Did farmers really abandon Modi’s BJP in the 2024 elections?

Did farmers really abandon Modi’s BJP in the 2024 elections?

The farmer from the Yavatmal district in Maharashtra had been a Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s supporter, who before the Maharashtra assembly election in October had assured to eliminate the farmers’ problems such as farm debts in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra state. Modi had even called onto Dabhane’s village of Dabhadi when he was campaigning for the first time in 2014 to become the Prime Minister. The village was selectively chosen from the 15000 plus villages in Vidarbha to target farmers during Modi’s election campaigning in 2014.

However, after 10 years of Modi such crises are only exacerbating. Therefore, when it came February when Modi was visiting Yavatmal, Dabhane wanted to meet the prime minister and tell him this. The police, however, restrained him and also did not permit him to go on with whatever he was trying to say. He was released after Modi; Ajmal was not let off, went on education and then left the country after Mr Modi left.

However, when the results were out on Tuesday, it reflected a sharp decline in the number of seats that BJP has been able to win from Maharashtra and Dabhane was content. The party, which in 2019 had bagged 23 Out of Maharashtra Assembly’s total 48 MPs who go to the lower house of India’s parliament only after Uttar Pradesh, this year bagged only nine seats out of the 48 Assembly seats that went to polls. Even the incumbent coalition dubbed the National Democratic Alliance, which secured 41 parliamentary seat in 2019, secured only 17 in 2024.

This seems to have been the case across many important farm regions in India as it is illustrated above and elsewhere. Globally, the BJP fell short of its tenure and recorded its weakest performance since 2014, clinching 240 of the 543 parliamentary seats, as against the 303 it had won in 2019. Despite leading the polls, it is now clear that Modi and his party will need the support of their partners to survive this new Indian government.

First cut at the figures says it’s appears millions of voters such as Dabhane in some of the biggest food bowl states of India voted away from the BJP this time. It fared better in Haryana, one of India’s main food bowl states where the BJP had swept all the 10 seats in the 2019 general elections winning only five this time while the rival CongressEmerging Patterns The Survey The Survey TheKey Takeaways rival Congress grabbed the balance five. The BJP had a zero performance in Punjab, an agricultural state that is known for its production of rice and wheat in the country.

In Rajasthan BJP came to power at the state level only in December 2020, and it could win only 14 of the 25 seats of its own; in 2019, it had won all the 25. It was two former government servants, Amraram from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the defeated incumbent from the BJP,

who had designs for the case filed by Bittu in which they accused each other of appropriating farm issues and the resentment most farmers had towards the Modi government to win the seat in which no left candidate, let alone the CPI(M)’s, had ever triumphed before. In Uttar Pradesh, where over 65% of the population are involved in agriculture and depend on it, the BJP secured only 33 out of 80 seats which are significantly less than the 62 seats it had in 2019 and the 71 it had in 2014.

Nationally, the NDA recorded a 2% improvement and that of the YPP, a 1%. Its vote share in the rural areas of the country rawshan has less in the new analysis of the Hindu one of the leading newspapers of India has reported a two percent decline. On the other hand Opposition Congress—led INDIA alliance, improved their vote share in the rural and semi rural 18 percent.

“If you look at the results they make it very obvious that one of the primary reasons for the BJP’s negligible performance in the rural pockets is this resentment that the farm professionals have built up against Modi and BJP,” Devinder Sharma, an agricultural scientist and farm expert from Punjab.

Al Jazeera tried to get the BJP’s national media chief Anil Baluni’s response on the criticism of the party’s farm policies but there was no reply received by the news channel.