Seven assembly elections are scheduled to be held in 2027, including UP, Gujarat and Punjab. If there are any lessons to be learned from the recent elections, they will be more useful in next year’s elections and not in the national elections of 2029. Anyway, state elections and national elections are different. So what did we learn? First of all, whatever the bigger implications, the outcome of the 2029 Lok Sabha elections has not been decided yet. At the same time, we must also remember that recent elections again show that India is not an electoral dictatorship. The V-Dem report – the most read report on democracy in the world – has been saying this for years. If governments of so many states are changing in the elections, then it is clear that India’s electoral democracy is still very strong. Changing ruling governments is the best answer to the idea of electoral dictatorship. But if SIR becomes a model for the coming elections, India’s democracy will surely be weakened. The SIR has tried to influence the electoral contest by largely excluding Muslim voters – whose voting percentage for the BJP has remained around 8% since 2014. This also happens in the US, where Republican governments practice “gerrymandering”. This reduces the influence of black voters, because they generally vote for Republicans very rarely. The same happened in a different way in Assam, where minority-dominated seats reduced from 30 to around 20. Many modern governments adopt such methods to remain in power. But sometimes these methods also fail, like Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary. But this happens when the victory of the opponents is so big that all these methods become ineffective. Let us say that the contribution of SIR in BJP’s victory in Bengal was what can be called in Shakespeare’s words “further ensuring the security of victory”. On the other hand, the Congress party is now running the government in 3 out of 5 states in the south: Karnataka, Telangana and Kerala. Today it can be called primarily a party of the South. It also has a presence in the North and West, but there it is losing again and again. It is also either in or part of the government in two northern states (Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand), but these are smaller states. At present, Congress is not running the government of any major state in the North and West. Congress’s strong hold in the South also has some contradictory effects. The economy of South India has been growing very rapidly since 2000, or even earlier – almost at the same pace as China. This means that Congress will have no shortage of funds. But it cannot become a big force in Delhi by being based only on the South, because only one-fourth of the Parliament seats are in the South. To become strong in national politics, Congress will have to make a better strategy in the North and West. Also note that Vijay’s victory in Tamil Nadu is very important. His father is Christian and mother is Hindu. Although not religiously active himself, he is registered as a Christian by birth. However, this was not an issue for the voters of Tamil Nadu. Politics there is based more on caste and language than religion. This is the reason why BJP’s anti-minority politics could not create any big atmosphere against Vijay. BJP itself did not get much electoral benefit in Tamil Nadu. This shows that diversity remains very important in the cultural and political life of India even today. The election results of Tamil Nadu are quite different from those of West Bengal and Assam. The BJP has always believed that India’s huge social diversity is a problem for national unity and that it can be molded into a “one country, one identity” model, as has happened in Western Europe. But the vision of India’s founding fathers was different. The people of Tamil Nadu also seem to agree with the same old constitutional vision, and not with the Hindu nationalist idea. The contradictions of Indian politics are clear. On one hand, democracy is winning, on the other, there are attempts to narrow the democratic playing field. On one hand, religious If there is diversity, then the attack on it is successful elsewhere. (These are the author’s own views)
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Ashutosh Varshney’s column: Diversity is still important in the political life of India
