Questions After Maharashtra

Yogendra Yadav

I was not surprised by the victory of the BJP-led Mahayuti in Maharashtra. Or rather, I was not surprised by the failure of the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) to win an election that it should have easily won. Yet I simply cannot fathom the tsunami-like scale of this victory. Neither the political common sense nor the technical political science helps me make sense of the final outcome of this race. I cannot but ask: Was the winner on steroids?

This is a grave matter. Any serious questioning of the official election outcome must pass some prima facie credibility tests: Is there something big and substantial that needs explaining? Are available explanations hopelessly inadequate? Let us examine both these.

The Maharashtra election presents us with a four-fold surprise. First of all, there is the jaw-dropping margin of Mahayuti’s victory: Over three-fourths of seats and a 14 per cent lead in terms of vote share. Such victories are rare, but not impossible, nor unheard of. What adds to the surprise is the near disappearance of all the known patterns of Maharashtra politics. It is as if a hidden hand has levelled the huge regional, urban/rural or within-coalition party-wise differences that have always existed in Maharashtra. The third element of the surprise is the dramatic nature of this turnaround: From a 17-30 defeat for the Mahayuti in Lok Sabha to 235-50 victory in the assembly, from a vote share deficit of 1 percentage point to a lead of 14 points, within five months. This too is not entirely unprecedented in Indian electoral history.

What makes it truly unprecedented is that this reversal was in an unexpected direction. Reversals of election verdicts between national and state elections are associated with the success of national parties in national elections (BJP in Rajasthan, MP, Chhattisgarh in 2019) or regional parties in state elections (Janata Dal in Karnataka in 1985, AAP in Delhi in 2015 and 2020 or even JMM-led alliance in Jharkhand this time). There is arguably no other example of a national party-led alliance reversing its Lok Sabha electoral defeat in an assembly election. Going by Maharashtra’s own electoral history, the BJP was expected to do worse in the assembly elections. The electoral ball spun quickly, sharply and in the “wrong” direction. This was indeed an electoral googly.

Do we have a good explanation of what happened? Let us look at the standard explanations offered so far, that the MVA leaders squandered a great opportunity due to their complacency, short-sightedness and avoidable squabbles. This is largely true. The Lok Sabha elections had handed the MVA a solid, moral-boosting platform to launch the assembly election campaign. There was no shortage of issues. The Mahayuti alliance of BJP-Shinde and Ajit Pawar was born in sin. The brazen tactics of splitting Shiv Sena and NCP were disgusting. Uddhav Thackeray enjoyed a positive image as a mature politician and a CM who did a great job during the pandemic. Yet the MVA leaders did very little in the last five months to press their advantage by quickly finalising their respective seat shares, announcing poll promises, projecting a CM face and countering the BJP’s moves.

The BJP-led Mahayuti learnt the lessons from its defeat and had a game plan that it executed well: Neutralise the indifferent image of the regime by opening the treasury, announce countless benefits including the Ladki Bahin for women, counter-mobilise the OBCs and the least advantaged Dalits, align the energies of the entire Sangh parivar and prop up dummy candidates and parties. Add to it the massive money and media power of the BJP and you know why Mahayuti outpaced the MVA.

This big difference between how the two alliances approached elections can explain why the Mahayuti could wipe out the small deficit of the Lok Sabha election and also counter the potential additional loss of say 5 per cent in an assembly election. At a stretch, you could adduce all these factors to explain the Mahayuti gaining a small lead over the MVA. But could all this explain a lead of 14 per cent? No way. This simply beats me. I wish I was as smart as those pollsters who first predicted that the election was too close to call and then offered instant gyan on this outcome. The fact is that neither the media, nor the pollsters, nor the political leaders — winners included — anticipated it. Nor can anyone fully explain it.

Now, election results routinely surprise everyone and often elude understanding. Wave elections do leave everyone stunned, including leaders, observers, reporters and pollsters. I have seen many such waves — Janata Party in north India in 1977, Rajiv Gandhi in 1985, and Modi in northwest India in 2019. But you can smell these electoral waves. Everyone on the street agrees who the winner will be, even if they can’t see the margin. Journalists and pollsters project a comfortable victory, though they underestimate the extent of it. Nothing of that kind was reported from Maharashtra.

For me, the final place to resolve an electoral riddle is the sample survey based post-mortem of the final verdict by the CSDS. Sadly, the very detailed and otherwise invaluable analysis by the Lokniti-CSDS team carried out in The Hindu (November 25) does not help us answer the big question. Their own pre-poll survey had projected a 4 percentage points lead for the Mahayuti. Even after weighing it to 14 percentage points as per the actual results, this analysis does not bring out any striking factor in terms of satisfaction with the Mahayuti government, preference for a “double engine” government, popularity of leaders or the reach of welfare schemes that could explain such a big outcome. Even the Ladki Bahin scheme can at the most explain a 2 or 3 percentage points advantage to the Mahayuti. In this analysis, you do not find any of the one-sided patterns of public opinion associated with a wave election.

All things considered, there is an X factor about the Maharashtra outcome that we can’t get a handle on. It may be hasty to blame the EVMs, but it would be impossible to prevent this question from being asked. For nearly a decade I have been a critic of the EVM conspiracy theories, much to the chagrin of my friends and political colleagues. I am still not convinced that the gap between initial estimates of turnout and the final figures necessarily suggests rigging. Similarly, the discrepancy between votes polled through EVM and votes counted through EVM, scandalous though it is, may not be good proof of fraud. Those who suspect EVM manipulation have to come up with better prima facie evidence than we have so far. But there is certainly more to this result than meets the eye. The Opposition cannot be blamed for feeling cheated, though there is a real risk that the INDIA coalition could focus on this issue and overlook their own massive political failure in this election that was so critical to the fate of democracy in our country. All in all, there is a serious case for election forensics analysis here.

Unfortunately, this is the third election within a year — Madhya Pradesh in 2023, Haryana recently and now Maharashtra — where the outcome begs big questions that have remained unanswered. Sadly, the EC has not responded to the serious questions about discrepancies in the electoral data of the Lok Sabha elections. What happened in a UP by-election this time is an open and shut case of electoral fraud. Sadly, all these elections have taken place after current CEC Rajiv Kumar took over. If we do not wish to slide towards our neighbours, where all election outcomes are contested more than the elections, we need to act now. This is a good case for an independent and credible election forensics.