Hindustan Times

Roshan Kishore

Abhishek Jha

The years from 1989 to 1998 would confirm that the revival of the Congress was not to be. Instead, the BJP was resurgent. And Mandal parties would become their main competitor across a range of seats, in a trend that persists today.

The decade of Mandal versus Kamandal

<p>The 1989 election results, when they were declared, suggested that Indian politics was all set to go back in time. VP Singh, a former Congress man who broke ranks with his party to float a new socialist outfit, managed to dislodge the Congress from power with the support of both the right and left ideological camps in Indian politics. This was a very similar story to the Janata Party experiment of 1977. However, the decade to come would also see the logical culmination of contradictions within the anti-Congress camp that brought down the 1977 Janata government. These contradictions would give rise to a new kind of political faultline in the country, which continues to be relevant, although in a weaker form. Here are three charts that explain this in detail.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;"><strong>The resurrection of the Hindu right</strong></h2><p>Indian politics has had a Hindu right since before independence. But this stream did not have the might to take on the hegemonic Congress party, which captured power as India became independent. In order to keep this political stream alive, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) aided the formation of a political party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), in 1951.</p><p>While the BJS made significant political gains in the late 1960s and played a key role in the anti-Emergency struggle, it decided to merge into the Janata Party after the 1977 election. However, the anti-Congress camp had its own political contradictions and the Janata government collapsed in 1980 as a result of these. It was then that RSS and former BJS leaders launched the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in 1980.</p><p>While the 1984 election was a disaster for the BJP, with the party winning just two Lok Sabha seats, it made unprecedented gains in the 1989 election, winning 85 seats and a 27% vote share. In the decade that followed, the BJP continued to expand its political footprint, best captured in the chart of the rise in its vote share and seat share.</p>

<h2 style="text-align:center;">The atrophying of the Congress as a pan-India party</h2><p>Indira Gandhi’s victorious return in 1980, and the Congress’s landslide victory in the 1984 election held in the aftermath of her assassination, raised the question of whether this party had managed to reverse the decline in its fortunes, which began in the late 1960s.</p><p>The period between 1989 and 1998 would confirm that this revival was not to be. Not only did the Congress’s seat tally fall after the 1991 election, it also saw a fall in its vote share across crucial states. In 1989, the Congress’s vote share was at least 20% in all 31 states and union territories where elections were held. By 1998, this number had decreased to 24 of 32.</p>

<h2 style="text-align:center;">Rise of Mandal as a counter to Kamandal</h2><p>The VP Singh government formed after the 1989 election had communists and the BJP supporting a socialist party. This anti-Congress bonhomie, however, would not last long. The BJP withdrew support in the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, and the subsequent demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 actually brought a lot of socialist formations closer to the Congress than the BJP.</p>

<p>Given that the Congress had already been weakened in large states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Mandal parties emerged as a major challenger to the BJP’s ambitions of gaining a parliamentary majority. Data from Lok Sabha elections during this period supports this argument. Mandal parties were the BJP’s main competitor in only 11% of the seats it contested in 1989 (with these parties finishing just ahead of the BJP in case the BJP lost or just below the BJP in case the BJP won). Since 1991, Mandal parties have been the BJP’s main competitor in at least a quarter of the seats it contests.</p>