The Maharashtra elections appear close, complex, and chaotic. Two days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives in the state to address his first two public meetings in the state, Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, will be there to launch the Maha Vikas Aghadi’s (MVA) poll campaign along with other senior leaders of the Opposition alliance.

Gandhi will first visit Nagpur in the electorally crucial Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. He is expected to arrive at Deekshabhoomi, where Dr B R Ambedkar converted to Buddhism in 1956, around 12.30 pm. After paying homage to the architect of the Constitution, Gandhi head to a “Samvidhan Sammelan (Conference on Constitution)” organised by the OBC Yuva Manch, a politically unaffiliated organisation.

For the Congress and its allies in the Maha Vikas (MVA), Vidarbha is important as almost 36 of its 76 direct contests with the BJP will take place here. The BJP has also fielded 47 candidates in Vidarbha, the most of any region. If the Congress manages to win this battle, it will be one big step towards winning the war.

Gandhi’s schedule shows that a major part of the Congress’s campaign pitch will be on the Constitution and reservation as the party attempts to keep the region’s significant Dalit population on its side. And why not? This strategy worked for the party in the Lok Sabha elections, especially in Maharashtra where it won 13 seats. Four of those parliamentary seats came from Vidarbha.

The Congress hopes the game plan will work again this time. But as Haryana showed — even accounting for the completely different ground realities in the two states — it may not be enough each time.

After the Haryana results, one of whose implications was that Dalits were concerned that a Congress return would mean the return of Jat dominance and as a result deserted the party, Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote about the Congress’s electoral narrative, “Its two attempted master narratives, one on caste and the other on farmers, are not enough to consolidate an electoral strategy, and may even backfire under some circumstances. This is because both narratives fall prey to social determinism. They quite simply underestimate the churn in rural India.”

Mehta added, “It is harder to build broad social coalitions, when your pitch on farmers still operates within a paradigm that privileges old dominant castes over others. There is real agrarian distress. But the politics of those who claim to represent farmers has become a politics of preserving the status quo privileges of dominant farmers.”

Take the crux of the argument and a question arises: will the Congress be cognizant of this in Maharashtra? It will be apparent starting Wednesday as Gandhi starts addressing voters. He will travel from Nagpur to Mumbai, where he will attend a major public meeting of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) around 4.30 pm. The Opposition alliance is set to unveil its poll guarantees at the rally.

The Congress may find that if it does not appear to substantively address the more material concerns of the marginalised communities whose support it covets, raising alarm over a perceived threat to the Constitution will likely be a strategy of diminishing returns.

As the MVA announces the guarantees, the Congress may also need to guard against the BJP’s attempts to tie it in knots over a debate on populist schemes. Prime Minister Modi attempted to do that last week by targeting the party over Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar’s comments on the free bus ride scheme for women in the state.

Recommended reading: Do populist schemes win elections? As PM Modi leads attack, a lot for Congress to chew on

In Telangana, the Revanth Reddy-led Congress government is set to begin a statewide caste survey, which was one of the party’s poll promises in the Assembly elections last year. More than 80,000 enumerators and 10,000 supervisors will be involved in the exercise, which is expected to take around a fortnight.