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Journalism of Courage
The outcome of the Madhya Pradesh election later this year will be setting the narrative for the Lok Sabha elections in 2024 and the BJP faces a tough battle to retain the state where it has been in power for almost 20 years.
At the heart of the challenge for the BJP, as an analysis of the numbers shows, is its fluctuating vote share in the Assembly elections since 1980. It is not rising even as the vote share in the Lok Sabha polls has been steadily climbing since 1984. The recent surge in the Lok Sabha poll vote share is likely due to the Narendra Modi factor while voter fatigue is a hurdle after almost two decades of uninterrupted rule. Barring a little over a year (December 2018 to March 2020), the party has been in power in MP from December 2003 and Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has been at the helm since 2008.
The seriousness with which the BJP is taking the challenge of retaining power in MP is reflected in the decision earlier this week to name candidates for 39 constituencies where it believes it is vulnerable.
The last Assembly election, in 2018, threw up a fractured mandate. The BJP, with 109 seats, fell short of the majority mark of 116 in the 230-member House. The Congress ended up forming the government with its 114 MLAs and the support of Independents. Senior party leader Kamal Nath took over as CM. But this government was short-lived, lasting just 15 months, and was brought down by Jyotiraditya Scindia and his group of 21 MLAs who switched to the BJP.
So, what challenges lie ahead for the BJP in a state where it has more or less had an uninterrupted run for two decades? We take a look at the numbers.
Since its foundation in 1980, the BJP has contested nine Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh (five in undivided MP and four after the state’s split in 2000). Its best performance was in 1990, when it contested 312 seats and won 220 of them. The vote share stood at 46.5%.
Its worst performance in terms of seats was in 2018 (see graph below), but the vote share remained at 41.33%.
It was 45.19% in 2013. (see graph below).
While the BJP managed to return to power after the fall of Kamal Nath’s government in 2020, its 2018 numbers throw up questions.
An analysis of BJP vote shares in MP Assembly elections between 1980 and 2018 shows that the party’s vote share in seats that it has contested has remained between 31.38% and 46.5%.
It is a completely different story in the Lok Sabha elections where the party’s vote share has been steadily rising since 1984. A distinct trend emerges from an analysis of the vote shares from the mid-1990s — the BJP in Madhya Pradesh has been getting a higher vote share in the Lok Sabha polls which are held after the Assembly elections in the state.
For instance, the party got 38.82% votes in the 1993 Assembly elections. In the next Lok Sabha polls in 1996, the party obtained 41.32% of the votes in the state. After the 41.33% vote share in the 2018 Assembly polls, the party upped its game for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and the vote share jumped to 58.23% just months later (see graph below).
This was even higher than 2014’s vote share of 54.76%. In absolute terms, the BJP secured 2.14 crore votes in 2019, which was higher than the total votes it polled — 1.56 crore —- in the 2018 Assembly elections.
