By Kuriakose Mathew, Arjun Ramachandran, Viplov Wingkar
The Maharashtra election results were a shock. As Yogendra Yadav put it, the results present a challenge not just to political common sense but to existing election studies models in political science as well. Faced with the unprecedented, unfathomable electoral outcome, analysts soon came up with wildcat explanations, both familiar and unfamiliar. The most popular among them seems to be that giving money to women can beat anti-incumbency, effectively saying that women voters can be easily bought off; if that is so, why wouldn’t the best bidder win? Other explanations abound, which talk about a combination of factors such as the promise of farmer-centric schemes and caste equations. Yet others, including Sharad Pawar, spoke of communal polarisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the game-changer.
What sets Yogendra Yadav’s take apart from the other analyses is his honesty. He is willing to concede that the available data and explanations are far from satisfactory. How can a few welfare measures create such a landslide victory? What was exceptionally communal about this election that was not there in the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year? It is simply impossible for a massive gap of 14% to develop in the vote share based on one Ladli Behna Yojana or one slogan of batenge to katenge (if we are divided, we will break). Even less satisfactory is the idea that pilgrims made the BJP win; and that the Sajjad Nomani saga hurt them. These might have been genuine factors, but there was nothing about either of the factors that made them unprecedentedly effective. As Yogendra points out, Eknath Shinde’s Mahayuti government had many things going against them, but none of them seem to have been reflected in the election results. This was a tsunami election, as Uddhav Thackeray said, and if so, it must have been caused by an earthquake. Yet, no one has detected such an electoral earthquake in Maharashtra before, during, or after the polls.
The common factor in these approaches is that they are all driven by what data is available to them, which in turn is determined by the traditions of psephology. But an exceptional result such as the one in Maharashtra demands an exceptional explanation. There is a better approach to understanding the state than simply trying to make sense of available survey data and one or two communal slogans. A different entry point is needed: one must make sense of the peculiar clustering in the Marathi ideological space to read this election result correctly.
Politics in ideologically charged societies do not often follow rational models of political behaviour, which forces rational observers to conclude that there is something unfathomable at work. The only way to make sense of the ‘unfathomable’ is to step inside the dominant ideology and view the events from within. In other words, the best way to understand the electoral outcomes in Maharashtra is to look through the fissures in the Hindutva ideological matrix.
INDIA bloc vs NDA, or nationalist Hindutva vs subnationalist Hindutva?
On the face of it, this looked like a reiteration of the INDIA bloc vs NDA contest that is unfolding across India. It was taken for granted that Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) was the Marathi name for INDIA bloc, and Mahayuti was the Marathi name for NDA—these were Indian curries made with Marathi spices. Indeed, nearly all the parties also saw it as such.
This story was originally published in thenewsminute.com. Read the full story here.
