Analysing the strategic contrasts of 2024 between BJP and the Congress

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.