Why welfare isn't winning elections in India like it used to

Key developments are emerging from the global stage. Why welfare isn't winning elections in India like it used to1 day ago Share Save Add as preferred on GoogleSoutik BiswasIndia correspondentHindustan Times via Getty ImagesWomen in Maharashtra aged 21-65 receive a monthly cash transfer of 1,500 rupees ($16)India's welfare politics is not collapsing - but its electoral magic may be fading. Over the past decade, cash transfers, subsidised services and women-focused schemes have become the default grammar of state politics in India, with welfare increasingly used to soften the effects of a growth model that has struggled to generate enough jobs. Across party lines, governments now promise a familiar basket of benefits: pensions, direct cash transfers, scholarships, free or subsidised electricity, cheap foodgrain, self-help group support for women and allowances for unemployed youth.

What began as a competitive advantage for a few regional parties has hardened into a bipartisan consensus: from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Tamil Nadu to the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Assam, parties now compete less over whether to offer welfare than over how much. But recent state elections suggest that extensive welfare delivery alone is no longer enough to secure incumbency. The DMK - long seen as the architect of India's most durable welfare-transfer model - has lost power in Tamil Nadu.

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Mamata Banerjee's TMC was swept out of office in West Bengal after three terms despite women-centric welfare schemes that had once been central to its electoral dominance. The Congress-led United Democratic Front has returned in Kerala despite the Left Democratic Front government's expansive welfare record. All the three chief ministers who lost were known as welfarist leaders.

NurPhoto via Getty ImagesA vegetable vendor sits beneath a poster promoting a welfare scheme led by Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal - a women-focused cash transfer programme central to her campaign before her TMC lost power"We should resist the easy binary: welfare won or welfare failed," says political scientist Bhanu Joshi. "Welfare is already the floor of Indian politics. What decides elections now is what parties build above it.

Voters understood that long ago. Analysts are still arguing about the floor while the contest has moved to the ceiling. "That, Joshi argues, is why welfare can no longer be viewed in isolation from the broader political coalitions parties assemble around it.

In West Bengal, he says, the TMC's old "electoral equilibrium of welfare delivery, women voters, Muslim consolidation and enough Hindu support" may have fractured, contributing to its loss to the BJP. In neighbouring Assam, meanwhile, the BJP's rise rests "not only on religious rhetoric but also on welfare schemes, women's self-help groups, roads, state institutions and Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma's image of administrative efficiency", Joshi says.

The development has drawn wide international attention, with diplomatic circles watching closely.