Now that voters in five states have rendered their judgments in a clutch of recently concluded state assembly elections, the eyes of 1.4 billion Indians—and those observing from abroad—turn to the country’s general elections, expected to be held over several weeks in April–May 2024.
The results of the December 3 state polls provided a big boost to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The party swept elections in the Hindi belt states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The lone victory for the opposition Indian National Congress (INC, also known as the Congress Party) came in the southern state of Telangana. Neither the BJP nor the Congress Party figured prominently in the Mizoram battle.
These results confirm what is already common knowledge: as far as the 2024 parliamentary elections are concerned, the BJP remains firmly in pole position. This advantage is principally driven by Modi’s enduring popularity. According to Morning Consult, which tracks the weekly approval ratings of more than twenty democratically elected world leaders, 78 percent of Indians surveyed in late November approved of Modi’s job performance. Modi’s net approval (calculated as the share of respondents who approve of his performance minus those who disapprove) is a stunning +60. The second-most-popular leader on the list is Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose net rating is “only” +30. It is even more remarkable that Modi’s approval has been remarkably consistent since August 2019, the date that data were first available.1
Domestic opinion polls confirm that Modi’s popularity remains intact and that this continues to fuel his party’s dominance. The biannual Mood of the Nation poll from India Today has consistently shown, including as recently as August 2023, that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) would handily capture a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha, even if its majority reduces compared to its 2019 tally (when it notched 353 seats, shown in figure 1).
However, elections are popular demonstrations of the will of the electorate; they are not preordained coronations. Past experience—not least the previous NDA government’s surprise upset at the hands of the Congress Party–led United Progressive Alliance in 2004—suggests that Indian voters do not thoughtlessly conform to the conventional wisdom du jour. As the road to 2024 begins, five issues are worth watching: the waning predictive power of state elections, the challenge of opposition coordination, the battle for backward castes, the arms race of competitive welfarism, and the emergence of foreign policy as a mass issue.
Limits of State Election Results
The first issue to keep in mind is the limited predictive power of the recent state assembly polls. While it would be churlish to deny the BJP its celebration, it would be shortsighted for the party to believe that these results mechanically predict how voters in these five states will behave in next year’s general elections.
In an earlier era of Indian politics, scholars detected an unmistakable relationship between state and national elections. As the political scientist Nirmala Ravishankar found, candidates that state ruling parties put forward in national elections fared well when the elections occurred early in the state government’s term. Conversely, candidates nominated by state ruling parties whose respective governments were deep into their tenure were punished in national elections.
This correlation has broken down in recent years. As figure 2 demonstrates, the Congress Party swept the December 2018 assembly elections in Chhattisgarh and bested the BJP in both Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. But this advantage proved short-lived. In the parliamentary result (disaggregated by assembly constituency segments), the BJP dominated over the Congress Party in all three states in the Lok Sabha elections less than six months later.2 In the 2018 Telangana state polls, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS)—later rechristened the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS)—won three out of every four seats, but the party could not replicate this achievement in the 2019 elections, where the Congress Party and the BJP collectively won seven of seventeen parliamentary seats.
However, there is reason to believe that this correlation could be stronger in 2024 than in years past. Modi’s unparalleled popularity means that electorates have an extra incentive to back the BJP in national elections because doing so reinforces his position.
Challenge of Opposition Coordination
In 2014 and 2019, the BJP was aided in its quest to attain a single-party majority in Parliament by a fragmented opposition. In many constituencies, the BJP was facing off against not a unified opposition but several opposition parties competing with one another as much as they were battling the BJP. The inevitable result was a fracturing of the opposition vote. In India’s first-past-the-post elections, a candidate need not capture a majority of votes to win their constituency; they simply need more votes than the runner-up.
The opposition, after two successive electoral defeats in Parliament, seems determined to learn from past failures. In July, more than two dozen opposition parties announced the creation of a new opposition formation, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (or INDIA for short). The alliance is a hodgepodge, ranging from the Congress Party, which has a pan-Indian footprint, to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (the ruling party in Tamil Nadu) and Communist parties of all stripes. The opposition alliance has talked a good game about collectively taking on the BJP, but it faces an uphill climb on at least three counts.
First, the alliance must agree on a common platform that transcends a reflexive opposition to the Modi-led BJP. The BJP alliance earned 45 percent of the vote in the 2019 election, suggesting that more than half of the country did not support it. While their common anti-BJP position creates a floor for the opposition, the INDIA coalition must also offer an alternative vision for governing that sufficiently distinguishes it from the BJP.
Second, at present, the INDIA bloc is leaderless. This places it at a distinct disadvantage to the ruling alliance, which boasts a larger-than-life leader in Modi. While the opposition is factually correct in stating that India is a parliamentary democracy in which the eventual prime minister will be chosen by the party (or coalition) that constitutes a majority in the Lok Sabha, this ignores the fact that Modi has successfully presidentialized the system over the past decade. In the face of a popular incumbent, the INDIA coalition risks being dismissed unless a leader emerges who offers a counterpoint to Modi.
Finally, the opposition has yet to negotiate a seat-sharing agreement. If it is to truly fight as a unified front, INDIA’s constituent parties must voluntarily forego contesting seats they feel they “own” in order to make way for partners. This is easier said than done. In many states, like Punjab, constituent parties like the Congress Party and the Aam Aadmi Party are bitter opponents. In West Bengal, the Congress Party and the Left Front have fought together to displace Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress, yet now they must join hands.
Even if alliance members agree to let bygones be bygones, coalition arithmetic does not automatically generate coalition chemistry. Take the example of Uttar Pradesh in the 2019 elections. There, the two foremost regional parties—the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP), long at loggerheads—joined forces to keep the BJP out of power. Notwithstanding this grand coalition, the BJP alliance earned 51 percent of the vote and bagged sixty-four (of eighty total) seats, while the BSP-SP alliance won 39 percent of the vote but just fifteen seats.3
On paper, the opposition alliance had arithmetic in its favor; the SP and BSP jointly earned 42 percent of the vote in 2014—the same share as the BJP. But, in 2019, arithmetic on paper was not a substitute for the lack of chemistry in practice.
Breaking Down Backward Castes
The third factor to consider is the battle over the allegiance of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), the largest single voter bloc in India, likely accounting for more than 40 percent of the population. The electoral transformation of the BJP under Modi owes its success, in large measure, to the party’s ability to attract OBCs into its fold—snatching key voters away from the Congress Party and from the so-called Mandal parties in northern India, which mobilized on the basis of empowering backward castes.4 Hindi belt parties, like the Janata Dal (United) and Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar and the Samajwadi Party (SP) of Uttar Pradesh, shot to popularity thanks to their ability to cater to large segments of the OBC vote—until Modi’s arrival, that is. According to data collected by the Lokniti Programme for Comparative Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and analyzed by Rahul Verma, in the 2009 election the BJP captured 22 percent of the OBC vote (see figure 3). In 2014, under Modi (who happens to hail from the OBCs), the BJP made large inroads among this community.
In particular, the BJP positioned itself as the champion of jatis (subcastes) located among the lower rungs of the OBC community. These deprived groups, referred to as Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) or Lower OBCs, did not necessarily reap the benefits promised by the Mandal mobilization, with most of the visible benefits accruing to a handful of dominant jatis. The BJP’s bet paid off big in 2014. While the party captured 30 percent of the OBC vote, it earned 43 percent of the EBC vote. In 2019, it increased its gains among both groups, winning 41 percent of the OBC vote and 48 percent of the EBC vote. The share of the backward vote flowing to the Congress Party and once-dominant regional parties declined precipitously in turn.
Down but not out, the Mandal parties plotted their revenge. The charge has been led by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, an erstwhile political ally of the BJP who championed the cause of a comprehensive caste census in his state, a politically contentious maneuver meant to spotlight the pervasive underrepresentation of OBCs.5 Bihar released the results of this first-of-a-kind census in October, revealing that OBCs made up 63 percent of the state’s population. The finding fueled fresh demands for proportional reservations in government jobs.
The issues surfaced by the caste census have placed the BJP on the back foot, with the opposition exploiting a rare opportunity to define the political narrative ahead of 2024, especially in heartland states. But the BJP does not lack cards to play. Chief among them is the fate of the Rohini Commission, a government committee set up to propose the creation of official subcategories within the OBC grouping. This task of subcategorization is crucial because it provides a blueprint for allocating OBC reservations among the hundreds of communities that fall within this larger umbrella grouping—in essence, creating subquotas within the larger quota.
The commission submitted its final report in August, but the contents remain under wraps. If the government publishes the report and announces its intent to implement the committee’s recommendations, it could take the wind out of the sails of the opposition on this score. But there are also clear downsides to this course of action: divvying up OBC reservations will create winners as well as losers within this large, heterogeneous group, increasing disaffection among dominant OBC groups. Furthermore, highlighting the issue of reservations could raise the ire of the BJP’s upper-caste supporters, who worry about the adverse consequences of an ever-expanding thicket of affirmative action schemes in which they do not figure.
Competitive Welfarism
A fourth factor shaping the 2024 fight is the impact of welfare schemes on voting behavior. As former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian has noted, a critical pillar of the Modi government’s economic program consists of what he has termed “new welfarism,” in which the government has ramped up investments in the public distribution of private goods such as gas cylinders (a clean source of cooking fuel), toilets, bank accounts, and electricity connections.
Data from successive waves of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) demonstrate that access to a range of household goods has risen dramatically (see table 1), with the rate of penetration rising significantly post-2014. This welfare push has been coupled with the government’s embrace of direct cash transfers, which have funneled government benefits directly into household bank accounts while cutting out leaky intermediaries.
Table 1: Increasing Access to Basic Household Amenities
| Table 1: Increasing Access to Basic Household Amenities | |||||
| NFHS-1 (1992-1993) |
NFHS-2 (1998-1999) |
NFHS-3 (2005-2006) |
NFHS-4 (2015-2016) |
NFHS-5 (2019-2021) |
|
| Households with electricity | 50.9 | 60.1 | 67.9 | 88.2 | 96.5 |
| Households with flush/pour flush toilet | -- | -- | 39.1 | 53.2 | 68.3 |
| Households using clean cooking fuel | 11.6 | 17.5 | 25.5 | 43.8 | 58.6 |
| Note: All figures are in percentage terms. Data are sourced from successive waves of the India National Family Health Survey. | |||||
| Source: StatCompiler, The DHS Program, U.S. Agency for International Development, https://www.statcompiler.com | |||||
As Suyash Rai has shown, the expansion in cash transfers and in-kind assistance has been staggering. According to his calculations, the central government transferred 73.7 billion rupees in cash ($1.2 billion) to about 108 million beneficiaries in 2013–2014. In 2019–2020, it channeled 2.4 trillion rupees ($34 billion) in cash to more than 700 million beneficiaries using its direct benefits transfer platforms, alongside an additional 1.4 trillion rupees ($20 billion) worth of in-kind benefits. These benefits surged further on account of the pandemic.6
Although the conventional narrative holds that the BJP fought—and won—the 2019 election on the back of nationalism induced by a national security crisis involving Pakistan, economics had a distinct role to play. Indeed, in the months leading up to the poll, the central government announced an annual cash transfer of 6,000 rupees ($86) to every farming household under a new scheme meant to alleviate symptoms of rural distress. This scheme transferred cash directly into the bank accounts of some of the country’s most underprivileged households.
Survey evidence suggests that these investments engendered political returns. One analysis of the 2019 general election found that voters who received benefits under central government schemes involving cooking gas, bank accounts, and housing were more likely to support the BJP. However, it is also true that some welfare beneficiaries, namely pensioners and participants in a national rural employment guarantee scheme, were more inclined to vote for non-BJP parties.
In the recently concluded assembly elections, parties of all stripes made lavish promises of transfers if brought to power. For instance, the BJP announced a 150,000-rupee cash transfer to every girl child in Mizoram and an annual 12,000-rupee payment for married women in Chhattisgarh if it were brought to power (amounting to $1,800 and $144, respectively). To entice voters in Telangana, the BRS promised 100,000 rupees ($1,200) to the families of low-income and Muslim brides. In Rajasthan, the state Congress Party promised 10,000 rupees ($120) to every woman head of household, tacking on a commitment to provide women with smartphones and free internet.
The opposition has clearly homed in on the BJP’s welfare plank and wants to ensure it fights fire with fire, blunting the tight association between the prime minister and dozens of central welfare schemes. Not to be outflanked, the Modi government recently announced the extension of a pandemic-era scheme to provide free food grains to 800 million citizens for an additional five years. While lavish welfare promises do not guarantee victory—evidenced by the recent state results—the BJP will likely look to further innovate in this domain ahead of 2024, given the opposition’s fierce response to the party’s welfare gambit.
Foreign Policy for the Masses
A final factor informing the 2024 elections is harder to pin down—India’s evolving role in the world. Traditionally, political scientists studying India have distinguished between “elite” and “mass” issues. Elite issues concern subjects like foreign policy, national security, and trade policy, while mass issues pertain to matters like inflation, jobs/employment, and welfare benefits, issues that have a visceral impact on ordinary lives.
Modi has arguably broken the invisible barrier between these two categories. In February 2019, just months before voting began, a suicide bomber attacked a convoy of Indian paramilitary troops in Jammu and Kashmir, killing forty Indian personnel. The ensuing crisis, punctuated by India’s retaliatory strikes on alleged terrorist training camps in Pakistan, helped to generate a nationalist fervor that Modi skillfully tapped into and owned on the campaign trail.
It was hardly the first time an Indian general election took place in close proximity to a security crisis. The infamous 26/11 attacks in Mumbai occurred months before the 2009 election, and the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan transpired just ahead of that year’s general election. But, in both cases, there is scant hard evidence that national security had a measurable impact on the election outcome. In 2019, polling data suggested that the crisis bolstered the BJP’s fortunes, helping to displace more quotidian concerns about the economy.
But the impact of foreign policy on voter behavior cannot necessarily be reduced to contingencies alone. There is a widespread perception that Modi has elevated India’s status on the global stage, ensuring that the country enjoys a seat at the global high table. The government’s yearlong, high-voltage marketing campaign celebrating its inaugural G20 presidency serves as recognition that the way India is perceived globally is a matter of domestic political salience.
As Rohan Mukherjee has noted, rising powers like India care deeply about their status in the global hierarchy of powers. While India has long emphasized its moral exceptionalism and civilizational greatness, Indians do not always believe that non-Indians share their perceptions of their country’s global significance. The Modi government has worked overtime to propagate the idea that India has transitioned from being a “balancing” power to a “leading” one. Today, it is not uncommon for voters to remark that Modi has “put India on the map.”
The opposition is at a disadvantage here. For starters, it lacks the agenda-setting power incumbency affords. And its attempts to critique the government also risk backfiring if voters believe it is actively rooting against the country. As Prashant Jha has observed, the opposition has repeatedly shifted the goalposts when scrutinizing the government’s foreign policy. For instance, the opposition hammered the government when it looked like it would fail to reach consensus on a G20 leaders’ declaration in September. When it eventually did, the opposition claimed that the government only succeeded by making critical concessions that watered the text down.
Conclusion
As the battle for 2024 begins in earnest, the incumbent BJP undeniably maintains the upper hand. It is home to India’s most popular leader, most formidable political organization, and most savvy marketing machinery. After disappointing state election results, the opposition is forced to regroup. Rhetorically, its leaders have agreed to a ceasefire that allows for collective action against an existential threat. Even the Congress Party, which has been hampered by charges of dynasty and nepotism, has projected a leader whose last name—after a long time—is not Gandhi. The question is whether the disparate opposition groups can develop a forward-looking political narrative that is simultaneously cogent and flexible. The opposition has a steep hill to climb, and time is not working in its favor.
In the months ahead, Carnegie scholars and contributors will be analyzing various dimensions of India’s upcoming election battle—including the role foreign policy plays, the strength of partisan ties, and how technology has reshaped campaigning. Keep up to date with the project at https://carnegieendowment.org/specialprojects/indiaelects2024.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Caroline Mallory for excellent research and editorial assistance, Alie Brase and Haley Clasen for their editorial guidance, and Amy Mellon for her graphic design assistance.
Notes
1 The lone exception was a brief dip in Modi’s ratings following the brutal second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in India in spring 2021. Even then, Modi’s net approval rating hovered around +30.
2 Parliamentary constituencies in India are comprised, on average, of 7.5 state assembly constituencies. The latter are perfectly nested within the former.
3 In the 2019 general election, the BJP allied with Apna Dal in Uttar Pradesh, while the BSP and SP also joined forces with the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD).
4 The term “Mandal” refers to the Mandal Commission, a government committee that recommended the extension of public sector job reservations to OBCs. Although the commission submitted its report in 1980, its recommendations were only implemented a decade later, leading to a surge of backward caste assertion and a corresponding upper caste backlash.
5 While the Census of India regularly collects data on the population of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, two historically disadvantaged groups that enjoy constitutionally protected reservations, the government has not undertaken a detailed enumeration of all caste groups since 1831. The issue has long been viewed as politically explosive given what it might reveal about the imbalance between the population and the demography of economic, social, and political realities in the country.
6 Exchange rates are for the corresponding year as the transfers (2014 and 2020, respectively).