How The Ball Turned On The Haryana Field

Yogendra Yadav

The instant analysis of the Haryana Assembly elections illustrates the problem with our political commentary. To borrow a cricket metaphor, we seek to explain the outcome of every match as if it was an “innings defeat”, where one team outperformed the other in every respect. Whatever the winner did was right and whatever the loser did was wrong.

What makes the BJP’s victory in Haryana so politically consequential was the staggering gap between expectation and outcome, not the gap between winner and loser. The vote share gap between the BJP and Congress is less than 1 per cent. In cricket terms, the Haryana election was a T-20 match that should have been won with two overs to spare, but was dragged till the last ball, and then lost. So, we need to explain three things: Why did we expect it to be an easy affair? Why was it dragged till the last ball? Why was it lost? So, for Haryana, we need to understand the structural reasons for Congress’s perceived advantage, the strategic factors that helped the BJP neutralise it and the tactical moves that resulted in an unlikely victory for the BJP.

A statutory clarification before I turn to these questions. I write this on the assumption that the result as declared by the EC is a fair reflection of the way people voted. Congress has raised serious objections to the results, presented some evidence to support its claim and promised more. The onus is on the EC to clarify. For now, I have taken the official results, counter-intuitive as they are, at face value and bracketed all other concerns about manipulation.

Let us begin by understanding the structural shift Congress enjoyed at the beginning of this election. The party suffered a dramatic collapse of its vote share in Haryana — from around 40 per cent — to Lok Sabha elections of 2014 (23 per cent), assembly elections the same year (21 per cent), 2019 LS elections (29 per cent) and assembly elections (28 per cent). In LS elections of 2019, it trailed the BJP by nearly 30 percentage points. Haryana Congress was staring at the fate of its counterparts in UP and Bihar. This is where the farmers’ movement and the wrestlers’ protest changed the political landscape, weaning away the dominant farming community from the BJP. Congress revival after the Bharat Jodo Yatra made sure that the disaffected farmers turned to Congress rather than the INLD or JJP. Rahul Gandhi’s aggressive pitch on the Constitution helped bring a big chunk of Dalit voters back to Congress.

This was reflected in the LS elections, as the vote share of Congress (including AAP) made a huge leap of 19 percentage points to finish 1 percentage point ahead of the BJP. So, contrary to post-poll commentaries, kisan, pahalwan and samvidhan did work. Else, Congress would not have been a serious contender in these elections. Anti-incumbency against the 10-year-old state government was palpable on the ground. The obvious expectation was that the BJP would fare much worse in the assembly elections, as it had done in 2014 and 2019. So, in an increasingly bipolar situation (the combined vote share of Congress and BJP rose from 55 per cent in 2014 to 79 per cent in this assembly election), that would have meant a decisive defeat for the BJP and a comfortable majority for Congress.

But this structural advantage was not enough to win elections. This was the mistake in the kisan-jawan-pahalwan-samvidhan narrative. I was among the many analysts who believed that this initial structural advantage for Congress was large and irreversible in the short run, enough to absorb the effect of any strategic or tactical move by the BJP. Although, unlike in the LS elections, I refrained from making a formal seats forecast for the Haryana assembly, I shared the widespread belief that a comfortable majority (or a wave or even a tsunami) for Congress was on the cards.

The BJP strategists were smart enough to see an opportunity in adversity. They could see that the big shift towards Congress came largely from the Jats. And there was an opportunity to split the Dalit votes in view of the sub-quota controversy. By all accounts, they went about executing their strategy meticulously.

The only way of making sense of this outcome is to see it as a result of a series of strategic moves by the BJP that neutralised the huge initial advantage enjoyed by Congress. These moves included replacement of Manohar Lal Khattar by Nayab Singh Saini and a series of announcements meant to address the weak points of the BJP. This strategy involved a bold decision to deny tickets to many sitting MLAs and big leaders. Quietly, the BJP pressed the 35-1 (pitting 35 communities of the state against Jats) polarisation strategy. This was similar to the “Yadav raj” strategy used by the BJP successfully against the SP in the UP assembly elections of 2022. In Haryana the BJP invoked the fear of raj by one community, one district, one family. This was not a new strategy, the BJP used it in 2019 too. Although ground reports do not suggest greater polarisation this time, this is the most plausible explanation for the BJP’s unexpected success. This was supplemented by a quiet campaign among the non-Jatav SCs on the issue of the sub-quota.

Congress, on the other hand, either did not have a clear strategy or could not execute it. While Rahul assured a government of all “36 biradari”, the party could not carry this assurance, especially to the voters of south Haryana and GT Road region populated by non-Jats. The decision to renominate all sitting MLAs showed complacency — 14 of the 28 sitting Congress MLAs lost the election. Also, the ticket distribution carried the stamp of one leader and reinforced the impression of Jat dominance. Kumari Selja’s not-so-quiet protest did not hurt the party in her own areas, but it accentuated the BJP’s narrative of Congress as a Jat party. While there was no electoral gain in making an alliance with the AAP or SP, there was a degree of complacency in addressing official and unofficial “rebels”.

These strategic disparities brought the electoral match down to the last over, to the polling day. This is an area where the BJP has an unmistakable advantage over the Congress, with its micro-targeting of voters, polling booth management and last-minute mobilisation. Congress relied on hawa, enthusiasm and voters’ self-mobilisation. These seemingly small but critical factors give the BJP up to a 2 per cent spike in every election, in every state. In the last instance, that appears to have tilted this close election in favour of the BJP and resulted in what would be described as an unprecedented and historic verdict. As in the T-20 finals, one catch can change the match.

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