‘’What happened?’ That was the title of the introspective journey that former First Lady and Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wrote after the staggering shellacking she received from a rambunctious novice called Donald Trump in 2016. As the jaw-dropping numbers from Maharashtra Assembly elections reached a vertiginous high, I was sitting in a TV studio amidst both pro-Congress and die-hard BJP supporters; for a change, they all sported similar countenances and looked stupefied: What happened? I will attempt to do a biopsy of probably the most extraordinary result from the land of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.
First, the context: Just five months earlier, the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) comprising the Congress, NCP ( Sharad Pawar) and the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) had obdurately withstood the saffron surge, and hammered a glorious win in 31/48 Lok Sabha seats, a whopping 65 per cent conversion success rate. It led in 155 assembly constituencies. On the counting day of the state election on November 23, by 10:45 am, the writing was on the billboards of Mumbai. MVA had been ruthlessly crushed, reduced to a paltry 50/288 seats. This was an electoral catastrophe; no political pundit forecasted this havoc-creating tsunami. In fact, neither had the Mahayuti alliance (BJP, NCP and Shiv Sena) which was the stunned victor. So, what really happened?
First, the MVA, shell-shocked by their own impressive accomplishment in the Lok Sabha, began fantasising about occupying the chief ministerial residence, Varsha, too early. Their overconfidence looked like a legitimate extenuation of reality: Rising food inflation, agrarian distress, youth unemployment, corruption allegations, a belligerent Manoj Jarange-Patil demanding Maratha reservation, and the big emotive issue of disrupting traditional Maharashtrian regional pride; the public mortification of the son of the towering personality of Balasaheb Thackeray, and the modern-day maestro of Machiavellian politics, Sharad Pawar. Unbeknownst to them, the RSS, which had remained studiously indifferent in June 2024 had already got into the act of knocking on household doors. The RSS celebrates 100 years in 2025: How could Nagpur be reporting to a Congress-led coalition whose leader Rahul Gandhi regularly called them a dangerous threat to India’s secular future? The MVA underestimated Nagpur’s zealous involvement in this election.
Second, the Congress local leadership, understandably cocky, made a calculated mistake in not agreeing to endorse Uddhav Thackeray as the CM face of MVA. It was Uddhav’s bold snapping of ties with the BJP that had resurrected Congress, till then sulking in splendid isolation, and created the unique MVA experiment. MVA was a remarkable attempt at forging an alliance of ideologically opposed parties. Uddhav had painstakingly redefined his inclusive Hindutva as distinct from BJP’s toxic, hate-spewing enterprise. Given the Eknath Shinde Shiv Sena faction’s repeated assertions that Uddhav had betrayed his father’s controversial religious assertions, Uddhav surely knew that he was on a slippery slope against trenchant unyielding adversaries. Congress needed to reciprocate the favour in the Assembly elections; their myopic ambitions prevented that. An Uddhav as a CM face would have galvanised Sena supporters state-wide, who, at the core, remain family loyalists, and want a Thackeray at the helm. With Shinde’s own return as a CM looking extremely uncertain, the MVA could have capitalised on a significant SS vote share of 16-18 per cent in the state, besides several borderline voters who liked Thackeray’s governance during Covid and his unassuming likeable demeanour. It is beyond doubt that SS supporters shied away from the MVA as they did not relish Nana Patole as the big Kahuna. It was a bad call.
Third, with local issues dominating the state election, and the popular perception gaining ground that the MVA was safely ahead, Prime Minister Narendra Modi resorted to his usual modus operandi — dog-whistle politics a la Ek hai toh safe hai (we are safe if we are united). To a layman unfamiliar with BJP’s divisive rhetoric, that would appear to be a resounding call for unity. In reality, it was brazen scaremongering. Safe from whom? Who is not letting India unite? Who are the enemies within, the fifth columnists? The UP CM had his own line, and together they became combustible material for polarising politics. Judging by the results, it worked, while it trampled masterfully over the caste-reservation call of the MVA. The MVA counter-attack on Modi was overwhelmed by the Big Media cacophony which supports the strongman’s pitch. Hindutva is BJP’s trump card, a peerless political narrative. It rarely fails in a country that has been repeatedly exposed to identity chatter since 2014. Modi nationalised a provincial election.
Fourth, the stunning debacle of Haryana (although Congress and the BJP had identical vote shares) had electrified the Mahayuti cadres, and enfeebled the MVA. The public squabbles among the MVA leadership damaged perception; Nana Patole became a pariah temporarily. Seat-sharing dragged on interminably, and that helped Mahayuti establish the first voter connect. The Ladli Behna scheme, which reflected the acute economic circumstances of poor households, became the Mahayuti’s USP, with the MVA appearing clueless, to combat a clearly opportunistic ploy of a mere Rs 1,500 per month. The MVA would actually double that amount to Rs 3,000 under the Mahalaxmi scheme, but the manifesto came just 10 days before D-day. If the MVA had gone ballistic on the Mahalakshmi Scheme with a month to spare, they would have significantly dented the actual loss of women’s vote. My guess is that rational economists within the MVA took over, perhaps caught in the mathematical gridlock of fiscal profligacy. It was poor politics. First, you win, then you work out your finances.
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Fifth, the MVA forgot the cardinal principle of politics in the age of AI, 5G and social media: A day can be a long time in politics, forget a week. Perhaps five months was too much; elections are never a perfunctory ceremonial affair. Like sports, even the raging favourite has to win the title — no one surrenders to Manchester City or Novak Djokovic. It is never over till the last ballot is counted. Congress had to do the heavy lifting, but it would end up with the lowest strike rate; it floundered twice back-to-back. But in both Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand, a stronger savvier regional alliance partner stood rooted. Politics needs a 24×7 engagement model. The Bharat Jodo Yatra was a magnificent march; Congress received huge political dividends. But a new attractive idiom was needed, beyond the formulaic trope. For the grand old party, the big worry is that it is refusing to learn from unpardonable mistakes. It has lost five states where it was a clear frontrunner: Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana and now Maharashtra. It blundered big in Rajasthan too. It is never too late to reboot, but Congress’s twin failures within months put India’s democratic future at great risk.
If Congress needs any inspiration for the future, it should look at its fellow partner, Hemant Soren and his wife Kalpana Soren. Jailed, harassed, and facing a vicious hate campaign, a fabricated charge of forced demographic change on account of Bangladeshi infiltration from a take-no-prisoners BJP, the JMM leadership remained resilient. The tribal communities of Jharkhand ended up defeating BJP’s poisonous play. The BJP which led in a majority of Assembly seats in the 2024 LS elections, was left nonplussed, and saying: What happened?
The writer is a former Congress spokesperson.
