South Asia's election result predictions were not just off the mark but dangerously so

This year has been rightly recognised as the year of elections, and South Asia has been at the leading edge, with Bhutan and Bangladesh (January), Pakistan (February), Maldives (April), India (April-June), and Sri Lanka (October) going to the polls.

With all but one of these completed, it is a good moment to step back and look at what the conduct and the results can tell us about the state of democracy, and politics at large, in the world’s most populous region.

If “free and fair” elections are the ideal, these votes have spanned the full gamut ranging from Bhutan, recognised as a regional bright spot for their openness and orderliness, to Bangladesh, which a number of international observers found somewhat problematic. The rest have fallen within this spectrum.

It is worth focusing on India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in particular, with the three countries representing more than 90 per cent of South Asia’s population.

While the freeness and fairness of the elections in all three countries varied greatly, taken together they offer key lessons on what voters really want, and the need for parliamentary opposition parties to connect with them on these issues.

On the flip side, these results also demonstrated how out of touch the media-centric urban classes – and by extension, international conventional wisdom – are with the sentiments of ordinary people in small towns, villages and working-class neighbourhoods.

Most analyses ahead of the Pakistani and Indian elections got the results wrong. In both countries the leading opposition parties, largely written off because of an unfavourable playing field, delivered unexpectedly strong results that significantly weakened the incoming coalition governments’ mandate.

A strong mandate in Pakistan and India requires a strong win in these countries’ largest provinces. This is exactly where the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) in Punjab and the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh faltered. And in both cases, it came down to a mix of young people and rural voters who didn’t entirely trust the dominant parties to deliver a better and more secure economic future.

One indicator of the magnitude of surprise was the reaction of the Indian stock markets, which lost an estimated $386 billion in share value after the results were announced. The fact that the markets recovered entirely within a week suggests that the reaction was not so much to the specific electoral outcome as to being surprised, and realising that they had relied on faulty judgments.

Much, if not most, of the national media in both countries implicitly treated the opposition as feeble, which in turn influenced opinion in the classes that heavily consumed their content.

In India’s case, the results of the exit polls commissioned by major media houses seemed to confirm this expectation, adding to the disorientation of many when the actual election results were released. This was despite the fact that exit polls had been spectacularly wrong in the past, something that was seldom highlighted by domestic media.

The conventional wisdom in both countries seemed rational on the surface.

Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party had come under enormous state pressure. Much of the senior leadership had been arrested, coerced into quitting, or retreated into silence. Candidates were unable to publicly campaign, and the party faced a partial media blackout. In India, two politicians leading key opposition parties were arrested, and the Indian National Congress’s funds were frozen right on the eve of the election.

This taming of the national media through a combination of sticks (regulatory harassment and cancellation of government advertising revenue) and carrots was not sufficient to deliver the desired results. It not only failed to convince large segments of the population; it made those outside the bubble dangerously invisible to those inside it.

Pakistanis had long been accustomed to a political scene where powerful local leaders could literally command votes – irrespective of the parties they were part of. It was, for the most part, simply a matter of these power brokers joining a particular party before an election for that party to fare well.

However, what appears to have been topmost on people’s minds this time was unwinding the dominance of elite interests and ending the continuous lurching from one painful economic crisis to another. These are systemic issues at the provincial and national level; as a result, voters’ judgments were about parties rather than their connection to the candidate’s social network.

As a result, Mr Khan’s PTI performed astonishingly well in the election, despite all the handicaps placed on it. Instead, an enormous grassroots movement that didn’t rely on official party workers mobilised itself.

Once politically passive, citizens now organised their own mini town hall meetings, their own news-sharing networks, and their own transport to polling stations. Above all, their vote could not be dictated or bought. But this unfolding transformation of rural and small-town Punjab simply did not register with the country’s urban elites.

India’s better-off classes, both pro and anti-BJP, had just as much difficulty recognising the shifting voter landscape. Although there wasn’t the same loss of systemic legitimacy, or a national sense of anxiety about the future, very significant sections of the governing party’s voter base were no longer tuned in to its message.

While the economy was stable and corporations were thriving, young people’s struggle to find full-time jobs had steadily worsened since the Covid-19 pandemic, while inflation ate away at rural residents’ purchasing power. In a country that is young (median age of 28) and still rural (64 per cent), this was bound to cause trouble.

The BJP’s particularly poor performance in Uttar Pradesh, where it won just 33 of the 80 seats, should have come as little surprise. The state’s population is even younger (median age of 24) and even more rural (77 per cent) than the rest of India. Its youth unemployment situation is among the worst in the country. After a decade of the BJP in national government, and seven years in state government, it was inevitable that disappointments over unrealised promises would catch up – as long as the opposition showed up.

Bangladesh offers an instructive contrast.

Unlike Pakistan and India, its most populous provinces had seen year-on-year inclusive growth in terms of jobs and income across the socio-economic spectrum, at least until the Ukraine war broke out in 2022.

The surge in energy prices that followed has destabilised the economy and diminished public confidence in the Awami League government. But unlike in India and Pakistan, the leading opposition parties in Bangladesh chose to boycott the election that they viewed to be flawed, rather than mobilising voters around an alternative vision.

Although the unexpected relative success of the opposition in Pakistan and India provides comfort that democracy lives, however imperfectly, the underlying issues driving voter sentiment will not go away any time soon.

Pakistan’s struggles with economic and political stability, and India’s issues with youth education and employment are problems that have metastasised over the past two decades regardless of who was in power. Bangladesh is currently at a tipping point, where it could either escape both Pakistan and India’s challenges or find itself stuck with both.

Unless powerful extra-parliamentary forces such as the army in Pakistan, private corporations in India, and international partners in Bangladesh take a measure of responsibility to break out of the patterns listed above, the circular political churn will only intensify, to the detriment of all.