Why Congress lost Chhattisgarh

The Bharatiya Janata Party is all set to storm back to power in Chhattisgarh, having registered its best-ever electoral performance in the young central Indian state. As of 9 pm on Sunday, the Hindutva party’s vote share (46.3%) was over four percentage points higher than the incumbent Congress (42.2%) in what was largely a bipolar election. In terms of seats, the imminent victory is even more impressive: 54 to the Congress’s 35.

Yet, a closer examination of the mandate – the spatial distribution of seats, for one – and the factors that appear to have shaped it makes one thing fairly clear: the verdict is not so much an endorsement of the BJP as it is a rejection of the Congress government.

Besides, the Congress may have made the job easier for the BJP by employing a cynical brand of politics that undermined the reasons it got voted for five years back.

Adivasi anger

In the 2018 election, the Congress won a whopping 68 seats of the 90 seats in the Chhattisgarh assembly.

Five years later, it has lost ground across the state. The most heavy losses, though, have come in the state’s Adivasi belts – areas it has traditionally been strong in and which it swept last...

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