2018 assembly election results analysis: part 4

A quick recap

In the first part of this report, I summarized the 2018 Telangana mandate including a historical perspective. The second part focused on the data & analytical methodology. The latest i.e. part 3 sizes the magnitude of the verdict as well as regional & demographic trends.

The present post looks at various factors including alliance dynamics and party wise primers.

UPA "think tank" core approach

In 2014, Congress & CPI forged an alliance and won 25.9% of the votes. This alliance was somewhat cohesive with just one dissonant note i.e. CPI put up a lone extra candidate over its allocated 6 seats. TDP & BJP fought the elections together under the NDA umbrella contesting 72 & 45 constituencies respectively. The alliance was broadly smooth (just one rebel candidate from each party) and polled 21.5% of the votes (TDP:BJP split 14.5%:7.0%) of the votes.

The raison d'etre of the present alliance is the apparent arithmetic: adding 25.9% & 14.5% yields 40.4%, a 6.4% advantage over TRS's 2014 vote share of 34.0%. A simple "back-of-the-envelope" calculation assuming complete vote transfer between UPA & TDP 2014 votes shows TRS losing 12 of the 63 seats it won in 2014.

There are several serious problems with this oversimplified approach. For starters, even in the highly unlikely situation of the other 56 seats going against TRS once more, it would still remain the single largest party with 51 seats.

The next big question is of course chemistry. Would the alliance actually work on the ground? Would votes transfer to allies when the support base is not uniform in composition, enthusiasm & general makeup?

There are several other serious issues with the proposed alliance. For instance, how can we measure TDP votes when it fought as a part of NDA? In addition, even the most optimistic TDP supporters acknowledge that the party's base in Telangana eroded significantly. Finally it is universally agreed that TRS grew a good deal in the last five years making inroads into hitherto uncharted areas & voter groups.

Pro-UPA "experts" conceded all these points but argued the Congress too grew since 2014 and further claimed TJS would partially offset the TDP losses. UPA strength was estimated around 40% (30% to Congress and 4-5% each to TDP & TJS) against a near identical TRS share. It was further argued the UPA's alleged focus in urban & semi-urban areas would be helpful vis-à-vis TRS's better distributed vote bank. There were frequent references to an allegedly superior "poll management plan" resting on the pillars of social engineering, promotional strategy & targeted campaign planning championed by TDP supremo Naidu, said to be the modern day Chanakya!

UPA dynamics

Let us first look at the two minor alliance partners before going on to the Congress-TDP equations.

As we saw earlier, CPI came a cropper with a semi-decent performance in just one of its three seats. Their contribution to the alliance can be therefore said to be near zero, especially when the seat allocation was broadly based on their own assessment of alleged local strength. Their only consolation can be that CPM performed equally badly.

For TJS this election was a disaster right from seat sharing. They competed with Congress in four of the eight constituencies it fought, Three of the other seats were in any case deemed unwinnable. Prof. Kodandaram was effectively reduced to be the proverbial curry leaf in biryani during the campaign. Even with all these constraints, TJS electoral debut (just 0.5% of the votes) was a colossal failure paling even before the 2.6% obtained by LSP in 2009! Should TJS have allied with BJP? While they would have certainly received greater respect, the end result would have been similar. Kodandaram must wake up to the reality of the serious drubbing if (a big if in my view) TJS is to have even a modest electoral future.

Did Congress & TDP jell well? The presence & performance of Congress rebels in comparison with previous can be a useful pointer:

Election *	Tally **	Percent ***
1989	15	2.9%
1994	26	5.4%
1999	18	2.6%
2004	22	4.3%
2009	10	1.7%
2014	16	1.8%
2018	24	1.6%

* Earlier data unavailable or not considered reliable

* Congress rebels contesting in the election

** Vote share of such rebels

The findings are summarized below:

·         The rebellion impact is akin to "atmospheric noise" that never goes below certain levels and hence must be accepted as a normal phenomenon occurring irrespective of alliance arithmetic

·         2018 Congress rebellion appears at par with previous alliance situations but the impact of these rebels is highly muted. Remember when Congress & TRS paired up in 2004, the rebels took away nearly a tenth of the UPA vote: the present case comes nowhere close

·         Even this minor impact was offset by the presence of 14 TRS rebels polling a slightly higher 1.7%

We can safely conclude Congress voters did broadly switch to TDP as & when required (and vice-versa even though this is less important due to the shrinking TDP base) This is also borne out by anecdotal evidence. As we saw during the 2016 municipal elections, TDP polled 2.4% of the votes in Greater Warangal failing to retain deposit in 57 of the 58 wards of the city and one candidate polling a grand total of 4 votes! To everyone's shock, UPA allocated # 105 Warangal West to TDP with Revuri Prakash Reddy contesting a seat (Hanamkonda in its previous incarnation) that did not see a TDP candidate after 1994. Congress aspirant Naini Rajender Reddy protested loudly with the TV cameras lapping up the dissent eagerly. In the end however TDP managed to secure 31.2% of the votes, a feat that can be ascribed only to total unswerving Congress support in the face of an extremely unpopular alliance choice.

Agreeing Congress-TDP alliance worked out on the ground let us move to the more pertinent question: was it useful? Did Congress benefit by tying up with an admittedly shrinking party? Ignoring "logistics support" for the moment and concentrating only on votes I drew up a simple district wise "what-if" chart:

District	UPA *	TDP *	UPA **	2018	Change
Adilabad	24.8%	8.5%	33.3%	31.0%	-2.3%
Nizamabad	30.4%	6.5%	36.9%	35.7%	-1.2%
Karimnagar	25.7%	5.3%	31.0%	31.6%	0.6%
Medak	30.0%	12.4%	42.4%	31.0%	-11.4%
Ranga Reddy	22.8%	24.9%	47.7%	32.2%	-15.5%
Hyderabad	12.5%	13.6%	26.1%	18.9%	-7.2%
Mahabubnagar	33.0%	13.4%	46.4%	30.7%	-15.7%
Nalgonda	33.1%	14.2%	47.3%	40.1%	-7.2%
Warangal	26.3%	12.1%	38.4%	35.0%	-3.4%
Khammam	23.5%	27.5%	51.0%	43.8%	-7.2%

* 2014 performance

* 2014 joint performance assuming total & perfect transfer

The analysis may be summarized as under:

·         UPA 2018 fell short of the total UPA + TDP vote share in all districts except Karimnagar where we see a miniscule gain

·         In 6 districts (Adilabad, Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Medak, Mahabubnagar & Warangal) the 2018 UPA vote share fails to breach the 2014 TRS levels. In other words, TRS could have stayed static and yet remained ahead of the expanded grand alliance J

·         In Mahabubnagar, UPA fell shy even against its own 2014 performance!

The conclusions are resoundingly clear: allying with TDP yielded negligible if any electoral benefits to Congress. TDP transferred its dwindling vote bank to the alliance but this was of no material consequence. As the defacto challenger, Congress could possibly have attracted a major chunk of this vote even without an alliance.

Did Congress voters desert the party due to what was widely believed to be an unholy alliance with TDP, a party generally perceived to be inimical to Telangana interests? If true this carries a strong lesson that Congress can ignore only at its peril.

On balance it is evident that Congress subsidized the allies rather than the other way round. The decision in the "gobble or ally" option turned out incorrect with the outsourcing experiment going badly wrong.

On a positive note, all is not lost as Congress is live and kicking. The situation is much better than "down but not out" as Congress is not even down. As we will see later the Congress candidates that did win are mostly of the "card carrying loyalist" variety with all but a few of the parachutes, coverts and "forward troops" eating humble pie. If the party can shake off the discredited elements, gather its base and generally get its act together, it can live to fight other battles. With Rahul Gandhi preoccupied with the upcoming Loksabha battle and focusing on the Hindi heartland, I do not expect any shakeup in the near future. Will TRS help by making an unforced or two? This remains to be seen.

As for the TDP, the present situation represents a historical low point not seen even during the 2010 Telangana by-elections when the party could still garner 6.7% of the votes. In 2014 TDP piggybacked on the Narendra Modi wave to survive but all options (left, TRS, BJP and even the Congress) are now exhausted. Their leaders must come to grip with the fact it is wiped out in Telangana with no conceivable way to bounce back. The best advice any one can give them is to cut costs and exit unless Congress can be persuaded to carry the failing outfit some more time.

BJP impact

A common refrain of pro-UPA elements throughout the campaign was that TRS & BJP colluded behind the scenes and the latter played spoilsport by splitting anti-TRS votes. Rahul Gandhi stressed the point a good deal though some of it was lost in translation. Naidu too has taken to painting TRS, YCP et al with the same "mota Modi chota Modi" brush.

I analyzed this matter by constructing a maha gatbandhan (MGB) of UPA + BJP. The salient features of this ideologically improbable statistical entity are as follows:

·         BJP candidates fielded in the 14 constituencies where the party outscored UPA

·         TDP, TJS & CPI seat share reduced to half in an effort to offset rebel trouble

·         Congress too foregoing a handful of seats

·         MGB thus becomes a previously unthinkable Congress-BJP alliance backed by three fringe parties

Assuming a theoretical total unquestioned transfers, the expanded super alliance would wrest 15 seats from TRS in addition to winning # 63 Nampalli from Majlis. These gains would accrue 11:5 between the two dominant partners viz. Congress & BJP. TRS would still the form the government with 73 seats in its kitty. In a real world of course, the actual situation would more likely have been much more depressing.

This dismal scenario is not surprising given the fact that TRS vote advantage is a staggering 14.1% while BJP scored just 7.1% of the votes.

Let us now review BJP performance to discover any available trends. 2009 is a good baseline for this comparison as it is the last time they fought on their own. The district wise results are tabulated below:

District	2009	2018	Change
Adilabad	3.9%	9.9%	6.0%
Nizamabad	6.8%	8.2%	1.4%
Karimnagar	5.9%	6.3%	0.4%
Medak	3.8%	6.2%	2.4%
Ranga Reddy	6.6%	8.2%	1.6%
Hyderabad	15.0%	18.2%	3.2%
Mahabubnagar	4.5%	6.2%	1.7%
Nalgonda	2.4%	3.9%	1.5%
Warangal	2.4%	2.6%	0.2%
Khammam	0.9%	1.0%	0.1%

On a positive note BJP improved in every district with Hyderabad & Adilabad looking quite decent. Nizamabad & Ranga Reddy districts are somewhat promising though much short of expectations.

Karimnagar, Medak & Mahabubnagar must be considered serious disappointments indicating a serious tactical failure. Importing a rabble rousing Swami from Andhra did not work out!

Even the modest improvement is broadly restricted to urban areas. The days of initiatives similar to Vanvasi Kalyan Asram are clearly nowhere in the picture. The city based leadership has clearly failed the party once more.

Why should we even bother looking at BJP when the party is in an "also ran" situation? The main reason is that this is the only party among dozens to exhibit any stamina in Telangana. A subjective assessment of BJP's strength around 10% with a good share of their votes going over to UPA tactically could actually be reasonably accurate.

With LSP, YCP & TDP fading away and others like TJS & JSP failing to take off, even a modest but steady performance must be treated with some respect. The fact that BJP has some kind of an ideological core base can sustain it in lean years, an advantage not available to "big tent" parties like YCP & TDP that need a higher threshold level in order to survive.

While analyzing the 2016 GHMC elections, I used two alternate methods to figure out BJP's "true strength" arriving at two possible answers: 12.4% or 13.0%. in the current elections, they exceeded my estimations by scoring 13.5% of the votes in the Hyderabad region. Because it is generally agreed the party has been continuously losing votes, we can interpolate their Hyderabad strength at 15%+ in 2016  and 18-20% in 2014. Recapturing this level can be used as a near term target for the party's city based leaders.