From India's largest newsroom, I'm Arun George
and this is The Times of India Podcast.
But vote, please. We
should never be sad in the vote.
It's also hot summer in many
parts of India with warnings of heat waves in
many states. But is that what's affecting
turnouts? And also, does it just feel
like campaigns are just very low key? Many
commentators have observed that this election just
feels less energetic than previous ones and the
turnouts reflect that fewer voters are making their way
to the polling booths than the last general election.
But what are the implications
of this? To decode that, we spoke with
Nilanjan Sarkar, who is a senior fellow at the Centre
for Policy Research in Delhi. Nilanjan
admits that there's much less energy in this
national election than he remembers in the past and
explains why it could be a worry for the BJP and
Narendra Modi who claim to be aiming to win 400 out
of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. He
also explained how he views the biggest headlines from
the campaign trail so far, which is Narendra Modi's
speech targeting Muslims and the Congress manifesto. We
started by asking Nilanjan about what explains a
seemingly lacklustre election this year. There
has been some commentary about this but does this
election campaign feel a slightly more lacklustre one
compared to even the ones we've seen in 2014 and
2019? And is it just because we have
an election that's spread over nearly two months? So
I think we have had long elections in the past.
There is no doubt that there is
much less energy in this election. At
least in the first phase of the election polls,
we've seen a pretty significant decrease in
turnout. That is a bit unusual given
what we've seen in the last two national elections,
where both in 2014 and 2019, we saw increases in
turnout, sometimes very, very significant at the
constituency level. And second, it being associated
with the sort of a wave -like support for the BJP.
The ability of the BJP to
mobilize voters around broad -based issues in 2014, anti
-corruption, in 2019, Balakot, Pakistan. We
seem to be missing that kind of wave -like energy
this time in 2024. If there is a lack of energy
and sort of turnout, what does it mean then? How
does a low turnout, if this continues, this kind
of turnout continues, what is the sort of outlook
then? First, let me talk about what the
data has said in recent history in national
elections. And secondly, some of the micro
foundations of why we may be seeing higher or lower
turnout. In the last two national
elections, at the constituency level, a large
increase in turnout from the previous election has
been strongly associated with BJP support. So
in 2014, that's anti -incumbent, right? Because
the incumbent was Congress. But
in 2019, that is in fact pro -incumbent, right? And
in many ways, 2019 breaks from the past. There
was an association between higher -level turnout at the
constituency level, increases in turnout, and vote share
for the opposition. So 2019 changes our priors in
a few ways. It shows us that increased
turnout may not always help the opposition. But
secondly, it cements the fact that the BJP is the
mobilizing party par excellence in India. It
might be because of resources, it might be
because of message, it might be because of
machinery. But in the last two elections,
the wave -like support has benefited the BJP and been
strongly associated with increases in turnout at the
constituency level. At a micro level, we have to
try to understand why people might turn out. So
we have a general rule in the study of politics and
political science that when elections are competitive,
you tend to see higher turnouts, right? So
if I believe that in my seat, the election could go
either way, then I'm emboldened to turn out
because I might cast the deciding vote. When
elections are largely uncompetitive, we tend to
believe that turnouts drop. So
that's one plausible explanation. Now,
who is turning out and who is not is a far more
complicated question. Because if the story we believe is
that the recent increase in turnout have been a
function of the BJP's ability to get people to
the polls, then it may stand to reason that the
people now not showing up are people who are no
longer being mobilized by the BJP. But
it may also be that you have a fragmented sort of
demoralized opposition in many places and people are
simply not turning out for the opposition because they
don't believe the election can be competitive even at
the constituency level. So that's a bit of a mystery.
We don't know. We
will find out, obviously, when we see the results.
But suffice to say that the
lack of energy, the lack of real mobilization of
voters to get to the polling booth is something
that is very new in the Modi era. Also,
this sort of nine phase election that drags out
over two months. This comes just before the BJP
plans to rule out this whole one nation one
election proposal. Would this election then
effectively show you that that's a really difficult
thing to do anytime in the near future? It
depends on how you read the dragging out of the
election. Right. So it is indeed true that
elections have gotten longer in India. So
we're really sort of extending the periods very,
very significantly. One story is that the reason
for this is increases challenges in security and
lack of resources for the kinds of logistics that are
required to run a fair election. In
which case, I would agree that it is very, very hard
to imagine a story in which you can have one
nation one election and run it in one shot, right?
Because there's exponential growth
in the kind of complexity of fielding an election
when you have one nation one election. The
other story though is of, you know, somewhat
institutional capture that the longer elections and
this actually occurred started occurring even
before the BJP came into power, sort of allows the
incumbent party to use other institutions, the
media in various ways to, you know, sort of aggregate
benefits and correct course over time. Now,
in that case, the length of election may not tell
us much about the feasibility of one nation
one election. I think the more complicated
question about one nation one election is that even
in the recent past, in fact, especially in the
recent past, we have had governments falling,
switching, so on and so forth. So
if you don't have a system in which you have regular
polls every year or from time to time, how do you
deal with the extraordinary turnover in governments that
you're seeing at the state level? The
reason why sort of bring this up is that the entire
question and the entire answer to the question is
about logistics. And the only thing that has
not been spelled out, lots of people have all kinds
of grand theories about how much it will cost and what
is the economy like, nobody has spelled out the
logistics of one nation one election. And
until that's spelled out, it's very hard to imagine
that it's feasible. You mentioned the fact that a
longer election also allows for course correction. Is
that something that could benefit the opposition as
much as the ruling party? It
could, obviously. Everybody gets to course correct.
Everybody gets to see sort of past
results. We tend to believe it benefits
the incumbent for the simple fact that the
incumbent has many more resources at their disposal.
In this case, quite literally
because the BJP is by far the richest party in India.
But by resources, I mean state
institutions, media control to explain why and the
ways in which things might matter. From
a political actor during the model code of conduct
that governs elections, no kind of policy declaration
or policy decision is plausible. But
state institutions are not necessarily prevented from
taking actions that may have some basis in
politics. So West Bengal is a very good
example where the High Court has taken a decision
at this time on a potential educational and
teaching scam, which may or may not adversely affect
the TMC. But it is a tool that is at
the disposal of the ruling party that may have some
control over state institutions that is not
available to the opposition. And
so in so far as large policy shifts or
declarations or legal actions or police actions
can affect behaviors of the electorate, the incumbent
tends to be in a stronger position. Where
the opposition may have something going for it, at
least as we were walking into the 2024 national
election, the imagination was the opposition has no
chance that this is going to be sort of a real
mess. We are all looking romp for
the BJP. We already see that in the
first phase, energy has been low. There
are stories, narratives that perhaps in certain places
the BJP is nervous. I tend to dismiss those
stories, but many people might believe them. If
the opposition can build a narrative over phases that
in fact the ruling party is getting nervous, it is
no longer sure. You can see a longer election
like this create kind of wave like benefits for the
opposition by the time we get to the later phases
five, six, seven. So that's an open question. I
think we still have a long way to go.
With Narendra Modi after that
first phase of voting and more importantly while
campaigning in North India, he made this relatively
uncharacteristic direct attack at the Muslim
community. Whereas he's now more known for
the indirect attacks rather than a straightforward
attack. How surprised were you by that?
I do think it was surprising.
We can expose justify anything
that is sort of the character of pundits and
scholars, but it was quite a break from what we have
seen in the past. What is the need for this kind
of aggression? Now, what I would say is that
it is less about whether the BJP is winning or
losing. That is a very murky
calculation, but it is more about this sheer lack of
energy that we're seeing in the election. Polarization,
particularly polarization that is derived from the
top is sort of energy on the cheap. People
get passionate and emotional about Hindu Muslim things.
So from that lens, I do see
what the logic was. I think there's a second
thing that we have not been talking about enough
and it is a byproduct of the first, which is sort
of low national energy. The BJP is at its strongest
when it is a national election in all senses,
that it is an election in which the issues that are
coming forward are national nature, national security,
balacrups, corruption at a national level and the
kinds of scams. Once elections get more
regionalized and regional factors come into play,
then the BJP is not necessarily playing its
strongest game because some of the state level units
of the BJP are quite a bit weaker. So
when we look at states like West Bengal, which we
just talked about earlier, where you have a dominant
party as a regional party, there's a real need to
make the discourse something more national like Hindu
Muslim and make sure that the discourse doesn't become
overly regional in which the BJP will be playing
sort of from the back foot. We
have to understand that the kind of course correction
that perhaps the BJP needs because of low energy is
not simply to get energy up on some sort of
national social issue as Hindu Muslim, but also to
decrease the likelihood that a voter is thinking about
regional issues and not national issues when she or
he goes to the polling booth. One
of the things that we've seen in the last couple of
national elections, especially the last national
election, is that the BJP outperforms itself at the
state level between state and national elections by
double digits. So you might have a state in
which the BJP gets 42 % of the vote share in a state
election, but it might jump to 55 % or 60 % in the
national elections in that same state. The
BJP is trying to manufacture those kinds of
growths in vote share percentage because that's
what is required to get those kinds of sweeps,
those 300 plus or Charso -Parr kind of seats that
the BJP is claiming to get.
For you, does that also then
explain why a lot of Narendra Modi speeches deal
with issues that are in the Congress manifesto and
less say on future or even past achievements to that
extent, that it seems to be nitpicking on every line
of a Congress manifesto, whereas a lot of battles,
like you're saying, will be fought at the state level
with perhaps more regional parties than just the
Congress? I think on one level, even
this discussion speaks to the extraordinary ability of
Modi to set the agenda. Because
before this moment, whoever cared about party
manifestos, I mean, let's be brutally honest, right?
I mean, this is the one
thing that nobody cares about, right? But
now all of a sudden it's become a key issue, which
is line by line, what did Congress write in its
manifesto? Perhaps even when they were writing
their manifesto, they couldn't have possibly
imagined that line by line, they would be scrutinized
for which word they use, minority, Muslim, cash,
this, that. That is now the world that we
are in, right? So there are two key elements
to this kind of attack, right? So
the first is, of course, the linking of the Congress
party to a certain set of social ideologies, right? So
the linking of Hindu Muslim division to the Congress
party, essentially not taking the right side,
taking the Muslim side as opposed to the Hindu side,
right? That's a very clear part of the
messaging. The second part of the
messaging, which is importantly crafted, is that
the opposition is still Congress. So
it's that story I said about regional and national,
that why should you vote for me in Aindramudi or
BJP, if I'm sitting in a state like West Bengal, or
if I am sitting in a state like Urissa, even if
the Congress is not a player in your constituency.
So you definitely want to vote
for the BJP so that the Congress doesn't take power
at the center, even though Congress is not a player
where you are. So it sets the agenda in two
ways. It makes a link between a
social cleavage and the political parties, but it
also diminishes the role of regional actors, which have
the capacity to do a lot of damage to the BJP and
the kinds of numbers it is aiming for. With
the speech about Muslims, which was the controversial
one, the election commission after that has now stepped
in to caution all star campaigners across parties
where the BJP Congress. How do you view that criticism
given the regulator is facing criticism for not
responding earlier? And we also have reports now
that we already know what they're going to say with
regard to religious issues being raked out. So
we have a very basic principle. Institutions
fundamentally do care about their legitimacy. Within
the ambit of being a legitimate institution,
there's a lot of flexibility. Such
a direct communal attack, which is essentially what
we're saying happened in Prime Minister Modi's
speech. For the election commission to
simply not say anything in any way would be a huge
loss of face. Insofar as it is important for
India as a whole to project that it has free
and fair elections, it is important for the election
commission to be seen as being relatively legitimate.
It also cuts the other way
for the BJP and for Prime Minister Modi to demonstrate
that its rule has been legitimate. It
needs to make sure that the election commission is
seen as relatively legitimate. And
so this is a situation in which it is incentive
compatible for both the BJP and the Modi and the
election commission to at least make noises about
sanctioning. The question is whether there's
any bite to the sanction, even after the election
commission says any of this. Do
we somehow believe that Prime Minister Modi will be
barred from campaigning or barred from running? It's
very unlikely and it would probably cause a lot of
violence on the streets if it happened. So
if there is no stick, despite all of these
noises, is it enough to resurrect the credibility of
the election commission, the legitimacy of the election
commission? I don't know. I
always expected that they would make these kinds of
noises. I don't imagine that in the
minds of voters it is nearly enough. Do
voters really care about something like the election
commission strictures? Like you said, it's like it
never has bite. Does that then make it also
like the sort of umpire who just sort of whistles
but doesn't take out a card in a football game?
It just stops the game and
says that's not right and everyone just keeps playing
as they were. We've seen a long term decline
in the legitimacy of the election commission. So
we start from tea in Sashen, we have Kureishi,
we have these sort of personalities in fact that
we associate with the election commission and fair
elections. And so you know in many of
those earlier surveys, 90s, early 2000s, you would see
that actually the election commission was seen as an
extremely legitimate organization. Not
just because of survey response, I think even
today in surveys you'll see that they'll say that, but
genuinely in all kinds of data, you know, qualitative
data collection and so on and so forth. To
a great extent that has fallen apart. I
think that people do believe the average person
you speak to when you're doing field work does
believe that the selection of people on the election
commission is biased. There is something that I do not
believe but there is a belief among certain set of
people, even those who support the BJP, that the
EVMs, the electronic voting machines are not entirely
fair. And there certainly is a view
and perhaps not without reason that the set of
rules that govern who can do what during the election
are biased against the opposition to a greater
extent today than they have been in the past. Now
when those are things that the voter or the citizen
fundamentally feels irrespective of how they
answer to a survey question. They
don't believe that the institution is as legitimate
as it was before. So I agree that they were
always limited in what they could do in the model code
of conduct and how much they could actually force
the party to behave in a particular way. But
in more fundamental ways I think the average citizen,
the average voter questions of legitimacy of the
election commission today. Nilanjan,
the Congress has portrayed to have sort of tied
itself into knots over this whole redistribution of
wealth issue with like you said a manifesto that no
one had read till it came up in the campaign rallies.
And then you have the India
overseas Congress leader talking about it and it's
a whole big thing all over again. How
do you view what the Congress is facing on the
campaign trail and how do you see that dealing with
it so far? So the easiest way of putting
this I think is that it is a real missed
opportunity for the Congress party. I
think the one thing that plays across the political
spectrum, across the social spectrum in India is rising
social inequality. We can define it in economy,
we can define it in other ways, English, non -English.
You hear it on the ground
everywhere. And so one of the reasons why
for instance the farmers protest was so successful,
they very quickly built a narrative about this is not
just about MSP. This is also about Adani and
Ambani and you know all of what that represents. Field
work and later quantitative survey data has shown that
there actually is quite a bit of sympathy for the
farmers even among people who are not directly
affected by the actual economic demands. So
this is the issue that has huge resonance on the
ground and in fact it is the single issue that can
do the most damage to Modi and the BJP. He
is not acting in the interest of the median or
average citizen and is acting in the interest of
a small set of moneyed people or otherwise powerful
people. That is the day the BJP gets
decimated at the polls and everybody understands that.
Then Modi understands that. You
know there is an interesting passage in
Prashant Jaha's book about this where soon after
winning in 2014 Rahul Gandhi had made the jaibe
ki sudh bhut ki sargah. And
Modi transformed himself as a Neta who reached out to
the poor to a much greater extent. And
so even from its very earliest days this version
of the BJP and this version of Prime Minister
Modi has understood that the undoing and the
unraveling can be around issues of economic and
social inequality. So when issues like inheritance
taxes, estate taxes and everything and anything that
comes around it come into play. If
one had put a little bit of thought into it, built
an intelligent campaign around it, it actually
could have had a lot of resonance on the ground.
That simply is not something
that we see today. With the India coalition that we
have seen, it sort of fractured just before the
elections started where you have the PDP NC sort of
breaking ranks suddenly. You have seen all these sort
of random fishers pop up just before the elections.
How do you view that campaign
so far in as much as a sort of united coalition?
For the opposition, I genuinely
view it as a blessing in disguise. I
did this calculation where it took 303 seats that the
BJP won in 2019. And in those seats, I added
the vote shares of the second and third place
party. I didn't even care if it was
in the India coalition. The BJP only lost an extra 30
or 40 seats. Its vote margins were so high
that the third place party very rarely made a
difference at the constituency level. So
given the kinds of vote shares the BJP was getting
and the seats in which it contested, it's very
unlikely that irrespective of whether a coalition was
formed or not, that there would be much of a
difference. The first thing is that it was
always understood that the BJP's vote share has to
drop if you are to weaken the electoral force that is
the BJP. Now, two things have happened
because there is no fixed coalition, there is no
single actor to go after. You
can go after the Congress manifesto but by definition
you have not also gone after UP and TMC and many
of these other parties. They
can still do a lot of damage at the regional
level. The second thing that happened
and there is some evidence for this, that even if at
the national level you were not able to create an
alliance, at more regional levels it does seem like
local units of the Congress party and some of what
would have been in the India coalition have built
tactical alliances. So in that way it's been a
win -win for the opposition. I
don't think that the India coalition could ever have
been a single national idea that was going to do so
much damage to the BJP that its vote share was
going to drop significantly. On
the other hand it was giving a very big target
to Prime Minister Modi who is the most charismatic and
popular politician in India to target the opposition.
So this fragmentation has kind
of made it harder for the BJP to deal with the
opposition. Okay, we just now two phases
into again a very long election. What
do you watch for in the coming days? I'm
going to go back to this idea of why do I care so
much about energy and turnout at the elections.
Let's assume for one second that
turnout and energy levels stay where they are. As
we speak today, energy levels are incredibly low,
turnouts have been coming down. Let
us say further that the BJP actually wins 350 seats
out of 543. There would be a massive
electoral triumph, right? Not
seen since the mid 1980s after the assassination of
Indira Gandhi. Do we believe that these 350
seats would have as much legitimacy and energy behind
it as the Congresses win in the mid 1980s? Or
for that matter these 350 seats would be seen as
much of an electoral triumph as the 282 in 2014
and the 303 in 2019. I don't think so. And
so the BJP and this version of the BJP is
having a certain existential crisis where you have been
built as an electoral juggernaut, but simply
winning elections by a large margin is not helping
your underlying legitimacy. And
one of the things that has happened with largely
uncompetitive elections, the role of state institutions
and politics, is that the sheer legitimacy of
parliamentary politics has become much lesser. And
today if you are in the opposition, again the
farmers are a good example of this. Do
you try to work through a political opposition or do
you take to the streets? So
today the political opposition or the social
opposition understands that it is better to use non
-parliamentary means to register your grievance than
it is to use parliamentary means. And
so the reason why I care about things like turnout
and energy is not just about what it says about
the BJP or the Congress, but what it says about the
legitimacy of parliamentary politics in India as a
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