In this season of electoral hyperbole, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has had an outstanding run with rhetoric which would make even the likes of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump blush.
Faced with hate speeches, falsehood, and relentless communal dog whistling, it is always good to go back to the drawing board, and look at hard numbers. Data is the Shakespearean soothsayer in the age of dubious opinion polls and slippery psephologists.
Electoral performance on both vote-share and Lok Sabha seats won by the two biggest national parties of India; the Bharatiya Janata Party Congress since 1984 in 10 general elections is revealing.
The takeaways portend which way the winds may be blowing in the 2024 general elections.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
1. In not a single Lok Sabha election in India’s parliamentary history has the winning political party won the majority vote-share.
Congress peaked at 49% (414 seats) in 1984 in a historic sympathy wave following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Thus, even in the absence of a coalition age (the only experiment before that was the short-lived 1977 Janata Party dry run), India’s singular pluralism has ensured a hotchpotch of several smaller national parties and many regional outfits.
The BJP’s 370-seats pitch – revised from the ‘400’ – was at its core an overplay that may have boomeranged in the absence of a huge emotive theme in the 2024 elections.
2. A review of the last ten general elections (see table) shows that the aggregate vote-share of the Congress and BJP on average is 51.95% and their total number of seats is 325. This counts for 60% of the Lok Sabha.
| Year | 1984 | 1989 | 1991 | 1996 | 1998 | 1999 | 2004 | 2009 | 2014 | 2019 | Average |
| BJP vote-share | 7.7% | 11.36% | 20.11% | 20.29% | 25.39% | 23.75% | 22.16% | 18.80% | 31.00% | 37.36% | |
| BJP seats | 2 | 85 | 120 | 161 | 182 | 182 | 138 | 113 | 282 | 303 | |
| Congress vote-share | 49.10% | 39.53% | 36.20% | 28.80% | 25.80% | 28.30% | 26.53% | 28.55% | 19.30% | 19.46% | |
| Congress seats | 414 | 197 | 232 | 140 | 141 | 114 | 145 | 206 | 44 | 52 | |
| Aggregate vote-share | 56.80% | 50.89% | 56.31% | 49.09% | 51.19% | 52.05% | 48.69% | 47.35% | 50.30% | 56.82% | 51.95 |
| Aggregate seats | 416 | 282 | 352 | 301 | 323 | 296 | 283 | 319 | 326 | 355 | 325.3 |
The rest of the political parties exercise a huge influence given that they control among themselves 48.05% of votes and 40% of LS seats. In India, we have a perpetually fragmented political sharing of the voter goodies. It is perhaps the biggest bulwark against a potentially destructive dictatorial bailiwick.
3. If we take away the two elections from the menu – the 1984 Rajiv Gandhi sweep and the 2019 hyper-nationalistic hurricane following the Pulwama-Balakot factor – the average aggregate vote-share of the two national parties dips further to 50.75%. The average aggregate number of seats slips down to 310.
In essence, this points to a significant exposition; the Congress and the BJP have an artificial cap of about 310 seats and 50 % polled votes to share.
Since electoral politics is a zero-sum game (your win is my loss, and vice versa), the ‘Congress versus BJP’ notion is the blockbuster battle which will decide the fate of 2024 elections. While over decades both the BJP and the Congress appear to have developed a core voter-base which may be a reliable stronghold, it is not sizeable.
A look at the table shows that the Congress has a 19-20% support base even in the most adverse circumstances (2014 and 2019), while the BJP’s may be a bit higher, at closer to 22% (it was 18% in 2009).
Bottomline: An Indian election is still a fascinating uncertainty because of the large uncommitted swing voter.
4. The BJP was banking on the Ram temple consecration ceremony to be its trump card. Its expectation was that the majority Hindu population would credit the political party for correcting what was perceived as a long overdue historical injustice, overriding everything, given its religious importance.
But the people of India do have other, more compelling issues to worry about (jobs, food inflation, corruption, fear, communalism, inequality etc,), the emotional gratification at seeing the Ayodhya temple notwithstanding. The Hindu population is innately conservative and traditional, but various sections of it have rejected the BJP’s political business model of communalising it. At least, so far. And that seems to have torpedoed PM Modi’s electoral calculations. That political hubris has serious ramifications was seen in the cocky India Shining 2004 campaign and a surprisingly lackadaisical Congress which in 2014 was convinced that the Gujarat Chief Minister – Narendra Modi – was just an irritating gadfly with a fat ambition.
Modi, considered by many to be a canny Machiavelli, has shown that he has feet of clay. But his hate speeches betray a man on the edge.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
5. The Congress has a lower bar to cross to defeat the BJP. The regional satraps of the INDIA alliance are already powerful entities on their own. For instance, Congress needed 145 seats in 2004 to form the UPA-I. BJP trailed behind by a thin margin, with 138 seats, but its coalition partners were relatively weaker. The BJP thus needs a higher threshold to forge a coalition win for NDA.
While the Vajpayee era saw a genuine attempt at coalition-building (although the party still needed 182 seats), the Modi-era has seen the exact opposite. It has displayed the “anaconda approach”, where the BJP tries to swallow its own erstwhile allies like Shiv Sena, Shiromani Akali Dal, Janata Dal (United), Lok Janshakti Party, AIADMK, and so on. Despite having a staggering 38 parties in the NDA fold, it is extraordinarily overdependent on just one party: the BJP. Will the BJP be able to form the government if it wins 245-250 seats, leaving the rest to the other NDA parties? It seems improbable.
6. But for the BJP to lose, it is undeniable that it is the Congress that has to principally humble its nemesis at the hustings. This is the only crucial variable of this election because many of the other INDIA alliance parties have familiar heft.
Can the kneecapped Congress claw back against its formidable adversary, against whom it has had a wretched hit rate of less than 10% in direct head-to-head confrontations in both 2014 and 2019? Can it do the heavy lifting for the INDIA alliance?
7. Based on conservative estimates only from ground reports received so far in this summer election, the BJP is expected to cede seats to the Congress in the following states: Karnataka (10), Maharashtra (5), Gujarat (1), Haryana (4), Rajasthan (7), Chhattisgarh (4), MP (3), Uttar Pradesh (4), Delhi (1), Assam (2) , northeastern states and UTs (5), Bihar (2), Jharkhand (2), Uttarakhand (1), and HP (2). This is a total of 53 LS seats. Given ceteris paribus conditions elsewhere, it would bring BJP’s tally to 250, far below the half-way mark. But that is still half the story. Ceteris paribus is, after all, only a lazy economist’s romantic theorisation. What if BJP gains elsewhere? It can, but before that one needs to take cognisance of another reality; when the leading lynchpin of a coalition experiences tailwinds, it usually becomes symptomatic of a larger pro-alliance tilt as well. Thus, NCP (Sharad Pawar), Uddhav Thackeray Shiv Sena, Samajwadi Party, Aam Aadmi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, etc. are all likely to benefit from the overall perception of an INDIA alliance fightback which has looked progressively stronger after every successive phase of the election.
The regional heavyweights could devastate BJP, pushing it down further to the 220-230 range. That would be game, set and match to the INDIA alliance.
8. So where could BJP gain to compensate for the losses? Perhaps in Odisha, and maybe a few seats in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. But these pile ups are likely to be in single-digit numbers. If the BJP were to maintain the status quo in West Bengal it would be a creditable achievement. A weak NDA’s key partners are Telugu Desam Party, JDU, NCP (Ajit Pawar), and Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde). This means that the BJP under Modi is essentially politically isolated. The “washing machine” mission could be its undoing.
The ‘Congress versus BJP’ fight will determine the outcome of the key 2024 question: who is winning – INDIA or NDA? The NDA alliance partners are independently not strong enough to undergird an enervated BJP.
A reinvigorated Congress also indirectly electrifies INDIA alliance and there is a rub-off effect that manifests both ways. This is currently already evident in Maharashtra, Bihar and UP.
Given the Congress-BJP limited catchment area of 310-325 seats in the aggregate based on empirical evidence, the Congress needs 40 additional seats to its 2019 tally to form an INDIA alliance government. Or the INDIA alliance could together reduce BJP to 240-250. Will this be possible?
June 4 promises to be a humdinger. The INDIA alliance has reasons to believe the age-old adage, ‘The underdog always wins.’
Sanjay Jha is a former national spokesperson of the Indian National Congress party. He also worked as a banker and an internet entrepreneur.
