View from Abroad | The BJP bloc: Women, youth, farmers, poor... and Muslims?

In the wake of December’s state election results, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that the BJP was the party of women, youth, farmers, and the poor. Is that true? Typical election polls don’t have sample sizes large enough to slice up the electorate into smaller swathes. But immediately after the 2019 election, America’s Pew Research Center asked 29,999 Indians about their voting behaviour. That large sample makes it possible to do fine-grained analyses. Unfortunately, the Pew data don’t allow a direct comparison to actual voting patterns, because the organisation treated India like the United States—as a country having only two political parties. It’s not clear whether people saying that they voted for the BJP really meant another NDA party, and the same for Congress and the UPA. But some broad outlines are clear. First, voting patterns for men and women were near-identical. Reported voting differed by less than a percentage point across genders for both the BJP and the Congress. Second, there were virtually no differences in voting by age group. Reported voting differed by less than two percentage points from youth to late middle age for both major parties. Pew didn’t collect occupational data, but it did ask about respondents’ household incomes, dividing the population between households earning more than Rs 10,000 a month and those earning less. Thus the low-income respondents in the Pew survey aren’t necessarily the poorest of the poor, but they do broadly represent the less well-off in society. Here the results are clearer: the BJP’s voters skew poor, while the Congress’s voters skew better-off. The difference isn’t large, but it is noteworthy. The swing is a little more than 2 percentage points each way. But the real surprises have to do with religion. As expected, the BJP won Hindus by a factor of 4-1 over Congress, while Congress won Christians by a factor of 3-1 over the BJP. But among Muslims, the Congress advantage over the BJP was just 3-2. The Congress advantage narrows even further among poorer Muslims. Similarly, the Congress advantage over the BJP was narrower among Muslim women than among Muslim men, and narrowed even further among poor Muslim women. Congress won poor Muslim women by a factor of just 4-3 over the BJP. Perhaps the most interesting results, however, have to do with caste. The BJP is often labelled a “Brahmin/Bania” party. It would be more accurate to call it an “OBC/MBC” party. While general category castes did vote for the BJP over the Congress, the BJP’s vote advantage in 2019 was much larger among OBC and MBC groups. In fact, the Pew survey results suggest that if there is a Brahmin/Bania party in India, it is the Congress. In 2019 Congress received a slightly larger proportion of its votes from the general category (31.8%) than did the BJP (29.6%), and for the Congress, the general category was its largest vote bloc. The BJP, by contrast, got a much larger share of its votes from OBC/MBC groups (39.3%). Relative to the BJP, the Congress did best among SCs, and as most Indians will already be aware, SCs also voted for minor parties in larger numbers than any other group. If SCs shift over time into a two-party voting pattern, the votes that currently support those minor parties will be up for grabs. If Congress and its new alliance partners want to unseat the BJP in 2024, obviously they will have to do better in all categories. But much will depend on their crafting an attractive offer to India’s largest caste group, OBCs. Here they come up against their greatest challenge: the PM himself. Looking beyond caste, the big question in India’s multiparty democracy is the degree to which multiple parties will split the vote in individual constituencies. The opposition alliance may agree to a no-compete clause, but that won’t oblige the voters to respect it. Unless and until India evolves a straightforward two-party system, it will have messy and fundamentally unpredictable elections. The psephologists may express high confidence in their predictions, but at every election only half of them turn out to have been right. Which half will be right in 2024 is anyone’s guess. Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney and the executive director of the Indian Century Roundtable. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.