This happened exactly as predicted and Congress swept the Telegana state elections. This experiment was taken into the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and I expanded upon that strategy here. I did predict that the Hindu vote consolidation during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections was unlikely.
When the BJP was formed in
1980 and started wooing the Hindu vote towards the late 1980’s by raising the
issue of pseudo secularism, all other political parties immediately started chasing
Muslim votes when logic demanded that they chase the majority. To be fair they
did chase a very narrow caste group within the Hindu vote, but to conflate that
as a Hindu vote was illogical. Post 2014 the strategy of the opposition changed
tack to becoming insulting to the Hindu faith as they chased the consolidation
of the Muslim vote.
While they did get some success initially, mainly because the Muslim and Hindu vote was fragmented, the collective opposition catapulted BJP as the ONLY political party that spoke of Hindus at the national level. TMC was limited to Bengal, TDP/YSRC to Andhra, DMK/AIADMK to Tamilnadu, SP/BSP to Uttar Pradesh, JDU to Bihar, JDS to South Karnataka, BJD to Odisha and SAD to Punjab. The only pan India party was Congress who successfully tried the Muslim vote consolidation strategy in 2023 in Karnataka and then built upon it in Telengana – albeit in the short run.
The Congress had staked its
all to get the Muslim community to vote for it en-bloc and as the 2024 Lok
Sabha election results showed, it worked. By dropping from 81% to just 60% of
seats contested, Congress ensured that the en-bloc vote strategy worked, while
the rest of the opposition thought they had also benefited since the BJP lost
the majority even if the NDA scraped through. The smile on Rahul Gandhi’s face
was so big at a strategy that had worked brilliantly and perfectly, except that
- deliberately or ignorantly – he did not anticipate a counter polarisation.
Soon after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections I had ended my blog saying this.
- 2025 saw Delhi and Bihar having elections and in Bihar the voting percentage went up from 58.7% in 2020 to 67.2% in 2025. BJP won both elections.
- 2026 saw Assam have 86% (82%), Keralam 78% (74%), Puducherry 91% (81%), Tamilnadu 85% (73%) and Bengal 92% (82%) displaying a significant increase compared to the previous assembly election.
The Wire article on the elections
As the entire opposition
whistled and cheered the INDI alliance, what was obvious was that there was no
cohesion between them, no strategy, and each was free to throw whatever muck
they could as long as it was directed towards Narendra Modi/ BJP. The result
was that every muck thrown did not stick to Teflon Modi but it surely dirtied
the entire INDI alliance as collateral damage. The common strand of muck was
the anti Hindu story across the alliance. If a Mamata spoke about how a Hindu
BJP govt would stop people from eating fish, a Udayanidhi Stalin went hammer
and tongs at Hinduism by demanding that Sanatana dharma must be eradicated. Any
casual observer of politics would be bewildered at this strategy aimed at
hating the majority Hindu community in the most vile terms.
As a result, the INDI alliance became a Muslim alliance in terms of perception but the mud stuck the hardest on Congress & Rahul Gandhi. The party is now openly called the Muslim league of 1947 that partitioned India. Whatever the truth, Rahul Gandhi and his team at Congress are doing nothing to counter that allegation. Perception is fast becoming fact in the eyes of the voters. The bizarness of the opposition strategy was that ALL of them chased ONLY the Muslim vote.
As predicted, the opposition lost, the non Muslim votebase consolidated and even if in varying degrees, the result was the same – NDA/BJP swept Bengal like a Tsunami, retained Assam and Puducherry confortably, the DMK lost TamilNadu badly and Keralam ? Given the overwhelming Muslim population there, the Congress won comfortably. The secular politics of the left front under Vijayan and his soft peddling on issues like Sabarimala did not go down well. Whether the Muslim vote moved to Congress or was divided between the different opposition parties is anybody's guess but their vote was against BJP/Modi.
Soon after the results of the Bengal elections were announced, Social Media sites were flooded with stories of atrocities that the people of Bengal had endured. Even if one were to call it a narrative, that allegation would be wrong for just one logical reason. Any narrative is always that one story, one argument, one issue is sought to be amplified widely so that a certain impression is created. Journalists, TV and prominent teams of influencers pick it up and amplify it, make the singular message viral. Here we saw dozens of disaggregated stories, anecdotes, reactions and none went viral, none were amplified by any influencer team.
But was there a narrative that was attempted ? Yes, and that narrative was about how the BJP had not fielded any Muslims, how Muslims did not matter for the Modi/ Shah combine, how only a Hindu led coalition can confront Modi/Shah/ BJP. None had the gumption to call out the election for what it really was – a huge consolidation of the Hindu vote.
Others spoke of how a party like Congress must be more open and flaunt its support for the Muslims which would deliver results. The effort was to claim that there was no Hindu vote consolidation but a fragmentation of the Muslim vote. This was the more important narrative to expound since the spectre of a Hindu vote consolidation is the opposition's worst nightmare coming true and needed to be discounted on priority.
The frustration at the
overall success of BJP & anger at the Hindu vote consolidation is palpable
when you see the SM team of Rahul Gandhi asking if the aircraft used by PM Modi
to travel to Europe runs on “GoMutra” or Cows Urine. Perception about Congress
and Rahul Gandhi just became fact in the eyes of the voters.
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