Hindustan Times

Roshan Kishore

The big question between 2014 and 2019 was whether the BJP’s majority was a flash in the pan or a sign of the emergence of a new national political hegemon. See, in charts, how that question was answered decisively - across the board - in 2019.

A Black Swan election that (eventually) wasn’t

<p>When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 282 Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 election, the results shocked a lot of political analysts. The shock value of the results was for good reason. It was the first time since 1984 that a party had won a parliamentary majority of its own in India. The biggest question between 2014 and 2019 was whether the BJP’s 2014 majority was a flash in the pan or a sign of the emergence of a new national political hegemon.</p><p>The 2019 results — the BJP increased its 2014 tally to 303 — proved that 2014 was more a sign of the future than an aberration in India’s political evolution. While the conclusion is easier to make in hindsight, the period between 2014 and 2019 elections did not make this a forgone conclusion. Here are three charts which explain this in detail.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">2014 seemed to be an anti-incumbency verdict</h2><p>The 2014 general election saw the highest ever voter turnout in India. This number increased to 66.4% in 2014 from 58.2% in 2009. The only election that came close to the 2014 voter turnout figure was the 1984 election, held after the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi. An HT analysis by Neelanjan Sircar shows that the BJP’s probability of winning a parliamentary constituency (PC) increased strongly with an increase in PC-wise voter turnout between 2009 and 2014, which had not been the case in elections held in the years running up to 2014. This statistic, when read with the fact that the second United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had been firefighting on multiple fronts such as allegations of corruption, very high inflation and macro-economic precarity and popular movements such as the 2011 Anna Hazare movement and the 2012 protests against the gangrape of a young woman in Delhi, suggested that the voters had come out in large numbers to unseat an unpopular government and rallied behind the principal opposition party. This raised a natural question whether the BJP would do equally well in 2019 without the tailwinds of anti-incumbency which helped it cross the majority mark in 2014. The shoe seemed to be on the other foot when the Congress gave a huge scare to the BJP in the 2017 Gujarat elections and managed to win back the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in late 2018, months before the 2019 polls.</p>

<h2 style="text-align:center;">The BJP’s vote share was significantly smaller than in previous majority victories</h2><p>The BJP won 282 PCs in the 2014 elections with a vote share of 31%. Both in terms of seat share and vote share, especially the latter, this was the smallest parliamentary majority in the history of Indian elections. The fact that the BJP’s vote share was not as high seemed to suggest that it would be vulnerable to a more united opposition in a future election. This seemed like a very strong potential headwind for the BJP in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar which had contributed 93 of the 282 PCs of the BJP and 104 of the 336 PCs in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) kitty. This argument became stronger after the BJP’s big loss in the 2015 Bihar elections when the opposition was united and its landslide victory in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh when the regional heavyweights Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) fought separately.</p>

<h2 style="text-align:center;">But neither local anti-incumbency nor grand coalitions mattered against the BJP in 2019</h2><p>The most visible proof of this fact came from the BJP’s strong performance against an SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh and the Congress’s rout in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. However, when seen on a long-term basis, the results fit into a pattern where the BJP seemed to enjoy a discernible vote share advantage in national elections compared to its state election performance. The only way this vote share advantage could be theorised was by attributing it to the advantage Narendra Modi’s prime ministerial candidature brought to the BJP.</p>

<h2 style="text-align:center;">BJP’s state-wise vote share in 2014, state election between 2014 and 2019 and 2019</h2><p>The BJP’s 2019 victory was theorised by political scientists as the dawn of India’s fourth-party system with the emergence of a clear national political hegemon after the coalition era in Indian politics. Sure, this proposition will be put to test again in the 2024 election, but until results show otherwise, there is merit in holding on to this theory.</p>