How wrong could I possibly be?

And, related question, how did that happen?

Here’s what I have been puzzling over since last evening, when the Election Commission announced the final results of the Haryana assembly elections, with the BJP winning 48 seats, two more than the 46 required for a majority, while the Congress ended up with 37 seats, at least 13 short of expectations:

To make the call I did in my previous post, I had spoken to the exact same set of people I’d called before writing this preview of the Haryana phase of the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year. This is what I wrote then, summarising their inputs:

Bottomline, the best case scenario for the BJP here is that it splits the seats with the Opposition alliance — and that right there is a loss of five seats; ground reports indicate that the backlash is likely to be even more severe.

They were spot on then: Of the 10 LS seats on offer in Haryana, the BJP and the Congress won five each. So how did the same set of people — locals on the ground, and regional journalists embedded in key districts — get it so wrong this time?

All polls pointed to a Congress sweep, putting the party over the 60 seat mark. The feedback I got from the ground wasn’t quite so sanguine: In summary, what I heard was that the Congress would win 40 seats for sure; that the BJP was as certainly winning 20 seats, and that 30 seats were up for grabs. My take based on ground inputs was that the Congress would end up at around 55 seats, with a margin of error of three seats either way.

That didn’t happen; it wasn’t even close — and I don’t have an explanation. I was inundated with messages last evening, asking essentially the same question: What the hell just happened in Haryana?

It is particularly puzzling because in the first hour and a half of counting, news channels had the Congress leading in almost 70 seats, before the flow of information coming out of the ECI slowed down, and the balance shifted dramatically in favour of the BJP. I’ve been following elections, as a professional journalist, for over 30 years, and I don’t recall a single other instance of such a dramatic turnaround.

I made calls to the same set of people last night, but managed to connect with only two, and they sounded as puzzled as I felt. (One pointed out that when the BJP candidate came campaigning in his village, the villagers had joined together to chase him out — and yet, when the results came in, the BJP had won the seat handily).

Over the coming days, I’ll make more calls, because I am curious to understand the turnaround and figure out what, if any, implications there are for the two states — Maharashtra and Jharkhand — that will go to polls later this year.

Once I have greater visibility, I’ll return to this topic — at this point in time, I am nowhere close to an answer. But I do have some thoughts, bullet-pointed below:

• To blame the outcome on the machinations on the ECI and the EVMs is reductive. While I am no way satisfied with the way elections are conducted, it is a stretch to postulate that the Congress lost due to the manipulations of the ECI.

• Related to the above, various Congress leaders have said, both while counting was on and in the aftermath, that they are sure the ECI played foul, and that they are collecting evidence from various constituencies. Fair enough — but it occurs to me that I’ve heard this before, in the aftermath of the Lok Sabha elections where, too, the Congress was certain that outcomes in 20 seats, at the bare minimum, were the result of ECI machinations. Then, too, Congress leaders said they were collecting evidence, but nothing came of it. Which brings me to my point: IF the Congress has evidence, the party needs to do something official with it besides making broad allegations on TV talk shows. Failing that, such charges repeated after every election will dent the party’s credibility.

• The Ram Rahim factor?

  

  Post-facto analysis leaned heavily on convicted rapist and murderer Gurmeet Ram Rahim, who was given his nth parole just before the polls, and who appealed to his followers to vote for the BJP. Again, that feels somewhat reductive. On the one hand, the Dadri constituency elected BJP candidate Sunil Sangwan, who in his former avatar as prison official was partly responsible for granting Ram Rahim parole on six different occasions — the first time the BJP has managed to win this seat. But then again, Sirsa — where the Dera Sacha Sauda is headquartered — elected Congress candidate Gokul Setia by a handy margin. How does that square with the notion that Ram Rahim can have a significant impact on outcomes? (Note that during his frequent paroles, Ram Rahim stays not in his Sirsa GHQ but in the Barnava, Uttar Pradesh, branch of his ashram.)

• The Ambala Cantt. constituency, where BJP candidate Anil Vij eventually won by 7277, provides an inkling of at least one of the reasons for the Congress implosion. Vij, seeking a seventh term as the constituency’s representative, faced severe backlash during this campaign from farmers, and with good reason. Vij, as Home Minister in the Cabinet then headed by ML Khattar, had taken responsibility for the police firing on farmers protesting at the Punjab-Haryana border in February in which a young farmer died. When Naib Singh Saini took over the chief ministership from ML Khattar. Vij was dropped from the Cabinet in a bid to dilute farmers’ angst. This is a seat the Congress should have won handily — but in the event, the party refused a ticket to Chitra Sarwara, a former AAP functionary who had joined the Congress in January this year. Sarwara, contesting as an independent, polled 52,581 votes and came second, while the official Congress candidate, businessman Parvinder Pal Pari, managed just 14,469 votes and placed third. Do the math, and you find that the Congress managed to defeat itself through its choice of candidate.

• Ambala is not an isolated instance. Preliminary analysis indicates that there are at least 15 seats where disgruntled ex-Congressmen, contesting as independents, cut into the votes of the official candidate and thus helped the BJP win, in some cases by the narrowest of margins. Add 15 to the Congress tally of 37, and you find the party in precisely the sweet spot the people on the ground I spoke to indicated: 52 seats (which is within the margin of error of the projected 55 seats).

• This raises a larger point. Of late, there has been a reverse migration across states, with leaders of various stripes leaving the BJP to join the Congress, often to an effusive and well publicised welcome. Question is, does the Congress have any idea what to do with these turncoats? Again, Chitra Sarwara is a case in point — when she, along with her father, joined the Congress on 10 January, it was touted as a “shot in the arm” for the Haryana unit of the party. Question is, what expectations were set in the run-up? Were they realistic? Were they met?

• Still on that point, is there any vetting process in place to decide who the party welcomes into its fold? The Basholi constituency in Jammu is a case in point. The seat was won by the BJP’s Darshan Kumar by a margin in excess of 16,000 votes. The losing Congress candidate was Chaudhary Lal Singh — an erstwhile BJP leader and former minister who joined the Congress in March this year, to much fanfare. This is the same Lal Singh who had said the police investigation into the infamous 2018 Kathua gang rape was a conspiracy against Hindus, and had led a march, holding the national flag, in support of the accused rapists. The local unit of the Congress had warned against his induction; sections in the central leadership were against it — so why the effusive welcome and the gift-wrapped ticket for a BJP turncoat with an unsavoury past? It’s one thing for Congress supporters on social media to herald such entries with fire emojis and suggestions that the BJP needs fresh stocks of burnol — but politics is not played for momentary social media buzz, and that is another lesson the Congress needs to internalise.

This does not purport to be an analysis of the Haryana results, merely some first-cut thoughts. I’ll revisit this once I have managed to have conversations with people on the ground I trust.

So… later…