states like UP, MP and Bihar). Conversely, by mid-March 2004, the opposition campaign had picked up steam while BJP’s was faltering badly, whereas today we haven’t seen any such signs on the ground except for rare states like Karnataka. What about unemployment and price rise? These issues are perennial and Indian voters have long stopped choosing governments based on these issues as they simply cannot make much of a distinction from one party or the other – this is technically a mass behavioural pattern wherein the masses consciously or subconsciously equate all political parties as equally competent or incompetent in handling these issues and consequently this fails to become an electoral issue and rather transforms into a societal structural issue.

The sheer margins that BJP is getting in its stronghold regions that have polled so far is a very strong signal of why 2024 is different from 2004. In 2004, the data was very clear, even in those seats that BJP was winning, the margins were touch and go at best. Today, data is very clear, say from Uttar Pradesh or Gujarat where the party is actually improving from its highest peak of 2019 which would not have happened had there been a 2004 like disenchantment with the BJP.

The business end of the elections are over. 379 parliamentary constituencies have already voted. 19 states have fully completed their voting process. India has, for all practical purposes decided the trajectory of 2024, it is now only about adding to the margins and collecting the bits and pieces. Our servers now have enough data to make the clearest projections for this elections. We ran thousands of simulations using our predictive algorithms to arrive at our final projections for 2024 and here is what we think is going to happen, with a fair degree of certainty.

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The then care-taker Prime Minister of India, Chandrashekhar had attended a campaign rally in Lucknow on 2^nd May 1991. There were reportedly some 300 policemen deployed at the venue for the Prime Minister’s rally and the number of people in the audience was less than 100! Earlier, the PM had fought tooth and nail with his protegee, Mulayam Singh Yadav, to get a Lok Sabha ticket from SJP to his ‘special’ lady friend, Hiru Saxena from Lucknow to fight against BJP stalwart Atal Behari Vajpayee. Everybody knew that Mrs Saxena was neither politically competent nor had the resources to fight against the mighty Vajpayee, but Chandrashekhar was blind to all this.

Needless to say that BJP went on to win the seat easily and gave its best performance in the state till then by winning 51 LS seats, while the SJP managed to win only 4 due to Chandrashekhar’s affinity to distribute tickets to his friends and followers. Mulayam parted ways with his mentor and built the famous M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) vote combo and stayed at the top for almost three decades.

This is how tickets were “distributed” in India for long. All one had to do was to be close to a top leader and one would be assured of political rise. The change that Modi era politics has brought to India is that tickets are no longer given at whims and fancies of a few top leaders because BJP is so focussed on the “winnability” factor, the opposition too is forced to make each candidate count. Look at how Congress has distributed tickets in Karnataka and Telangana with meticulous caste calculations and understanding the capacity to mobilise resources. Earlier, in Congress ruled states, at least 3-4 tickets were simply given as “gifts” by the leaders to their friends and followers, now every seat matters because BJP and Modi fight every election with a total “do-or-die” spirit.

Take the case of Kannauj today which is an out and out Samajwadi stronghold that the party has won nonstop since 1998, for 8 times (including by-elections) and has been represented by 3 members of the SP’s first family – Mulayam himself, Akhilesh twice and Dimple Yadav too. Only in 2019, BJP managed to snatch it by a small margin. This time around, Akhilesh has taken matters in his own hands and is contesting from here with full backing of his party machinery. Normally, in the past other parties would tend not to divert too many resources in such star constituencies and try to focus on other “winnable” seats. In fact, prior to the rise of Modi, most top leaders of all parties would indulge in “adjustment” politics by putting weak candidates against the top leaders. Now that is no longer the case. Even in Kannauj, Akhilesh faced solid resistance today, so much so that it has remained undecided at the end of the day.

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It was on March 29^th 1951 that Pathala Bhairavi was declared a blockbuster. 12 years later on 29^th March 1963, one of the greatest hits of Telugu film industry, Lava Kusa was released. A decade later, again on 29^th March 1973, the first Telugu social in colour, Desoddharakulu was released to wide spread appreciation. They were all movies that starred the matinee idol N.T. Rama Rao who naturally believed that the date was highly auspicious for him. So when he stood in the club hall on the first floor of new MLA quarters at 2:30 PM on the 29^th of March 1982, the thousands who had gathered were anticipating something historic to be unveiled.

In grand filmy style, he took out a piece of paper from his pocket and read out the name of his party. “Telugu Desam Party” and further announced, “I am a Telugu man. From today onwards, I have decided to devote myself to the cause of our state. I have decided to fight to revive the glory of our cultural heritage and of our language. Therefore, we will call our party Telugu Desam.” Legend has it that Indira Gandhi never really took him seriously when he made his political debut. After all, Andhra Pradesh was one of the very few states that had stood by her even in 1977 when the Janata wave had overtaken the entire country. Even the national media largely discounted his political debut as a mere tamasha.

Unlike MGR in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu who had the entire Dravidian political movement to support him, NTR did not have any political infrastructure, neither did he have cadre or foot soldiers on the ground. He had to build everything from the scratch. Mr. Rama Rao, contrary to popular belief about his whimsical nature, was a methodical man and highly organized. He had meticulously planned everything before he began his political journey. Thus, within just 9 months of his political debut, he went on to win more than 200 seats (out of 294) in the then undivided Andhra Pradesh assembly which remains a sort of record in Indian electoral politics.

This is the nature of Andhra people where politics is always in a flux and they are constantly experimenting with their choices. Consider this, in the last decade, the now divided states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, have seen 4 completely different parties forming a government; Congress, TDP, YSRCP and TRS (now BRS). Such changes are highly unusual in other geographies. Yet these changes are also top heavy with only the party and leadership at the top changing while local satraps simply moving from one side to the other. For instance, even N.T. Rama Rao derived most of his political infrastructure by borrowing leaders from the Congress party and other established faces.

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“We have all been rendered powerless since yesterday” Rambhau Pandey had rued that night, “all of us are Savarnas”, he had further gone on to underscore. This was a story that very few people know about; the great village purge of the 90’s Uttar Pradesh. “19,000 Gram Panchayat Pradhans have been eliminated by the government, 70% of them were savarnas, remaining were other OBCs”, Pandey ji had explained. The Mulayam government, had almost overnight, undertaken a delimitation exercise of the local Panchayats and had, for the first time, brought down the total number of Panchayats from 74,000 to about 55,000 – delimitation exercise generally only changes the boundaries of a constituency/panchayat while the overall numbers remain the same, but here he had blatantly eliminated panchayats that were not ruled by his caste brethren.

It was the great Mandal-Mulayam blueprint of concentrating power and financial resources in the hands of Yadavs starting from the village unit. If you thought Mandal politics was all about reservations, think again. It was all about transferring power and money into the hands of Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. This is how the Yadavs came on to the power position in the heartland. Mulayam had essentially cracked open the Panchayati Raj system and turned it into a vehicle for power. Huge budgetary allocations were then given to the Panchayats by the government and all the thekas and permits were cornered by the Yadavs through a systematically channelized governance model.

Both Mulayam and Lalu then forged an alliance of Yadavs and Muslims in the villages and towns to create a block of roughly 30% votes which was more than enough to win an election in multi-cornered fights by adding a mere 3-4% incremental vote to their blocks. This is how the famous MY combo held sway throughout the 90’s and 2000’s which almost completely blunted the BJP’s Hindutva plank. This total domination of Yadavs in the power-money system created a great deal of resentment among all other castes who began to slowly challenge the Mandal-Mulayam politics.

The first time this system was challenged was by Mayawati in 2007 when she famously created a bridge between Brahmins and Jatavs which was able to trounce the MY combo. The BJP and the RSS had sensed the nascent beginnings of a Hindu coalition in the heartland in 2007, but still lacked the demographic depth to penetrate the society as a whole. It was with the rise of Modi in 2014 that the true USHV – United Spectrum of Hindu Votes – coalition arose, and the rest, as they say is history.

Phase 3 – Core-Heartland analysis

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“Our vote is for tiffin”, “We are all voting for tiffin” were some of the war cries heard on the streets of Gulbarga. Even local Congress leaders and workers were campaigning to get all the votes for “tiffin”. The year was 1980 when the Congress high-command had nominated Chambakassery Mathai Stephen aka C.M. Stephen who was from Kerala and had no connect whatsoever from this backward district of north Karnataka. He never even went there to campaign. The local Congress leaders, finding it difficult to pronounce his name, had adopted the easier “tiffin” moniker for campaign purposes and the gullible masses followed suit. C.M. Stephen won the seat easily and went on to become a minister in the Indira cabinet. Such were the times of “the idea of India” democracy.

Geographies like Hyderabad-Karnataka, the Yadav belt in UP, the Malda-Murshidabad belt in West Bengal, the Desh parts of Maharashtra, these are all typical geographies that unwittingly and unknowingly powered the “idea of India” democracy for many decades. There were three common patterns visible in these geographies.

1. Fragmentation of Hindu votes, partly due to gullibility and partly due to myriad self-interests

2. A large enough segment of Hindu voters making common cause with Muslims

3. Powerful leaders like Mulayam, Pawar, Kharge etc. holding sway through the 3M route – Money, Muscle and Minorities.

This time around, fortunately or unfortunately, the election schedule was such that all these geographies went to polls on the same day in the third phase of 2024 elections. To that extent, this was the toughest phase of election for BJP, though what we wanted to test was how much have the ground realities changed in these geographies due to the emergence of USHV as a demographic phenomenon. To be sure, at the outset, this phase looks like it is overwhelmingly favouring the saffron party because of the oversized impact of Gujarat which is a foregone conclusion by all means. Yet, for us here at 5Forty3 datalabs, the real story of 2024 is to observe whether the Modi wave is intact after a decade and whether BJP+ is actually increasing vote-share or shedding votes.

As you already know, we are looking at this election through two dimensions to try and quantify the growth or degrowth of both the alliances – the NDA and the INDI – as compared to 2019. The first dimension is what we call the “core heartland” and the second dimension is the “Periphery” consisting of the east and the south. Needless to say, the core heartland is the NDA stronghold whereas the periphery is more of a fragmented zone split between the INDI alliance and other parties like the TMC in West Bengal, the YSRCP in Andhra Pradesh, the BJD in Odisha, the Communists in Kerala, the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and other smaller parties in the North East.

Essentially, our trackers are trying to model two different sets of elections; the core election and the peripheral election; which will then be used to do a comparative analysis using the 2019 metrics of these underlying geographies through each passing phase. This is our big macro innovation for 2024, the core v/s periphery predictive analysis at the macro level which will give us the clearest possible trend.

But first let us do the round-up of three keenly watched constituencies of this phase, which we were micro-tracking.

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The year was 1991 when two of the biggest stalwarts of the Janata Dal were entrusted to make inroads into north Karnataka – one of them was a former Chief Minister, the other one would go on to be a Chief Minister latter in his life. The entire political class and the local as well as national media had then predicted that both would emerge victorious with consummate ease. Ramakrishna Hegde, despite being a Brahman himself, was the tallest Lingayat leader of the 80’s and 90’s and was contesting from Bagalkot, the veritable heartland of Lingayat politics. Siddaramaiah, the tallest Kuruba leader (Kurubas are politically analogous to Yadavs of north India), who was then in Janata Dal, was contesting from Koppal.

Both the stalwarts of the Janata Parivar humiliatingly lost their respective Lok Sabha elections to the Congress party in 1991. This has been the default political trend of the state, voters keep going back to the Congress party invariably, after brief interludes of experimentation. This is especially true of the Hyderabad-Karnataka region which is now known as Kalyana Karnataka. This is why when the Italian born Sonia Gandhi was looking for a safe seat to make her debut in 1999, her political managers chose Bellary from Kalyana Karnataka over all other regions of India.

Even last year, in state assembly elections, this region handsomely rewarded the Congress party to once again reaffirm its historic tryst of returning back to the Congress embrace. An unlikely combination of Muslims, backwards, Dalits and even a segment of upper castes go with Congress from time to time in this region to provide the grand old party a new lease of life. To that extent, USHV fails here and that is what perplexes the BJP leadership time and again, for they fail to solve the puzzle of Karnataka.

With that background in mind, the second phase of Karnataka elections unfolded today on the 7^th of May, in scorching heat of 42 degrees (which feels like 45 due to humidity). This is once again the battle of USHV v/s Karnataka’s tendency to deviate from that path. After first phase, our radar was trained to look for patterns that would tell us whether we are looking at the repeat of 2019 scenario or a deviation.

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We apologise to those of you who are still facing technical issues with subscription here. We have therefore created a special mirror site 5forty3.org where all the analysis will be updated simultaneously. You can read the election analysis as it has unfolded so far in phase 1 and phase 2 and also get the same updates in each phase from today onwards – our now famous 2 PM report and Evening Report, plus the full analysis of each phase 48 hours after the completion of each phase, once we have all the data with us and can successfully run queries and simulations using our algos.

What is more, 5forty3.org is fully integrated with UPI, so you can have a hassle free subscription experience. Hope you can enjoy our coverage of 2024 elections and see the rise of India as a Vishwaguru through its villages, towns a cities as a first-hand experience just like we did in 2014 and 2019. For those of you who have already subscribed here or are still subscribing here, nothing changes. What you can expect here at 5forty3 is pure data analysis and no Bakwas!

[There was a delay in publishing this report because of technical glitch in our data servers so we could not run queries or simulations for almost 36 hours.]

Yadgir assembly segment in northern Karnataka is a rare seat which had elected anti-Congress leaders for four straight elections after independence. Local folklore, therefore tells the story of 1978, when Mrs Indira Gandhi came on a chopper, waved her hands at the waiting thousands of people and flew back. This simple hand waving gesture though was enough to produce a Congress victory for the first time, that too from a totally unknown candidate.

At her peak, Indira Gandhi’s popularity was so high that her mere presence in a constituency for barely a few minutes would change the course of an election. Mind you, Indira was not a great orator, so nobody ever remembers any of her speeches other than the one she made in 1971 about “gareebi hatao”, so it is doubly difficult to understand her popularity among the masses. People saw in her a messiah who would deliver, especially the poor and the downtrodden, so they just trusted her blindly. Yet, even the mighty Indira Gandhi did suffer a deadly blow to her political charisma between 1977 to 1980, when she lost elections and power.

This is how mass leadership is in India. Generally in about a decade or so, mass leaders go through their lows in popularity, if they survive through these lows, they emerge stronger in the future, but very few can actually survive. Take the case of Lalu Prasad Yadav, for instance, he won almost all elections between 1990 and 2000, then his woes began and could never recover after that. Similarly, somebody like Digvijay Singh was hugely successful in Madhya Pradesh between 1990 and 2003, but once he lost it, he never has been able to gain a foothold.

To that extent, Narendra Bhai Damodardas Modi has remained a rare exception. Ever since October 7^th 2001, when he was first anointed as the Chief Minister of Gujarat, it has now been almost 23 years since, and he has remained an extremely popular mass leader, first in Gujarat and then all over India. He has never lost a single election in this period of time, whether in Gujarat or in national polls. What is more, he keeps expanding his popularity and vote-shares with each passing election. One of the primary reasons why these cycles of highs and lows used to occur was very simple, after 10 years or so being in power, you would have made at least some people unhappy because you cannot fulfil the wishes of all. This is where Modi distinguishes himself. Whether it was the 2007 or 2012 Gujarat election or the three national elections so far, not only has he managed to hold on to his previous voters, but also he keeps adding newer demographic subsets to his fanbase.

We have been recording numbers from the ground for more than 12 years and have witnessed his peaks first-hand. Each time, we go to the ground mentally prepared to see at least a plateau in Modi’s votes, but each time he positively surprises us with a new peak. We have already seen in the very first phase of this year’s election that how BJP is gaining in both the core as well as the peripheral zone as compared to 2019. Although in the second phase there might be a slight dip in the core-heartland, overall, BJP and Modi are still seemingly on course for another peak in their remarkable journey.

The Core-Heartland Zone analysis of phase 2 elections.

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One of the unique features of Indian election is that trends are always expanding and rarely do they ever change. We Indians have this unique ability to collectively arrive at decisions and then homogenously execute that decision region after region. Unlike say the US, where verdicts keep altering from one state to another, we are more of a consciously uniform society in our political thinking barring a few states like a Tamil Nadu or a Kerala.

This trend of uniformity of electoral verdicts is especially true for multiple-phase elections as we have seen repeatedly in the past. The one exceptional election that did not follow the trend was in 1991 which suddenly became more pro-Congress in the latter phases after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination which had created a sympathy wave for him. Had Rajiv Gandhi not been assassinated, history would probably have recorded the first time that BJP would have won 150+ seats and maybe even attempted to form a government which eventually happened in the next election of 1996. Imagine the first BJP government coming to power in 1991 and authoring the inevitable economic reforms and how it would have changed the trajectory of India.

Thus, even in 2024, as we move from one phase to another, we must be cognizant of this “trend” factor of Indian elections. Our models, in fact, assign a certain weightage to the “trend” factor and take corrective measures, if the data becomes more noisy in latter phases, so that we can adhere to the central trend of an election cycle.

We here at 5Forty3 Datalabs are looking at this election through two dimensions to try and quantify the growth or degrowth of both the alliances – the NDA and the INDI – as compared to 2019. The first dimension is what we call the “core heartland” and the second dimension is the “Periphery” consisting of the east and the south. Needless to say, the core heartland is the NDA stronghold whereas the periphery is more of a fragmented zone split between the INDI alliance and other parties like the TMC in West Bengal, the YSRCP in Andhra Pradesh, the BJD in Odisha, the Communists in Kerala, the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and other smaller parties in the North East.

Essentially, our trackers are trying to model two different sets of elections; the core election and the peripheral election; which will then be used to do a comparative analysis using the 2019 metrics of these underlying geographies through each passing phase. This is our big macro innovation for 2024, the core v/s periphery predictive analysis at the macro level which will give us the clearest possible trend.

So what transpired today, in the second phase of election on 26^th of April, 2024? Let us take a high level look for now.

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At around 2 PM, when we were publishing our first report, the average tally of 6 out of 10 Vokkaligas were voting for lotus across Old Mysore region which was completely turning the conventional wisdom upside down. This was five years ago, in 2019, When H.D. Kumaraswamy was the Chief Minister of Karnataka and Congress was in alliance with JDS. This is one of the lesser understood peculiarity of Karnataka politics. The average JDS voter is far more anti-Congress than an average BJP voter – with the exception of the Muslim voters, of course. Thus despite an alliance and despite their fellow Vokkaliga being a chief minister, average JDS voters refused to vote for the Congress. There is a certain history to this behavioural pattern. For many decades, Janata Karyakartas, especially in the Old Mysore region, have been fighting pitched political battles with Congress leaders and workers in every village and town, so these rivalries cannot be wished away overnight just because the top leadership makes an alliance just to come to power.

Much water has flown through river Cauvery since then and the entire alliance math has changed as now it is BJP which is in alliance with the JDS. Average JDS workers do not have the same enmity with BJP, in fact many still reminisce about the 2006 alliance years when H.D. Kumaraswamy had become the CM, the first time around with the support of the BJP and they believe that one of the reasons why JDS lost its charm for Karnataka voters, especially outside the Old Mysore region was the refusal to hand over the government to B.S. Yeddyurappa adhering to the 20-20 agreement made then. To that extent, BJP and JDS are natural allies in the state, generally, complimenting each other through their strengths in different regions.

Also, after a long time, the original Ramakrishna Hegde coalition of Lingayats, Vokkaligas and Brahmans which was created as a counterbalance to the KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim) alliance of the Congress, is once again coming together in Karnataka, this time perhaps to counteract the AHINDA alliance of Siddaramaiah (mostly made of backwards and Muslims). This is an important experiment carried out by BJP in Karnataka, a state with which the central leadership has somehow not come fully to terms with. It is a longstanding belief in Karnataka that whenever Lingayats and Vokkaligas come together, they are virtually invincible as together they form roughly 33% of vote-share and also manage to bring together another 12-15% votes of smaller castes owing to their leadership position in villages.

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The year was 1988 and there was a special booth in the Talkatora stadium of Delhi where thousands of workers including MLAs, panchayat leaders and district unit chiefs would stand in que to enter their details on a “computer” in that special session of the Congress party. These special booths collected detailed information of all these workers and then collated it into the newly created database for Rajiv Gandhi. This was the first time that the words “computer” and “data” were being extensively used in Indian elections.

According to R.D. Pradhan, the then chief-of-staff to Rajiv Gandhi, a list of 170 MP constituencies were thus derived using these vast amounts of data for the Prime Minister to focus his energies in the 1989 elections “which would make all the difference to the outcomes”. The problem was that Rajiv Gandhi’s so called club of “Computer Boys” were all mostly derived from his favourite wing of the party, namely the ‘Youth Congress’, who had a penchant to falsify data, often just to show their own importance to their bosses. As a result, many of these focus group of constituencies were simply added at the whims and fancies of some individuals rather than staying true to unbiased data analytics.

We often look at the 1989 election as a massive defeat for the Congress party and the rise of both Hindu Nationalism and Mandal politics, but the mathematical reality was that the Congress just barely lost the elections. The party had won almost 200 seats and could have even tried to muster up a simple majority if Rajiv had wanted to, after the elections. Imagine what would be the course of history had he won a mere 50 more seats in that election? All he had to do was ensure the integrity of the data that he got from his computer boys and run a measured campaign in swing seats and he could have retained power. In fact, there were 70+ seats were Congress lost by a mere 7% of votes or less and could have easily gone in Rajiv Gandhi’s favour had he not erred in his focus.

History is replete with examples of simple strategic errors committed over a period of just a few days that had the eventual impact of altering the course of a nation or even a civilization. Who can forget the Mahajan-Advani blunder in the summer of 2004 when they advanced the elections by six months and faced the wrath of rural voters who had ploughed through 3 successive years of drought (eventually the 2004 monsoon was abundant and brought back a bit of prosperity to the villages which would have had its positive impact if the elections were held as planned in October). This is why it is important to understand the strategic mapping of the 2024 elections.

There are two strategic streams that are operating in the battlefield of 24 – One targeting the macro narrative preponderance of a national mandate and another working towards small battles of attrition to create a fragmented outcome. The fact is that both the ruling and opposition parties know that only one party has the capacity to win a clear majority and that is the BJP, so all the others can do is try and limit this capacity.

The advantage and disadvantage of the Congress strategy of ‘24

Despite all its big talk of defeating Modi, for all practical purposes, the Congress party is seriously contesting only in about 120 odd seats on the ground when we track how the funds are being disseminated, the leaders are being allocated and the focus groups are working. In essence, the Congress party has voluntarily put a roof to its own performance of 2024 as it hardly believes it can cross the three-digit mark. The grand old party strongly believes that it cannot spread itself thin in the battle of 24.

Consequently, Congress is basically betting on fragmenting the voters using all methods at its disposal. This is why you see, Congress deliberately proposing “redistribution” of wealth or even an inheritance taxation regime and other such highly divisive ideas to somehow create enough fragmentation of voters that might create enough attrition of BJP voters in localised battles.

This strategy of the Congress party is arguably the brainchild of the former psephologist Yogendra Yadav who has been a long-time subscriber of the Kanshi Ram school of electoral politics which prescribes the formula of "fighting elections just to defeat your opponent" and then regrouping in the next election cycle to improve on your strength. Essentially, he seems to have convinced the Congress party leadership to seriously fight only in a limited number of seats where it has some chance of either winning the seat or at least defeating the BJP.

The congress party facing a fund crunch and shortage of human resources has seemingly accepted his formula of trying to defeat BJP than to win on its own. So, for instance, in a state like Rajasthan where the party was in power just until 6 months ago, is now focussing in less than 10 seats and might even reduce them to about half-a-dozen by election day. Similarly, in Maharashtra, the Congress party has decided to completely concede to the Shiv Sena (UBT faction) which has led to the virtual rout of the party unit in Mumbai – where, as recently as a decade ago, the Congress had 5 out of 6 sitting MPs in the parliament.

This strategy of a battle of attrition only in focussed number of seats is contrary to the Congress party’s 2019 strategy of going full strength against BJP even in states like Uttar Pradesh where it had very little chances to begin with. The 2019 buoyancy of Congress was due to its victories in the three state elections of MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh which had apparently convinced Rahul Gandhi that victory was within reach, but this time around the opposite results in those assembly elections has made him to take an opposite strategic stance.

• The biggest advantage of this strategy is that it approaches elections as a battle of attrition where it can only focus on a few seats and hope to maximise its benefits. From what we understand of this strategy, Mr Yadav believes that it is virtually impossible to stop BJP/NDA from getting “45%+ vote-share nationally”, so the Congress is letting BJP win by big margins in its strongholds accumulating in that 45% pool, while it is trying to defeat BJP in marginal seats by focussing on squeezing a big chunk of its “20% national votes in those 100+ contested seats”. In short, they are trying to get the biggest possible bang for each vote they get.

• The biggest disadvantage of this strategy is that it is about 2 decades delayed. Indian voters in any geography quickly gain the specific intelligence of who is really contesting to win, and vote accordingly. This is especially true of swing voters who inherently hate wasting their votes. So, for instance, most Rajasthan voters would have realised by election day that Congress is not in contest in the state to win, so even in those seats where the grand old party is focussing its resources on, the voters wouldn’t want to “waste their votes”. This strategy was working for a while in the 90’s and early 2000’s when the polity was fragmented and voters too were confused but has invariably failed in all the national elections since 2009 and almost all the state elections for over a decade – we hardly ever get non-majority verdicts even in state elections unlike the trend of the 90’s.

The advantage and disadvantage of BJP strategy of ‘24

Contrary to the Congress strategy, BJP has a broad umbrella approach of fighting even in those geographies where it was practically non-existent even until a year ago. This is why BJP is seen putting all out efforts in its politically peripheral regions like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Punjab and even in Kashmir where it has fielded Sajjad Lone from Baramulla and is making a fight of it. This, in fact, has now become the de-facto first principle of the party under Modi’s leadership where party keeps expanding into hitherto unreachable political geographies and build demographic coalitions that were practically unthinkable a decade ago.

This approach of the BJP is not merely a political afterthought but instead a longstanding social engineering project of its ideological fountainhead, the RSS. For over a decade, the RSS has been expanding into unlikely geographies like the North-East, Kashmir, Kerala and Tamil Nadu with a systematic plan to penetrate these societies. For instance, political analysts were shocked when BJP won the erstwhile communist stronghold state of Tripura in 2018 where BJP did not even exist in prior election cycles. Similarly, when many Christian organisations in Kerala are making overtures towards the BJP and finding common ground on issues like “love-Jihad”, most analysts are surprised as they cannot understand these realignments. Once again, it is the RSS and its affiliated organisations that have been assiduously working on the ground in these regions for nearly two decades that is culminating in these radical changes.

There is long-term strategic thinking in BJP’s broad umbrella approach, although it might look like a bit of an overreach to most lay political analysts. The RSS is fully on board too, indeed, this strategy at its heart is the new evolution of RSS of going beyond its core comfort zone and engaging the new Indian society beyond purely the Hindu idiom. We are now terming this the “Bhagwat era of the Sangha”. Let us dwell a bit more on this briefly, although a deeper analysis would require a lot of time.

Broadly, the evolution of RSS can be divided into 4 eras. The first era is obviously the Hedgewar-Savarkar era which can also be classified as the modern rebirth of the Hindu socio-political structure. The basic principle of this Hedgewar era was the operationalising of the physical Hindu networks of families of Swayamsevaks. The Second era is the Golwalkar era which gave the deep ideological mooring to this physical network of Hindus. The third era was the Deoras era which essentially built the political edifice on top of the ideologically embedded physical networks by creating mass movements (the most famous among them being the RJB movement). Since the late 90’s though, the RSS had gone into a bit of a drift near the end of Rajju Bhayya’s term as the Sarsanghchalak which then declined further in the 2000’s.

Now we are in the Bhagwat era. It is characterised by two main evolutions to the RSS networks. The first part of the evolution is slightly more symbolic in nature and is characterised by the Sangha developing a more public face as an organisation which is why we now see the Sarsanghchalak Ji’s speech live on national television every Vijayadashami day and it is also seen through greater engagement of the RSS on social media platforms. The second part is far more consequential and will be recorded as a turning point by future historians. The Bhagwat era has accorded the ideologically embedded physical Hindu networks of vast political outreach with a civilizational character beyond the pure Hindu idiom. The RSS has now begun to look at Bharat as a civilization that engages with other civilizations and at times incorporates elements of other civilizations – without affecting or diluting the core ideological beliefs.

This is why when Prime Minister invokes “Sabka saath, sabka vikas”, those are not empty words but represent the new evolution of the Sangha. Similarly, when the Sarsanghchalak Ji warns “not to look for Shivling in every mosque”, he is putting forth this same new civilizational approach. Quietly, BJP is emerging as the broad umbrella party of India without compromising on the core Hindutva ideology. This is a new India where Hindu interests like building a Ram Mandir or national interests like abolition of Article 370 find acceptance without much ado and the party then expands beyond Hindi heartland and Hindu demographic limits on its own conditions.

BJP’s 2024 strategy reflects this broadening theme of building alliances everywhere despite the party being in a mostly dominant position. NCP in Maharashtra, TDP in Andhra Pradesh, JDU in Bihar and JDS in Karnataka are prime examples of this inorganic horizontal expansion which was looking highly improbable even a couple of years ago. Generally, opportunistic alliances are formed in India to win a losing election, but these alliances formed by the BJP have perplexed many political observers as they look and feel unnecessary at the very outset. So what exactly are the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy?

• The first and biggest advantage is the very attempt to achieve the nearly impossible. At the outset, BJP has set a target of 400+ for 2024 which itself shatters the opposition’s confidence to smithereens. Then, the party has gone ahead and systematically built a strong coalition with powerful regional alliance partners even in territories where it is weak – like say, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh – which has given this talk of 400 seats a strong structural edifice to be built on. Now, even serious political observers concede that this target of 400 seats is not merely a rhetoric but has a reasonable possibility of being achieved. In India where elections are all about perceptions of a dominant political discourse, this 400+ target has created a trajectory of its own, for it is a vote getter of its own kind. Imagine the plight of an average swing voter in a state like Rajasthan or Andhra Pradesh or even in parts of Kerala who is known to shift allegiances from one election to another based on his/her changed political perceptions, what will he/she be thinking? This swing voter would wonder why waste the vote when “400 is already a reality?”

• The second advantage that such an approach accords BJP is that of maximising its pool of darts on the dart board. Imagine a big dart board and think of two skilled players throwing darts at them. Mathematically who is likely to get more hits, the one with 430+ darts (the BJP, for beginners) or the one with merely a 100 darts (the Congress party)? The math itself gives BJP the big advantage. Even if some BJP MPs face micro-anti-incumbency, the pool of “winnable” seats is so large that it ringfences the BJP’s floor to no less than 280 seats which would be the worst case scenario – see the contrast here? The Congress has voluntarily set a roof for itself, whereas BJP has ringfenced a floor for itself.

• The only discernible disadvantage that such a strategy bequeaths is that it has a tendency to spread the party thin with focus being too widespread. So, for instance, this massive macro-narrative may conceal many small weaknesses in various regions. This could become more pronounced of a problem, if BJP starts to underperform in some seats of its core areas of strength of the heartland but compensates it with better performance in newly expanded geographies with vote-share which may not exactly convert into many seats.

In conclusion, there are two contrasting strands of stratagem at work in 2024, the BJP is working towards getting a mandate for another 5 years whereas Congress is hoping that India would turn its clock and go back to the era of fragmentation of the 90’s. Which strategy will come out on top will be known in just a few days.

The post-COVID electorate of India has been a bit shifty as we have observed in quite a few assembly elections. From Bihar to Bengal to Karnataka to Chhattisgarh, a substantial chunk of voters have changed their stance on voting day, either for purely transactional reasons – like in Karnataka, where many voters simply calculated the average monthly pay-outs promised by the schemes of Congress and took the deal on voting day – or for perceived better governance issues – like in Chhattisgarh where the Congress government hardly suffered from anti-incumbency but the voters decided virtually on the last day that the BJP would be better placed to give good governance as it can coordinate better with the central government.

Mass behavioural analysis is a complex mixture of science and humanities that can often go wrong due to presumptive variables that one incorporates. Studying mass behavioural patterns to create predictive algorithms is fraught with errors and anomalies because we tend to overlook many metrics either due to their inherent simplicity or due to lack of domain knowhow. The COVID experience has had a strong impact on mass behaviours and quite a lot of data is out there that demonstrates this impact. The changing landscape of employment and female labour participation rates are one such example. The altered metrics of mass consumption of entertainment is another very important variable. Take the case of how the box-office is behaving since COVID and you will get a clue as to how profoundly masses have changed. These days, when you talk to small film distributors in Rajasthan or Uttar Pradesh, the one term that you will constantly hear is “updated content for post-COVID audience” as many of them have burnt their fingers by taking a bet on a “big film” of a big star. After COVID, the audiences have made a clear demarcation about what they want to see on the big screen and what they can consume on the smaller mobile screens at their leisure, the old star system is no longer a “safe bet”.

Similarly, in electoral politics too, the post-COVID voters are slowly becoming more pronounced in their choices and their votes are attaining that same “big screen” v/s small screen” distinction. The trend started with Bihar and Uttar Pradesh elections but gathered steam during Gujarat where the BJP got the “big screen” vote in 2022 and won one of the biggest victories in the state to the astonishment of the opposition parties and political analysts alike. In Karnataka and Telangana, too the voters gave Congress surprisingly easy victories. The more stunning results came at the last when BJP won all three north Indian states of MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, because voters saw that BJP is the one they wanted to see on the big screen while Congress was something they can tolerate on their smaller screens.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi says that “Main cheezon ko bhaamp leta hoon” (I can make assessment of public mood better than all of you), he is indeed right. He has understood the altered behaviour of the masses in the post-COVID world and realises that when the voters take a preference to something, they take it so big that previous records would tumble easily. So, he has foreseen that if ever he can try and win 400 seats in the parliament, this is the most opportune moment of time in history. On the very first day of elections, at least, voting unfolded in a pattern that looks to support the Prime Minister’s vision.

Let us once again look at what happened in the two zones of India on the first day – the core zone consisting of the Northern and Western heartland and the Peripheral zone consisting of the east and the south. Let us begin with analysing the Peripheral Zone first.

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