Role of caste in Goa elections

Caste played a less important role in Goa than in other states. This is evident from the post-election survey data of Lokniti-CSDS. About a third of the voters in Goa considered their caste identity to be a very important issue while deciding their vote. This importance given to caste by the voters of Goa was actually slightly higher than that of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand. Thus no attempt to understand the voting behavior in Goa would be complete without seeing how the castes and communities of the state voted.

An analysis of caste-wise voting preferences in Goa shows that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which garnered 33% of the total votes, accounts for nearly one-sixth of Goa’s total electorate, to find its lost ground among the Hindu upper castes. managed to retrieve it. Nearly half (49%) of the Hindu upper caste community in Goa, which includes mostly Saraswat Brahmins, voted for the ruling party. This was a good 10 per cent more than the 2017 elections.

However, the BJP seems to have lost considerable support among the Kshatriya Maratha community (around 6% to 7% of the electorate) who voted in large numbers (more than the upper castes) for the party five years ago. The BJP’s vote share among the community is expected to come down to one-third (34 per cent) from 53 per cent last time. The special thing about this decline is that Chief Minister Pramod Sawant is Maratha.

The BJP was not able to repeat its impressive 2017 performance among the electorally important Bhandari Samaj community, which accounts for about 15% to 20% of Goa’s population. Two-fifths (44%) of the community voted for the BJP, compared to more than half (54%) in 2017. Over the years, members of the Bhandari community are believed to have become angry with the dominance of upper caste leaders in Goa. Politics. In 2017, when several upper castes left the BJP, it was Bhandari, apart from the Marathas, who extended the biggest support to the ruling party. This time around, the situation seems to be the opposite – many upper castes have returned to the BJP, but a large proportion of the Bhandaris have moved away. Even the move of Ravi Naik, one of the senior most leaders of the Bhandari community, from the Congress to the BJP before the election, could not stop this erosion of support. Bhandari voters also did not show much enthusiasm towards Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), while AAP had nominated Amit Palekar of Bhandari Samaj as its chief ministerial candidate. It was the budding Revolutionary Goa Party (RGP) and the Trinamool Congress-Maharashtravadi Gomantak Party (MGP) alliance that seems to have benefited the most from the BJP’s decline among Bhandari voters.

The BJP was able to make up for its losses among the Bhandaris and Marathas by making gains not only among the upper castes but also among the Hindu Scheduled Tribes (STs). This dramatically increased its vote share among Hindu STs to nearly three-fifths (58%), up from nearly one-third (31%) last time. The majority of BJP votes among Hindu STs came from the Velip and Kunbi communities, not so much from the Gowda community, which voted more for the Congress than the BJP.

The overall vote share of Congress declined from 28% to 25% in 2017. It lost support among the upper castes, Marathas, Bhandaris and STs and made only marginal gains among non-Bhandari OBCs. The party fared well among the Dalit community (only 2% of the population) and Muslims (8%–9% of the population). However, it was unable to consolidate Muslim votes in its favor to the extent it would have liked. It was the most significant Christian vote (26%–27%) that Congress would be most disappointed to lose. The party fared poorly among Christians, which proved to be its most decisive blow.

Alaknanda Shringare is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Goa University, Panaji, and Shreyas Sardesai is with Lokniti-CSDS