Indian Election Observations
Indian Election Observations
A look at the numbers reveals a slightly more complex picture than a humbled BJP
The big event of last week was the Indian election result. For those that don’t follow closely, due to the enormity of the task, Indian elections are conducted in stages – this election had seven stages between 19 April and 1 June. With votes counted and declared on 4 June.
India has always been one of my great loves, and there’s very little on this earth that can excite me more than an Indian election. While the previous two elections have been dominant affairs for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of prime minister Narendra Modi, this election was a far more complex and interesting affair.
The headline from the election is that the BJP lost the majority it has held since 2014. The party is still overwhelmingly the largest in the 543-seat lower house or Lok Sabha (with 240 seats), but it will now be reliant on some regional parties to maintain a government – the Janata Dal (United) (JDU) from Bihar in the north of the country (with 12 seats), the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) from Andhra Pradesh in the country’s south (with 16 seats), and the Shiv Sena from Maharashtra in the country’s west (7 seats)
The result was a repudiation of the narrative which preceded the election that the BJP would consolidate or further enhance its power within the country. With prospect of the party gaining a “super-majority” which would have allowed it to change the constitution. Instead the result looks to return the country to the period from 1989 - 2014 where cobbling together often diverse and unwieldy coalitions was the norm. Which, counterintuitively, may deliver more stability by curbing ideological excess.
Aside from the BJP and a handful of other parties, ideology isn’t the dominant motivating force in Indian politics. Most parties are transactional and opportunistic. Regional parties especially are seeking outcomes exactly like this, where a bigger party is reliant on them to gain a majority and this reliance can be used to funnel resources into their states. These parties can be fickle and will switch alliances depending on where they best see this opportunity. In what now looks like a very canny move the JDU switched from the Congress Party-led Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (an incredible shoehorned acronym - INDIA) to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) weeks before the election.
The thinking is that being reliant on other parties may weaken the BJP’s ideological excesses – it may push them to focus on development, which is what these parties will be seeking for their states. Although the Shiv Sena is one party to share the BJP’s Hindutva ideology, it’s not opposed to transaction and opportunism itself. The party split in 2022 and there are now two Shiv Senas and the second – with 9 seats – is part of the INDIA alliance.
However, even if both the more ideologically flexible JDU and TDP were to switch to the INDIA alliance this alliance would still be 10 seats short of a majority. And their respective power in amongst a large jumble of parties would be far weaker than it currently is within the NDA. So this would give the BJP confidence that the coalition is safe. The BJP has given ministries to 4 other parties within the NDA alliance outside of the JDU, TDP and Shiv Sena, to give itself some extra security should the Shiv Sena pull out.
Where the BJP lost seats should also push it to focus far more on development, rather than communal tensions. For the BJP the Hindi heartland has always been its primary focus. It can be argued that the BJP have been regional party themselves, it’s just that this region is large and highly populous. The Hindi heartland, or Hindi Belt, comprises the states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. As well as Delhi. Although Hindi – or Hindustani to be more accurate – is a dialect continuum, and so there is contest over what may or may not be Hindi, and its use doesn’t neatly follow state borders1. Hindustani also includes Urdu. Hindustani is the language of Bollywood, even though Bombay is in Maharashtra.
In Indian politics the main prize is Uttar Pradesh, a state of 250 million people who send 80 representatives to the Lok Sabha. The next largest state by seats is Maharashtra with 48 seats. Doing well in Uttar Pradesh is the first step towards winning elections.
It should be noted that seat distribution by state is based on the 1971 census and there have been significant populations shifts by then. Bihar (130 million people) is more populous than Maharashtra now, but has eight less seats. There are plans to expand the Lok Sabha to 848 seats with the new Parliament House, which makes sense given that the lower house currently has 107 seats less than the United Kingdom’s House of Commons while India has 1.33 billion more people.2 However, there will be an enormous fight over the census data to distribute seats by state, as states like Tamil Nadu (with 39 seats and 72 million people) will most likely their lose their current weight in the federal parliament.
Uttar Pradesh was the primary area where the BJP lost seats this election losing 29 seats in the state. While across the Hindi Belt the BJP also lost 10 seats in Rajasthan, 5 seats in Haryana, 5 seats in Bihar, and 3 seats in Jharkhand. Although it mostly held firm or gained single seats in other Hindi Belt states.
The Hindi Belt is noticeably poorer than India’s south. The BJP had come to power in 2014 promising to be a party of development, who would drive India towards becoming a great power, or even a superpower. Although significant gains have been made over the past decade, there are still a great number of people who haven’t seen their opportunities and livelihoods improve, particularly in the north. The BJP have tried to disguise this by focusing on emotive and inflammatory rhetoric around religion. But the Indian voter is more savvy than the BJP calculated. Indians have always taken their democratic duty to punish parties not delivering seriously, and although the BJP have still formed a government, they have been given a slap across the face from the voters who the party had felt they could consistently rely upon. This is significant.
However, looking deeper into the numbers there is something more complex going on outside of the Hindi Belt. Overall the BJP lost 92 seats that it held at the previous election, but it picked up 32 new seats for a net loss of 60 seats from the last election (63 seats lost in total, as they gained three defectors during the last parliament).
And this is where it gets interesting and where the dominant narrative may be missing something. Because the BJP have mostly been a party of the northern Hindi Belt, it has always struggled to gain traction in the southern states (bar Karnataka) as well as eastern states like West Bengal and Odisha. So while the party lost seats in its traditional heartland, it actually made significant gains in regions where it has been traditionally weak (bar West Bengal, where it lost seats).
The most notable BJP gains were made in the eastern state of Odisha, a state that has been recently dominated by the Biju Janata Dal. The party won 12 of Odisha’s 21 seats at the 2019, but were completely wiped out this election, with the BJP winning 20 seats and the Congress Party 1 seat. Compounding this, simultaneously with the federal election, a state election was also held where the Biju Janata Dal had been in power for 25 years. Yet the BJP were able to secure a slim majority. This new major presence in Odisha is a massive gain for the BJP.
Alongside this, the party have also gained seats in the south, increasing its seats in Telangana from 4 to 8, from zero to 3 in Andhra Pradesh, and winning its first ever seat in Kerala – something previously thought impossible given Kerala’s demographics of large Christian and Muslim communities. Although the party failed to win any seats in Tamil Nadu – which was expected in a state with its own political traditions and sensitivity to language politics – the BJP will be incredibly pleased with the inroads that it is making in the south.
While the BJP also lost considerable seats in Maharashtra (16) and Karnataka (8) it knows that it can win seats in these states. The loss of seats this election doesn’t mean they can’t be won back at the next election. However, winning seats in states where it previously was a non-entity puts these states on the table now for the party. So while the party may have lost their majority and weakened their hand within this current parliament, they actually strengthened their hand as a party with national reach.
The other party with national reach – the Congress Party – also strengthened its hand, increasing from 52 seats up to 99. While the party only gained about 2% extra in votes, a smarter use of the First-Past-The-Post voting system with its alliance partners (to make sure they weren’t taking votes off each other) meant that it had a far more efficient vote this election. Its seat count also gives the public the sense that the party is no longer in terminal decline. Having confidence in a party’s ability to win can often be an important driver of voter intention.
Overcoming the BJP’s 2019 majority was always going to be something that took at least two elections to do. This election demonstrated that the party is not invulnerable, and if it fails to provide adequate development and opportunity in the north the voters will notice. Although the BJP will see gains in the south as a potential offset, all roads to Delhi still lead through Lucknow.
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