The BJP came back to power in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, breaking the chain of anti-incumbency cycles that most states in India routinely go through. It is perfectly alright in India for a party or person in power to lose the elections just because they have already been in power.
Since the phenomenon is so widespread in India, we don’t appreciate its exclusivity. Put simply, anti-incumbency is something that is observable in very few countries across the globe and certainly, India is the only country with a significant population and territory to experience anti-incumbency.
To have some context, an incumbent US president is much more likely to win an election rather than the challenger. Not just in the US, pro-incumbency is a globally dominant phenomenon. It is also easily explained. The person or party in power is able to deliver on the promises which were made during the elections because the person or the party has been able to leverage state power to do that.
This makes for an analysis: Why is the reverse, i.e. anti-incumbency, common in India, and what are the reasons which make it sustainable? Anti-incumbency precisely means that the incumbent is at a disadvantage, regardless of other issues on which elections are being fought. This evolves into another primary argument that an incumbent has to perhaps perform better than the challenger because of the associated disadvantage of being in power.
This means that the Indian electorate has a natural dislike for whoever is in power, not considering any ideology or electoral promises. This is demonstrated more prominently in Assembly elections, where states like Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, etc, have for a very long period in the recent past have voted out the incumbent in favour of the challenger, no matter who is in power or who is the challenger.
If any phenomenon in Indian politics cuts across regional and ideological boundaries, then that fact certainly calls for a deeper analysis. Unfortunately, there is very little popular discourse on the reasons for such a pattern of behaviour in the Indian electorate.
The reasons for the uniform and secular pattern of disenchantment with the incumbent, naturally, can’t be anything else but the failure of the person or party in power to deliver on the promises which were made as part of the election campaign. Such disenchantment is the manifestation of the people’s lives being static or becoming worse and consequently the people decided to throw the incumbent out of power. This is perhaps reconcilable with only one factual result that most politicians and parties have never really worked honestly for the betterment of the lives of its constituents — of course, there are and have been a large number of honourable exceptions. Thus, political power has not manifested into the state being more efficient.
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If we analyse the election results in the recent past, we can easily see that the BJP-ruled states are more likely to buck this trend of anti-incumbency. Classical example has to be, of course, Gujarat, where the BJP has held the reins of power since 1995. Narendra Modi himself has served as the longest chief minister in office for more than 12 years. Even in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP has held power since 2003, except for a brief period of 15 months between December 2018 and March 2020. In the latest election results, the BJP also broke a very long anti-incumbent trend in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh.
Considering Uttar Pradesh as a case in point, there are at least two major reasons which explain this divergent trend when it comes to the BJP. The first is that the BJP, when attains state power, is able to leverage it to fulfil its poll promises. The promises can be ideological or developmental, the BJP has a relatively consistent record on delivering on them. In the UP elections we saw that it successfully built the campaign on its welfare schemes like free ration.
This was not the first time that any particular political party came out with such a scheme. The BJP is different because it could efficiently deliver it to the people, by making the state machinery much more efficient. Even in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP was able to leverage the success of the Ujjwala Scheme, which again was something it was able to deliver to people efficiently.
The BJP in UP has a recognisable better record at improving the rule of law situation by clamping down on crime and dismantling the criminal—political nexus. This is manifested by the crime rates across UP going down. In fact, this improvement in rule of law and constitutional structures is something that makes the BJP-run state machinery more efficient, and it is able to deliver on its other promises.
Second, when it comes to state politics, and the BJP is up against the regional parties, which in the case of UP are the SP and the BSP, such parties even in other states are mostly family run. This is in direct contrast to the organisational structure of the BJP, which is cadre-based. The political aspirations of any individual joining the BJP as a cadre can legitimately be to hold the highest possible office in the country. The same is attested by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Ram Nath Kovind, where both of them had very humble beginnings but they ultimately went on to hold the highest possible offices in the country.
This is simply not true for most other parties in India, and the cadre of any other party like the SP and the BSP can only reach the No. 2 position, at best. Therefore, it is only the BJP that provides the political channel to anyone who is seeking to manifest their political aspirations up to the fullest. If we compare this to the corporate world, the BJP can be the only corporation where you can dream to be the CEO; everywhere else you can only be something similar to a senior manager.
It is important that other political parties learn the same from the BJP, and put their house in order if they plan to pose a serious challenge to the BJP at any time in the near future.
The writer is an Assistant Professor of Law at Maharashtra National Law University Mumbai. Views expressed are personal.
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March 22, 2022 at 04:08PM
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