If the victory in Haryana and the commendable performance in Jammu came as a relief for the BJP after the Lok Sabha election slide and the perception that the party was on a decline, the results of Maharashtra and Jharkhand, due on Saturday, will decide how the party fares in the battle of perception.

If the NDA wins the two states — or even if it wins only Maharashtra, where it’s called the Mahayuti — the BJP will have a spring in its stride as the Lok Sabha election results will be seen as more an aberration in its victorious march over the last 10 years.

At the same time, the party will have better coordination with its allies if it is seen as retaining winnability, as the very logic of coalitions is to maximise electoral gains and have a better chance of forming governments where a party cannot win on its own.

“If we repeat the performance of the Haryana Assembly elections here, politics will go back to where it was before the Lok Sabha polls so far as the battle of perception is concerned,” said a BJP leader who did not want to be named.

However, a loss in both states, or at least in Maharashtra, will be a setback that may have far-reaching consequences. A defeat for the party will likely boost the perception that the Lok Sabha results were indeed the beginning of a trend that is, by and large, continuing.

A win, in the short term, will allow the BJP and its allies to head into the Winter Session of Parliament on a more confident footing. The Winter Session, which begins on Monday, is expected to be acrimonious as the Opposition will attempt to push the government into a corner over the indictment of industrialist Gautam Adani in the US on bribery charges.

In Maharashtra, signs of Maratha anger over the Maratha quota demand, sympathy for Uddhav Thackeray and loyalty for Sharad Pawar among Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) voters, respectively, after the two parties split — something BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis claimed credit for — was believed to have led to the Mahayuti tally tanking in the Lok Sabha elections.

In an attempt to course-correct, the Eknath Shinde government started the Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana to carve out a women’s constituency to bolster the ruling alliance’s electoral prospects. The scheme transfers Rs 1,500 per month to the accounts of women between 18 and 60 whose annual family income is below Rs. 2.5 lakh. The Mahayuti has promised to raise this amount to Rs 2,100 if it returns to power. Among the things to watch out for will be if this welfare pitch and a constituency of women voters help propel the party to a win.

The BJP also resorted to slogans such as “ek hain toh safe hain (together we are safe)” and “batenge toh katenge (divided we fall)” in an attempt to send a tacit message of Hindu unity across the caste divide to counter the Opposition’s charge that it wanted to end reservation. The results will make it clear how voters received this message.

Despite being smaller than Maharashtra, Jharkhand is also crucial for the BJP for a variety of reasons. On the whole, it did better than the Opposition INDIA bloc in the Lok Sabha polls this year though it lost all five tribal seats. So, it is crucial for the party to hold on to its strongholds outside the tribal belts of the state and also put up a decent performance in the tribal seats to reverse the perception that it has lost tribal votes.

With Chief Minister Hemant Soren having been sent to jail for some months — he is out on bail now — there was buzz that he was targeted as he belongs to an Adivasi community. This denied the BJP the talking points it acquired when it made Draupadi Murmu, a tribal woman, the President of India.

The BJP has been trying to undo any perception that it acts against tribals by getting on board Champai Soren, a tribal leader who temporarily replaced Hemant as CM when the latter was in jail. The party then mounted a campaign that the JMM government allowed “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh to settle in the state’s Santhal Pargana, a tribal-dominated region, and gave them documents to become voters. The party alleged these “infiltrators” were marrying tribal girls and acquiring tribal land, linking this to the reduction in the Adivasi population in Santhal Pargana.