Terms of Trade: BJP’s shifting hegemony — From utopian to transactional

What exactly is one to make of the evolution of Indian politics in the last ten years, with 2015 and 2025 Bihar elections as the relevant milestones?

This column was written on a day when Nitish Kumar took oath as the Bihar chief minister for the tenth time. The entire top brass of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Prime Minister included, was in Patna to celebrate the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) landslide victory in the state.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and Governor Arif Mohammad Khan in Patna on Thursday. (Santosh Kumar/ HT Photo)

Ten years ago, when Nitish took oath as the chief minister of Bihar after a similar landslide, even if slightly smaller in scale than this victory, it was the biggest challenge to the political prospects of what was then just a year and a half old Narendra Modi government. The coming together of the proverbial Brothers Bihari – Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar – and a weaponisation par excellence of the Mandal or lower caste Hindu plank in Indian politics sunk the NDA armada in the state which had won 31 out of the 40 parliamentary constituencies in the state in the 2014 polls.

Today, the Bihar win is among the biggest boosters for the BJP in what remains of the political cycle until the 2029 national elections. Not only is the Congress doing badly in one state election after another post its relative recovery in 2024 Lok Sabha, the near decimation of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in the state has also raised serious questions about the ability of Mandal to take on Kamandal, political shorthand for Hindutva in India.

What exactly is one to make of the evolution of Indian politics in the last ten years, with 2015 and 2025 Bihar elections as the relevant milestones? Different people can have different answers to this question. What this column will try and do is to situate a larger political economy evolution of the BJP’s hegemonic status in Indian politics, which, barring a few upsets here and there, continues to be intact.

The 2014 mandate for the BJP under the leadership of Narendra Modi was perhaps the biggest vote for an aspirational politics, even if rooted in anti-incumbency, in independent India. Two and a half decades of reforms had generated both opportunities, inequality and a hiatus between the two for various sections of the society. The achievers believed that the world was waiting to be conquered only if the government pushed the paddle on further reforms and deregulation.

The non-achievers believed that their predicament was more because of the system being unfair or corrupt rather than any structural in-built infirmities in the kind of capitalist growth path India had embraced as part of the global neoliberal order. Modi milked both these sentiments to the hilt. The Congress, thanks to the macroeconomic instability, painful inflation and myriad corruption allegations which preceded the 2014 elections, became the punching bag for both these constituencies.

But political sentiments do not necessarily lend themselves to policies and more importantly longevity of political support. The BJP’s 2015 loss in Delhi against what was perhaps the first “freebie” challenge to Modi, and Mandal destroying Kamandal loss in Bihar later in the year underlined the limitations of the utopian and perhaps one-off hegemonic advantage the BJP had in 2014.

However, the best (ideology-agnostic) thing about the current day BJP is that it is a party which is not married to its own propaganda. What followed was a major course correction in the run-up to the Uttar Pradesh elections with a two-pronged strategy: welfare and Hindutva.

The strategy worked for Uttar Pradesh, which not only brought the biggest state in the BJP’s kitty but also undid Kamandal’s loss to Mandal in Bihar with Nitish Kumar coming back to the NDA fold. However, economic policy choices along with some of the promised reforms (read back-to-back shocks of demonetisation and Goods and Services Tax roll-out) also led to collateral damage in the economy, especially in damaging the terms of trade for the rural sector, which first gave a scare to the BJP in its stronghold state of Gujarat in 2017 and then led to losses in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in 2018, months before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections

What followed was a course correction once again: retrospective cash transfers for farmers in the 2019 pre-election budget and an olive branch to the BJP’s core support base of upper caste Hindus via reservation for the poor among them. What added to the BJP’s prospects was also the circumstantial tailwinds from the military intervention against Pakistan in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on armed personnel in Jammu and Kashmir. All of this combined led to a bigger BJP victory in 2019 than 2014, cementing BJP’s hegemony and Brand Modi. But as has been argued above, on a very different philosophical plane than what it was in 2014.

The first half of the second Modi government was largely disrupted thanks to the pandemic’s impact. A sudden and harsh lockdown meant the have-nots paid a much larger economic cost of the pandemic in the country. The palliative from the government took the low cost but high footprint route of things such as additional subsidised good grains and very small ticket cash transfers. By this time, the BJP was not the only player in the game relying on politically weaponising welfare and what started as a political masterstroke had become a necessary ritual. Virtually every state election in the last couple of years has seen the rhetoric and fiscal outlay on populist transfers go up in the country.

The most salient of these perhaps came in Madhya Pradesh in 2023 when Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s government took this route and registered a landslide victory. Chouhan is perhaps the only chief minister in post-reform India who cultivated his political capital by investing in making farming more rewarding in his state. Clearly, he also needed to move from the monoculture of his pro-farmer image to the double-crop of pro-farmer plus pro-cash-transfer. The BJP did not scale up this lesson at the national level for the 2024 elections and paid for it by losing its own parliamentary majority despite having fulfilled two of its core ideological agendas – abrogation of Article 370 and a Ram temple at Ayodhya – in its second term.

State elections post 2024 have only underlined the centrality of the transactional aspect in Indian politics over the ideological which the BJP has always stood for, as well as the utopian one which powered the Modi victory of 2014.

Herein lies an important lesson for the protagonists of anti-BJP politics in India. BJP’s core ideological beliefs and rhetoric are necessary to keep its own base intact and, are, in a way, politically disarming for the opposition because of what these pages have described as BJP’s “hegemony without dominance” in the past. However, a more important driver of its electoral fortunes is its course correction to patch up the holes in its utopian agenda in the realm of the economic with palliatives where it is no different from any other political party in the country. Because the palliative game is tilted in favour of the incumbent – they can deliver rather than promise these – and the BJP is in an advantageous position on this front, competitive palliative politics is unlikely to pose an imminent danger to the BJP’s political fortunes in the near future.

The only logical option for the opposition then remains motivating the electorate to become active participants in the struggle for economic justice rather than passive, docile recipients of welfare benefits. This would take a politics which is more baptism by fire than firing iterations of so-called silver bullets of caste and welfare at the BJP which never work.