The BJP’s micro-management as it went about putting the Maharashtra Lok Sabha results behind it included constituencies with significant Muslim numbers that the party had lost narrowly because of consolidation of minority votes against it.

As a result, in 38 Assembly seats where Muslims are over 20 per cent of the population, the BJP raised its tally to 14, up from 12 in 2019.

The Congress, on the other hand, went down in these seats from 11 five years ago to only five this time.

BJP leaders say that to ensure that its own support base rallied behind it, to counter the coming together of the minority vote, the party tapped into the extensive Sangh Parivar network – a coalition of over 30 organisations affiliated with the RSS – and employed a blend of political messaging, religious rhetoric, and strategic outreach.

Sources say that this was why one of the most prominent BJP slogans this time was “Ek hain toh safe hain”, repeated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his victory speech Saturday evening. The Opposition protested at its “communal” overtone – particularly as it came in the wake of the more inflammatory “Batenge toh katenge” slogan of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath – but the BJP never eased its stress on the need for “unity” to remain “safe”. Who needed to remain united or may end up unsafe was kept deliberately vague.

A Lok Sabha seat with high Muslim numbers where the BJP efforts worked a turnaround this time is Dhule. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had won the Dhule seat by a huge margin of 2 lakh-plus votes. But in this year’s general elections, the BJP lost the seat by a narrow margin of 3,800 votes to the Congress.

At a rally in Kolhapur in September, BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis cited Dhule to raise the alarm over “vote jihad”, suggesting a systematic consolidation of Muslim votes. He specifically talked of the Muslim-majority Malegaon Central Assembly segment in the Dhule Lok Sabha seat, noting that the BJP had got only 4,542 votes here.

In these Assembly elections, while the AIMIM lost the Dhule Assembly seat that it had won in 2019, the only constituency it won was Malegaon Central, but by just 162 votes, the narrowest margin of the polls. In 2019, the AIMIM winning margin here was nearly 40,000 votes.

Similarly, Union Home Minister Amit Shah personally held a rally in the Malkapur Assembly seat, where 20% of the population is Muslim, accusing the Congress of “conspiring” to give Muslims reservations. A BJP stronghold, Malkapur was breached by the Congress in 2019, which won it by more than 10,000 votes. But this time the BJP wrested it back by more than 20,000 votes.

What also helped the BJP build a narrative of Muslim consolidation were efforts from within the minority community to vote as a group to keep the BJP out, including appeals by Muslim clerics. This meant that, in many cases, Muslims even voted for the Shiv Sena (UBT) which is aligned with the Congress, though the Sena had been anathema to them before. During the recent Assembly poll campaign, the BJP projected these appeals by clerics as “fatwa”.

A BJP worker from Nashik said: “After the Lok Sabha elections, we realised the importance of reaching out to our own voters, warning them of the dangers posed by vote division among them.”

Giving a hint of how this was done, Fadnavis said in his winning speech Saturday: “There was an attempt to polarise a particular community. However, that attempt was not successful. This state has a history of religious figures. These figures went house to house, village to village, calling for unity in the face of this narrative.”

The party also used social media to make its case, such as sharing videos on WhatsApp.

Strategic candidate selection was the other factor in the BJP’s improved performance in seats with high Muslim numbers. In most of these constituencies, the party picked candidates with a strong Hindutva voice, including Chainsukh Sanketi in Malkapur and Anup Agarwal in Dhule City, to ensure its supporters stayed behind it.

There were some seats where the BJP’s planning missed by inches, such as Akola West and Versova. While the Congress’s Sajid Khan Pathan won Akola West by 1,283 votes, the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s Haroon Khan won Versova by 1,600 votes to become his party’s only Muslim MLA.

Of the Muslim clerics whose appeals may have ended up working in the BJP’s favour were prominent ones such as Maulana Khalil-ur-Rahman Sajjad Nomani. He asked the community to support the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance for “a secular and inclusive government”, and to rally together in the face of, what he called, the existential challenge posed by the BJP.

Little-known Muslim organisations too lent their voice during the campaign, such as the Aurangabad-based All India Ulama Board Maharashtra, which advocated 10% reservations for Muslims in education and jobs and called for a ban on the RSS.

The BJP brought up all these to supplement its “vote jihad” narrative.

Some prominent voices in the Muslim community now wonder if the active canvassing against the BJP may have boomeranged. One of them who was closely involved in the MVA campaign and did not wish to be identified said: “We could have approached this in a more understated way, like the RSS does. This mistake has cost us dearly.”