Good morning! It was fascinating to see the election results unfold last Sunday. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which is in power at the centre, winning three state elections was not inconceivable but was seen as unlikely. Even exit polls did not give any indications of the spectacular victory the BJP scored in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The Congress Party scored Telangana but got nearly wiped out in Mizoram. These state polls are often described as the semi-finals as the national elections typically fall due six months later. The wins have energised BJP’s rank and file, which were restive after the Congress victories in Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka. The election season is well underway.

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Bharat Bhushan

The state election results in India have given a head start to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the parliamentary election due in early 2024.

The legislative elections in five states—Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram were the last set of polls before the general election scheduled for April 2024.

While the results of state elections do not always match national elections, their outcome nevertheless has a psychological impact on political parties and voters.

The BJP has won three of these states in Hindi-speaking north India.

This has enabled Modi to assert that the BJP's “hat-trick”—winning three state elections—implies “a hat-trick in 2024” as well when he seeks a third term in office.

In Telangana, the only southern Indian state that went to the polls, Congress recorded a handsome victory.

A new political outfit, the Zoram Peoples’ Front (ZPF) has debuted in the north-eastern tribal, north-eastern state of Mizoram.

It is in North Indian states, however, that Congress faces a direct, head-to-head contest with the BJP.

Before the state elections, political observers were keen to see whether Modi’s electoral magic—a mix of demagoguery and ideological rhetoric—was intact. As it turns out, it was.

The ingredients of his recipe for electoral success seem to be: projecting himself over regional party leaders, Hindu majoritarian rhetoric, “Modi guarantees” for increased largesse to the poor and the marginalised, like tribals and women, and a well-oiled election machinery.

In addition to projecting his persona over that of the state-level leaders in the campaign, he made sitting MPs and BJP’s central party leaders contest from constituencies that the BJP had lost in the previous election, in 2018.

This compelled them to fight keenly for political survival. By leaving the field open for the Chief Minister’s job this also successfully subdued factionalism.

Modi’s promise of welfare added to the central government’s existing welfare schemes.

The free food distribution scheme for the poor introduced during the pandemic has been extended to 2028. In effect, his welfarism simply came across as more credible than the welfare schemes offered by the Opposition.

The Congress party’s promise of a caste census, which would guide the distribution of entitlements in proportion to a caste’s size in the population, failed to get traction.

These elections also underlined the contrasting election strategies of the BJP and Congress.

The BJP chose its candidates by a process of internal selection monitored by Modi and Home Minister, Amit Shah.

Congress, on the other hand, largely outsourced its surveys for selecting candidates to psephologists and election consultants instead of relying on inputs from block, district and state level leaders of the party.

The Congress party also seriously underestimated the anti-incumbency sentiment against its state governments in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.

In Rajasthan, its two-term chief minister Ashok Gehlot insisted on fielding nearly 90 percent of his outgoing legislators despite their palpable unpopularity, defying the central leadership.

Chhattisgarh has a predominantly tribal population where the BJP campaign to portray Congress’ state leadership as anti-tribal was successful in the rural areas.

Factionalism within the state Congress units in all the three north Indian states significantly hurt its campaign.

The results of the south Indian states have been different from that of the north for a long time. Voters in south India are suspicious of the BJP’s attempts to impose Hindi language on them to the detriment of their local languages. They also do not idolise Modi or buy into the Hindu majoritarian ideology, as yet.

Just as the state elections have further entrenched the belief in Modi’s electoral magic, they have also tested the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Gandhi dynasty that controls the Congress party.

His main platform opposing the BJP’s “divisive politics” seems to have failed to persuade the majority of the voters.

The defeat of Congress will once again raise doubts about Rahul Gandhi’s ability to lead the party to electoral success in 2024.

With its shrinking national footprint, Congress will find it harder to retain its pivotal position in the Opposition’s INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) bloc. Regional parties in the bloc are already elbowing for greater space.

The game for 2024, however, is not yet over.

The BJP’s victory in north India is in those states where it already has all or most of the parliamentary seats. Its margin for improving its tally in these states in 2024 is, therefore, limited.

Also, unlike state elections where local issues take precedence, for the national parliamentary election, the BJP will need a pan-India narrative that can sway voters.

India’s ‘surgical airstrikes’ against Pakistan, accused of terrorism against India, provided that narrative in the 2019 general election. There is no such emotional story to tell as yet for 2024.

While its absence from south India remains a formidable challenge, as of now, the BJP and Modi remain ahead in the battle of perceptions.

Bharat Bhushan is South Asia Editor, 360info.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

Tales of the macabre: Trigger warning for graphic descriptions that follow.

Harvard Medical School is one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world. The Ivy League university has an initiative called the Anatomical Gift Program, where people donate the bodies of someone they knew for students to research. It’s a sacrificial act, one that requires the bereaved to forego funerary customs and instead trust that an institution will treat the deceased with respect. That’s not what happened at Harvard. This chilling Rolling Stone story isn’t just about mortuary manager Cedric Lodge selling bodies that were donated to science. It’s about the underbelly of the world of oddities—the kind where collectors pay thousands of dollars for preserved body parts. Cadaver organs, skin, limbs, and in one case, even a foetus, were traded like baseball cards. Lodge and other lynchpins in the ugly nexus have since been indicted, but the victims’ families will know no rest unless the US closes still-existing loopholes in the trade of certain human specimens.

It takes a village…: …to allow a $2 billion (and counting) money laundering scheme to flourish. Singapore is still picking up the pieces of the biggest money laundering operation it has ever seen, months after it arrested 10 Chinese nationals and seized their assets. Ongoing investigations implicate everyone in the scam, from Singaporean nationals and local firms to large multinational banks that had no qualms doing business with the accused. This Bloomberg story breaks down how various Chinese citizens, many on the run from authorities for illegal gambling and other businesses, reached Singapore and happily laundered their ill-gotten gains through the city-state’s world-class financial system. It lays out the roles played by banks such as Singapore’s largest DBS, private wealth managers, citizens and local firms involved in quick, phony company registrations, and even real estate agents selling luxury homes for dirty money. But what is most at stake is Singapore’s storied reputation for attracting wealth and keeping crimes low. Now, it seems the very laws Singapore framed to attract wealth enabled a multinational money laundering operation of this scale and size. But then, can you really become a billionaire’s safe haven without (accidentally) welcoming dirty money? 

The CEO who “never sleeps”: There's a good chance you haven't heard of Xu Yangtian (or Sky Yu, his English name). We don’t blame you because even his employees, according to this profile by The Wall Street Journal, don’t. As it turns out, Xu is the CEO of Shein, the Chinese fast-fashion company that has taken the US, Latin America, and Europe by storm, and is now set to go public. In fact, the low-profile 39-year-old CEO signs off reports with a different name: Chris Xu. Not very proficient in English, Xu’s e-commerce ambitions go back to 2008, when he founded Dianwei Information Technology. But it was a later 2012 venture (SheInside) that specialised in wedding gowns, that morphed into the Shein we know today. The profile delves deeper into Xu’s origins from Zibo in China’s Shandong province, his leadership, and how the now-Singapore-headquartered Shein transformed itself. If you wish to dig deeper, the Financial Times also profiled Xu last month in the run up to Shein’s IPO filing.

Wasted: For residents of Delhi, its mountains of garbage are almost a part of their identity. Move beyond the city and you’ll find that it’s increasingly the reality for almost every city in the country. Given its population, India produces a lot of waste. Indian cities alone produce 42 million tonnes of solid waste per year as a whole. This is expected to grow 7% to 8% year to year. With Governments across levels sidestepping this issue, the mantle for waste collection, disposal and its management has fallen onto private companies. Some like JBM Enviro are using it to produce energy but with an international carbon market on the horizon, even that business might be coming to an end. To find out about India’s chronic waste problem and how companies and governments are dealing with it, read this sharp piece in Bloomberg. 

Going deeper underground: Residents of the Indonesian capital Jakarta would not blink if they re-watched the 1995 Kevin Kostner-starrer Waterworld. In the post-apocalyptic movie, the earth is completely under water, save for a tiny piece of land everyone is searching for. Jakarta is literally becoming a waterworld, gradually slipping beneath the waters of the Java sea. Some northern parts of the city have sunk 2.5 metres in 10 years and half the city is already below sea level. The ground floors of several buildings have disappeared underground. There is only one way of slowing it down: provide piped water to residents to prevent them from drawing ground water by digging thousands of (illegal) bore wells. Depleting aquifers are creating nether spaces for the city to subside ever more, according to Bloomberg. The task has been handed to PT Air Bersih Jakarta, which now has the contract to run the city’s five water treatment plants for the next 25 years. Anthoni Salim, the billionaire who leads the eponymous business group, which also makes instant noodles, is a veteran at the water business. Tailpiece: It was the Salim Group’s proposed chemical complex in West  Bengal’s Nandigram in 2006 that started a chain reaction which changed India’s political landscape forever. It ended the 34-year rule of the Left parties in Bengal and made it a stronghold of Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress. 

Social mirage: Social media is filled with people who seemingly have it all. A perfect family, legions of fans, big sponsors and big money… life’s perfect. Except it’s not. We all know it but we’ve never been able to see or read about it up close. Erich Schwartzel of The Wall Street Journal does exactly that in this story. Schwartzel covers the life of Dave Hollis, a former Disney executive who left the company to join his wife’s burgeoning self-help empire. What started as a simple journey of helping his wife’s business ambitions soon turned into a business empire of one’s own. Piecing together Dave’s life by talking to his neighbours, friends and his followers, Schwartzel charts a story of the fragile world of social media stardom. It’s a story of jealousy, enmity, paranoia, obsession and drug abuse… all culminating in an eventual death. It’s not an easy piece to read but then again, we don’t think it’s meant to be.