The Congress’ decisive win in Karnataka shatters two myths about the BJP’s electoral dominance — the idea of “subaltern Hindutva” and the popularity of the “double engine” slogan.
It would be tempting to reduce the Karnataka verdict to a simple case of State-level anti-incumbency. After all, no Karnataka government has been re-elected for close to four decades. The high levels of dissatisfaction attached to the Bommai government in particular meant that a renewed mandate seemed further out of reach. Yet, a simplistic anti-incumbency narrative, explained in terms of localized factors, might only obscure how the present ‘national’ polity also embeds itself deeply into ‘state’ results.
The argument here is not that the Karnataka results mark a substantial national shift, instead the argument is that the election provides an excellent portal to understand certain challenges and contradictions in the BJP’s post-2014 project of national domination.
