'Surprise' and catching on: Two verdicts

The thing about a 'surprise result' is that it's only a surprise if you didn't see it coming. In this context, Haryana 2024 is best seen in hindsight, and J&K 2024 with foresight. The two 90 seats-a-piece polls have thrown up a 'surprise' BJP victory in Haryana, and a verdict along expected lines in J&K. Both results can be seen as the consequence of strategic shortcomings of the losing sides.

Congress was seen being over-dependent on the Jat vote. Bhupinder Singh Hooda's traction with the Jat community, which constitutes 26-28% of Haryana's electorate, left BJP to mop up the considerably larger non-Jat and dalit votes. Congress' half-hearted signalling of Kumari Selja, a dalit, being its choice of CM, was seen, at best, as tokenism, at worst, as pulling the wool over non-Jat eyes. Instead, voters followed the ticket distribution trail in a state where this especially matters.

J&K, of course, is a different ball game - first election after Article 370's abrogation, with much water having flowed under the Jhelum since the last time it went to assembly polls in 2014. This election has been a success for GoI, if not for BJP, and that itself is a feather in the latter's cap. But Kashmiri perception of independent candidates trying on 'BJP's behalf' to divide the NC-Congress vote stuck, and struck home. Development and normalcy are, in 2024 J&K, a genuine ask. But unlike BJP's campaign 'advert', the prime minister's included, voters outside Jammu didn't see a 'double-engine' PDP-BJP coalition as the sole provider of such progress. It's up to CM-designate Omar Abdullah now to see the NC-Congress win isn't pyrrhic. One thing Tuesday's 'non-linear' verdicts do show is Indian federalism winking back at us.