This is part of a series of stories on the 2024 general elections in which the numbers do the talking.
Hyderabad, New Delhi:Among the 240 seats that it won, the BJP secured 61.25% in the northern, central, and crucially, eastern regions. With 34 seats (14.1%), its performance declined in its western stronghold, compared to 2019. The saffron party also cornered the maximum seats in the Himalayan region, with a strike rate over 90%.
In comparison, the Congress gathered the 40 of its 99 seats from the southern region – over 40% of its victories. Unlike the previous two elections, the Congress also improved its performance in the northern and western, and north-western regions with 17, 14 and 12 wins respectively. However, it drew a blank in the Himalayan region, where the BJP won 11. It continued to fare poorly in the central and eastern regions, adding only three and five seats from these parts of India.
BJP retained much of its vote shares (over 55%) in the central region in 2024, while slightly improving its share by around one percent in the eastern region. However, its drop was sharp in its other traditional strongholds – north western (18 points), northern (nearly 8 percentage points), and western (nearly five points) regions. But it also gained massively in the north-eastern (17 points) and southern regions (over 10 points).
All parties won over two-thirds of their tallies in rural constituencies. However, the Samajwadi Party stood out in the chart for having won no urban constituency. It drew a blank from urban seats although it pushed its tally up drastically by winning 37 seats in Uttar Pradesh. The Janata Dal (United) and Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar) also scored a zero in urban seats but because it only contested in rural seats, leaving the urban constituencies to their allies.
The Congress improved its performance across rural and urban seats substantially, gaining over 10 percentage points in rural and nearly 8 points in urban seats. The BJP, on the other hand, showed a slight decline in both these categories but managed to retain its vote shares largely in comparison to 2019.
Over 23% of BJP tally comes from the reserved seats for Scheduled Castes (31) and Scheduled Tribes (25), where over 32% of the Congress’s 99 seats are from the same.
The BJP/s margins of victory were better than the Congress at 15.77%. The Congress lagged marginally behind it at 11.08%. Although they won fewer seats, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (16.86%), Communist Party of India (16.25%), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (21.19%) Indian Union Muslim League (21.88%), Telugu Desam Party (16.79%) scored their wins by much better margins.
How the elections were so closely fought reflects in the relatively high number of seats with winning margins of less than 5%.
The NDA won 11 seats of its 293 with less than 1% margin, while the INDIA bloc won 10 of its 234. 52 seats were won by the NDA with a margin between 1 and 5%, and the INDIA won 53 in the same category. In those seats where the winning margin was between 5 and 10%, the NDA won 60 and the INDIA won 62.
Taken together, the NDA won nearly 42% of its seats with a margin less than 10%, while the INDIA group secured over 53% of its wins with the same margin.
Text by Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta.
Visualisation by Elisha Vermani.
