Haryana Surprise: The Inside Story Of How BJP Pulled Off An Impossible Victory

Many explanations and theories have been given since yesterday (8 October) for the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) unanticipated victory in the Haryana Vidhan Sabha election. Some of them are true—the usual stuff about the elections practically becoming 'Jat vs non-Jat' once again, the change of chief minister by the BJP earlier this year and more. Many others aren't.

Swarajya spoke to people involved in the BJP and Congress campaigns in Haryana to get their explanation on the results.

Here, thus, is the inside story of the Haryana election.

An extremely close contest

The eventual vote share difference between the Congress and the BJP was only 0.85 per cent. If you exclude the minority-dominated seats of southern Haryana where the Congress is assured to get giant margins, the difference might go up to 1.3-1.5 per cent (basis what you exclude).

There was a definite surge in favour of the Congress. The party registered a vote share increase of 11 per cent from the 2019 Assembly poll. Up from 28.2 to 39.

The BJP too saw a steady vote share increase since 2014. That there was an increase in the BJP vote share despite 10 years of incumbency is what ended up making the election close. Most pollsters and those working in the Congress campaign had more or less discounted the possibility of this happening.

Towards the end of the election, government formation by either party depended on political management and operational strength in a dozen odd constituencies. The Congress and its strategists believed that they had enough of a buffer for this to not matter. Their confidence primarily came from collapse of the INLD-JJP voting bloc which did benefit the Congress in some regions of the state (ignore those who say this vote went to the BJP).

How the Congress still managed to lose its post-Lok Sabha election momentum and get blindsided by the BJP surge in Haryana is the story of this election and is dealt with in the succeeding points.

BJP made it hyper-local

The BJP virtually made one Assembly election into 90 contests. Each seat was contested separately.

Usually in an assembly election, and more so where the BJP wins, around 60-65 per cent of the narrative focus is on pan-state/national issues while the remaining 35 per cent contains constituency-level, local, hyper-local issues.

This time in Haryana, this ratio was reversed. 70 percent of the narrative was centered around constituency-level issues, and the rest on state-national factors. The 'parchi-kharchi' story was making headlines in national media and did damage the Congress, yes; but in each seat, issues pertaining to that seat were amplified as well.

Further, state issues were localised—'Parchi Kharchi se <insert constituency> ke yuvaon ko rozgar se vanchit rakhne ki Congress (Hooda) ki saazish'. This aspect particularly revealed the gap between the execution capabilities of the two parties.

The next example is where hyper-localisation worked against the BJP itself but is nonetheless proof of the phenomenon. Ateli in the Gurgaon region, southern Haryana, was won by Arti Singh Rao of the BJP by a margin of 3,000 votes only.

Arti Rao is the daughter of Union Cabinet Minister Rao Inderjeet Singh. Inderjeet Singh is regarded as the senior-most Yadav leader of Haryana with complete dominance over the Ahirwal belt in the southern part of the state.

The conventional understanding of the Haryana result is that Yadavs (along with other non-Jat communities) counter-consolidated behind the BJP against what they saw as an imminent return of Jat dominance under the Congress. If that was the only, or the primary factor behind the results, the margin in Ateli for the BJP should have been one of the biggest in the state.

The inside story of Haryana is that the counter-consolidation theory barely begins to explain the result. While the Yadav consolidation helped the BJP in most seats of South Haryana where the candidate selection was even half-decent, a candidate like Arti Rao barely sneaked through simply because the election in Ateli, like in other seats, had become fairly localised. 

Note also, that this margin of 3,000 votes for Rao came against a BSP candidate, and not the Congress. BSP, a party which is not even a contender for power today in Uttar Pradesh, leave alone Haryana. 

What this example shows is that the election in Haryana this time around was heavily localised and net-net, the beneficiary of that was the BJP.

Flowing from the point of hyper-localisation, was the BJP's management of 'vote cutters' in every constituency. At the constituency level, depending on the field of play, the BJP was not only promoting the narrative of its own candidate but in many cases that of the vote-cutters in an indirect manner.

These vote-cutters could be third parties, or Independent candidates strategically propped up by the BJP. In some constituencies, there was an Independent candidate from each khap whose votes were present in the seat.

The party organisation focussed methodically on such rebel/Independent leaders. From persons with limited influence to leaders with a fairly large following, everyone was courted and handled as per a plan.

A consummate project in splitting the other side's votes.

BJP got its social media game right

One weakness of the BJP's Lok Sabha 2024 campaign was its inability to dominate the social media with its narrative, or even countering the narrative disseminated by the INDI Alliance.

But that changed in the Haryana assembly election. Evidently lessons were learnt and it was the BJP, and not the Congress, which was seen as winning the content battles on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube.

Again, even this social media strategy was subservient to hyper-localisation of narrative. That remained supreme.

No punches pulled

The narrative management of BJP for the Haryana assembly was different from earlier elections in two respects:

1. While earlier multiple leaders could intervene on the issue, this time clear chains of command were established.

2. Partly as a result of this, and partly as a conscious choice, the BJP pulled no punches when it came to countering the Congress at local levels. Parliamentary protocols were followed at the higher levels, but lower down the order, the instructions were clear: no time niceties, no time for mincing words.

Congress campaign more disorganised than in the Lok Sabha polls

This Haryana election showed Congress election strategist, Sunil Kanugolu's inability to manage a campaign in a Hindi-speaking state. That is one of the primary reasons for the Congress' Assembly election campaign becoming visibly more disorganised as compared to the one for the Lok Sabha election in the summer.

Kanugolu likely feels more comfortable in a southern state but had the confidence of Rahul Gandhi despite this. He has also shown himself to be better at elections where there is a pan-state narrative going around. Make the elections local and Kanugolu appears out of his comfort zone.

RSS no more active than in the Lok Sabha election

Since yesterday (8 October), social media is seeing stories describing how the RSS made special efforts and covered extra ground in the Haryana assembly election than it did for the Lok Sabha campaign.

Some exceptions aside, that does not appear to be the case. The RSS cadre was on the ground in Haryana canvassing support for the BJP before the Lok Sabha polls, and it was there before the Vidhan Sabha polls as well.

What changed this time was better coordination within the BJP and Sangh organisations, and the shoe of complacency being on the Congress' foot.