In this article, we use data from the 2019 NES post-poll survey to assess the impact of BJP’s welfare schemes on voting behaviour. We demonstrate that compared to earlier elections, voters are more likely to give credit to the central government as opposed to state governments or local politicians for welfare schemes. This centralization is especially the case for some of the BJP’s new welfare programmes such as Ujjwala and the Jan Dhan Yojana. However, even earlier Congress-era schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the Awas Yojana are now more associated with the central government. Schemes such as the Public Distribution System (PDS) and Old Age Pensions are still more likely to be associated with state governments. At the all-India level, we find some evidence that voters who received benefits under Ujjwala, Jan Dhan Yojana or Awas Yojana schemes were more likely to vote for the BJP, whereas recipients of pensions or MGNREGA were less likely to support the BJP.

India has been the crucible of several types of populism over time. In the 1960s, it saw the rise of peasant populism, an ideology that erased class differentiation to promote a rural people vs. urbanites divide. In the 1970s, Mrs Gandhi hijacked socialism by claiming “Indira is India.” Since the 1980s, the surge of Hindu nationalism mobilized the majority community against Muslims and Christians. Besides these national trends, at the state level, populist leaders have also emerged popularizing regional identities against alien or corrupt national elites. Overall, the chapter views populism in India as primarily a relational and often highly personalized style of leadership that frequently circumvents institutions to privilege a direct connection between a leader and the people, variously defined.

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Comparative studies often highlight the negative effects of federalism for welfare state expansion. We examine Brazil and India, which have both enhanced their welfare effort despite political fragmentation. We argue that federalism's effects must be seen together with degrees of party system nationalisation. In Brazil, new social policies have reinforced a move towards greater party system nationalisation. Control over anti-poverty programmes has been recentralised leading to more even outcomes. In India, while the central government also introduced new social policies, expansion has been filtered by political regionalisation. The effectiveness of social provision relies on state governments, producing substantial territorial differentiation.