A familiar maxim of American politics holds that in any election, the challenger hopes to turn the contest into a referendum on the performance of the incumbent, while the incumbent would rather present it as a choice.
This "referendum or choice" framing might be American, but the underlying logic is native to Indian politics as well. What we call "anti-incumbency" is a form of negative voting in which the identity of the challenger is at best secondary. With only one real exception, every Indian general election in which a full-term incumbent has suffered significant losses has followed the referendum-not-choice pattern: 1967, 1977, 1989, 1996, 2004. The one exception is, of course, 2014, thanks to a presidential-style opposition campaign unlike anything India had previously seen.
The BJP's re-election in 2019 stemmed, in part, from its success in turning that campaign into a choice, between not ideologies but personalities. The Opposition - then the Congress-led UPA - fell more than willingly into the trap, focusing its campaign on the person of the Prime Minister ("Chowkidar Chor Hai") rather than on his government's record.
Choice elections benefit incumbents in two principal ways. First, because they take advantage of a power that only incumbents enjoy - that of appearing statesmanlike on the world stage (India's presidency of the G20 will feature heavily in next year's BJP campaign). Second, because they widen the range of expression for negative emotions. The desire for collective improvement, collective greatness, ought to be at the heart of democratic politics, but fear and anger are often more reliable tools of electoral mobilisation.
In a referendum, negativity only benefits the challenger. In a choice, it can actually benefit the incumbent - whether the framing is known vs unknown, experienced vs unproven or lesser vs greater evil. Take the 2022 US midterms. An election in which the most unpopular policy belonged not to the incumbent, but to the challenger - the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade. Any dissatisfaction with the incumbent was more than compensated by fury at the opposition.
The Opposition that gathered in Bengaluru this week, where they chose for themselves the not especially imaginative acronym INDIA, claim to be motivated by existential fear, for their own survival, and for the survival of constitutional democracy in India. They are motivated, just as much, by a sense of opportunity, by the relatively recent belief that 2024 can, at the very least, be a real contest, one that the Opposition can define as a referendum.
The grounds for such a belief are as follows. In 2019, PM Modi and the BJP, like Indira Gandhi in 1971, could still claim the mantle of insurgency and could still contrast their mere five years in power with "60 years" (in fact, 54) of Congress rule. The party's gains that year in West Bengal and Telangana suggested that they had room to grow.
Four years later, the BJP looks like a party that peaked, politically, in 2019, with its twin ideological victories - the abrogation of Article 370 and the Supreme Court's Ayodhya judgment. Recent reversals in West Bengal and Telangana reveal a party that is no longer expanding. The BJP is many things, but new is no longer one of them. An entire generation of Indians has no political memory of any Prime Minister other than Narendra Modi.
At the same time, the Congress, a party that had turned many columnists, including this one, into overeager obituarists, has had its best year since 2009. Its position as the fulcrum of the Opposition now looks secure; and the Bharat Jodo Yatra has meaningfully elevated Rahul Gandhi's personal popularity and political standing.
The question now is whether the Congress can build on that success and whether it can avoid being as precipitate in claiming a comeback as some of us were in writing off its prospects. The party has form in this regard. Its assembly election victories of December 2018 in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, were too easily taken within the Congress as a barometer of the national mood. Five months later, the scorecard in those same states read BJP 62, Congress 3.
The Congress has good reasons to be optimistic about the forthcoming elections in two of those states; the party's strategists believe it may even be surprisingly competitive in the third, Rajasthan. Yet even another triple victory will mean little for 2024 unless the party learns from the missteps of 2019. Above all, this means declining to participate in a third edition of the election that the BJP wants: a Modi vs Gandhi presidential contest. Rahul Gandhi's approach to the Karnataka campaign, and to the formation of INDIA, are encouraging signs for those who hope that such a contest can be avoided next year.
Beyond avoiding presidentialisation, the referendum-not-choice approach means a focus on questions of livelihood rather than culture or national security. It means meeting voters where they are, identifying areas of existing dissatisfaction rather than trying in the course of a short campaign to change perceptions. "40% sarkara" was as effective a campaign slogan as "Chowkidar chor hai" was ineffective precisely for this reason. Any attempt to rerun the Rafale campaign in 2024 will yield the same results as last time.
A campaign of this kind could - if all goes well - go some way in turning 2024 into a "normal", that is pre-2014 election. Before 2014, a famous maxim of Indian politics held that a general election is an aggregation of state-level contexts. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have twice delivered national victories based on a national campaign, fought in one style and with one focused message.
If INDIA is to not merely wound the NDA but defeat it, it needs either nationally widespread anti-incumbency of a kind not yet evident, or it needs to be able to partially rewind the nationalisation of our politics. We know now that there are two BJPs, electorally speaking - one at the Centre, one in the states.
The latter does not even approach the hegemony that the Congress once enjoyed under Nehru and Indira Gandhi. As recently as 1982-83, the Congress was in power in every state bar two - Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. The NDA currently rules 16 of India's 30 elected assemblies, but this number overstates the BJP's dominance. In only 20% of those assemblies - six out of 30 - did the BJP win a majority in its own right at the most recent election.
Excluding states with five or fewer Lok Sabha seats, the BJP's assembly-level dominance is confined to Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Assam. Viewed another way, the 16 NDA-ruled states and Union Territories account for 226 Lok Sabha seats, and in many of those states the BJP state unit is currently on shaky ground. The 11 INDIA-ruled states/UTs have a combined 243 Lok Sabha seats. In 2019 the BJP won nearly half these seats, 117. What one might call the "Non-Aligned" states - Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha - have 63 seats. In none of the three does the BJP currently appear likely to improve its 2019 tally.
A non-presidential election that is more referendum than choice, with state-level variation rather than a single national trend - this formula for Opposition success has a lot of ifs built into it. But this time a year ago the Opposition was thought - even by many of its own constituents - to have no path to success at all.
(Keshava Guha is a writer of literary and political journalism, and the author of 'Accidental Magic'.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.