Do freebies really win elections in India?
The evidence about freebies is mixed. Here’s when they win votes and when they don’t
As digitisation has made cash transfers easy and instant, politicians in power now routinely resort to freebies to try and win elections. It is often presumed that freebies always win them power. The truth is that the results are quite mixed.
In December 2023, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Madhya Pradesh, India won a landslide victory when many in fact expected them to lose. The surprise result is widely credited to the Ladli Behna Yojana — cash transfers to women. Yet, similar populism did not help Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan or Bhupesh Baghel in Chhattisgarh in the same election.
In Telangana, KCR Rao won a landslide in 2018 with not only massive irrigation projects but also huge amount of cash transfers. Yet in 2023, the same cash transfer schemes failed to win him a third term.
In Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav famously distributed free laptops to 1.8 million students, apart from a slew of populist schemes including cash transfers. He lost badly in 2017. Five years later, the biggest issue in favour of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was free ration.
The foodgrains were already so subsidised that making them free was barely saving a family Rs500-600 a month. And yet this was supposed to be such a ‘game-changer’ that the Modi government has continued with free foodgrains for 800 million Indians.
Despite a number of cash transfer schemes in Andhra Pradesh, Jagan Mohan Reddy lost badly to Chandrababu Naidu in recent assembly elections. Free electricity for the poor — up to 200 units — was such a hit in Delhi that Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party won a second consecutive term with a 3/4ths majority in 2020.
The success of free electricity in Delhi made many states and election campaigns copy the idea. Yet in Punjab in 2022, Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi waiving off electricity and water bills could not save the Congress from a rout.
Method in the madness
One can go on and on to show how freebies sometimes work, sometimes don’t. How do we make sense of this contradiction?
The first lesson is that no one thing can make any party win an election. Election victories are akin to good cooking. All the ingredients, their mixing, cooking, sautéing, baking, have to all come together — even the plating. Timing is critical.
Freebies have become an essential part of the list of ingredients of election victories — only one of many. So freebies alone won’t win you the election, but if you don’t have any, you’re taking a big risk.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government did not announce any freebies — no new scheme whatsoever — in the pre-election budget this February. In an interview to Hindustan Times newspaper, he proudly said, “Due to our track record, we did not need any populist measures going into elections.”
The result was that the BJP underperformed to all expectations, reducing its Lok Sabha tally from 303 to 240 seats, losing its prized single-party majority. If we could go back in time, that budget would look very different.
One scheme, one election
Yet, why do some lose despite throwing freebies at voters? The biggest mistake is when leaders put all eggs in the freebie basket.
If they have unpopular legislators and candidates, there’s high corruption, a demoralised party organisation, the leader has been inaccessible, then freebies alone aren’t going to be your silver bullet. For a party in power, it will take a lot more than just freebies to address anti-incumbency.
As politicians destabilise state government budgets with populism, there’s a new risk — freebies clearly and visibly affect infrastructure development. Jagan Mohan Reddy paid a price for this, as will Siddaramaiah in Karnataka.
If the BJP’s Karnataka CM Basavaraj Bommai paid a price for not coming up with any “schemes”, his successor Siddaramaiah’s government has gone to the other extreme in fulfilling its election promises.
Sometimes politicians expect that money reaching bank accounts will automatically convert into votes. The lesson from the BJP’s 2023 election victory in Madhya Pradesh is that the party, the leader and the government must campaign hard over just one team. Shivraj Singh Chauhan’s singular focus on ‘Ladli Behna’ did what Gehlot in Rajasthan could not do with 10-15 schemes.
Lastly, any popular scheme will reap electoral dividends for only one election. The Modi campaign in 2024 was tom-toming many schemes from the first Modi government. But they had already won votes for it.
People will revolt if old schemes are stopped, but they want new ones too. This is the harsh reality of populism in a country with jobless economic growth.