Having grace in defeat is essential in politics. Going ballistic after a loss, especially after elections, often antagonises the voters. It demonstrates the losing side’s lack of sportsmanship and also projects a sense of entitlement on their part – that they alone deserve to be in power. The voters, as became evident with the results of the three Hindi heartland states, do not agree with this outlook of the Congress and its sycophants.
Nevertheless, prominent members of the party and its most vocal supporters on social media chose to blame the voters of the three states for electing the BJP. While doing so, they chose to manufacture a false North-South divide, suggesting that while voters in South India make more electorally sound choices by not allowing the BJP to rise to power, those in North India continue to elect the BJP due to a variety of factors, ranging from religion to bigotry to even illiteracy.
Who is Hurting ‘Idea of India’ By Manufacturing Fake North-South Divide?
Karti Chidambaram, the son of P Chidambaram, proclaimed on X (formerly Twitter): “The SOUTH!”. This was some really weird muscle flexing on Chidambaram junior’s part, who seemed to suggest that South India continues to keep the BJP at bay because the issues of the North do not matter down under. The Chairman of Congress’ data analytic department Praveen Chakravarty wrote, “The South-North boundary line getting thicker & clearer!” He subsequently deleted the tweet, but screenshots remain readily available.
X users who are sympathetic to the party and harbour a disdain for the BJP were more vocal. One user said, “India’s split is now complete. It’s Progressive South vs Communal North. I don’t know for how long the south will pay for and carry the north’s bigotry.” He added, “All the bigots from North India are showing us why they are called bimaru and dung belt in comments.”
Another user said, “Hence proved – South is aware and North is still lagging far behind.” Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who is the subject of an investigation by both the Enforcement Directorate and Delhi Police over alleged “terror links” and suspicious money trails said, “Victory for Hindutva and its coalition partner Big Business. Soft Hindutva of Cong fails miserably. North-South divide widens.”
Unfortunately, for the Congress and its supporters, the moment the people throw a mandate against the grand old party, they become not only religious bigots but also symbols of what supposedly plagues North India – lack of education and indifference to “real issues”. That the son of a sitting South Indian state’s chief minister calls for the eradication of Sanatan Dharma, meanwhile, is bold and entirely civilised. At least that is what we are supposed to believe.
What such ‘sharp’ analysts almost always seem to forget is that the same people, just in 2018, voted in favour of the Congress. Kamal Nath, as a matter of fact, even ran a government for over one year in Madhya Pradesh. How is it that the same people who voted for you five years ago are suddenly now “bigots”, “communal” and “backward”?
There is another anomaly with the Congress ecosystem’s casual hatred for North India. In Karnataka, the BJP continues to be a force to reckon with. In 2019, the BJP won a whopping 25 Lok Sabha seats from the state. Unless the Congress and its coterie do not consider Karnataka to be a part of South India, their petty campaign to invent a supposed North-South divide falls flat on its face.
The fact of the matter is that the BJP has won Karnataka in the past, and it would not be a long shot to suggest that a strong performance from the party in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls is likely. Yashwant Deshmukh from C-Voter fame has already said that this is a strong possibility.
Consider Telangana as another example. The BJP has doubled its vote share in Telangana, going up from 7 per cent in 2018 to close to 14 per cent now. Its seat share has risen from 1 to 8. So, the party cannot be written off in the state just yet. If anything, the BJP is on the ascent in Telangana.
In Tamil Nadu, a bastion of Dravidian and South Indian identity politics, the BJP is working on a long-term project with K Annamalai at the forefront. A lot is being invested in the state, and the BJP will eventually become a significant challenger to Dravidian parties.
The Congress also seems to have forgotten its victory in Himachal Pradesh’s assembly elections earlier this year. If North Indian voters were indeed making electoral choices on the Hindutva plank alone, the Congress would have not come to power in the Himalayan state by defeating the BJP in a one-on-one contest. Drumming up toxic regionalism in a post-verdict scenario is nothing more than a sorry coping mechanism for the Congress ecosystem and it must be called out.
Stop Blaming Voters and Learn Your Lessons
The mindset that voters are to blame for not choosing a party that gave them no vision or a blueprint on how their governments will be different from the BJP’s shows that Opposition parties, especially the Congress, do not learn the required lessons from such losses and continue living in a bubble.
Until August this year, the defeat of the BJP in all three heartland states – Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh – was considered the most predictable outcome. Then, Amit Shah’s election mathematics and strategy-making kicked in. Coupled with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unmatched persona among voters and the BJP’s formidable election machinery, the saffron party ended up stunning not just the country, but the world with a spectacular sweep of all three states in the “Hindi heartland”. The BJP started distributing tickets well ahead of the Model Code of Conduct coming into place. This ensured candidates, including sitting Union ministers, had enough time to prepare for the elections. The strategy worked, and the party has won handsomely on seats that it lost in 2018.
The Congress, it appears, has not quite figured out what struck it. This was their election to take. Instead, the BJP posted an unreal victory in Madhya Pradesh – scoring no less than a 49 per cent vote share. In Rajasthan, the BJP’s strategy of creating a direct contest between Ashok Gehlot and Narendra Modi made the outcome a foregone conclusion. And in Chhattisgarh, the overconfidence of the Congress, big allegations of corruption against Bhupesh Baghel’s government and the party falling for its own propaganda seem to have gotten the better of it.
While the BJP has successfully defended a state like Madhya Pradesh despite being in government for four terms, the Congress has collapsed like a house of cards in two major states – Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh – after just one term in power. That is quite telling.
To put it simply, the Congress has snatched a spectacular defeat from the jaws of victory and is now blaming the voters for its own complacency. What it should be doing instead is learning from its mistakes, bowing before the will of the people and accepting that it needs to undertake some serious soul-searching.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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