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After a series of meetings this week, seat-sharing negotiations for the Lok Sabha elections in the Congress-led Opposition INDIA bloc are off to a rocky start.
Already, the JD(U) and RJD in Bihar have claimed at least 16 seats each, with five for the Congress and three for the Left parties. In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress has reportedly offered the Congress just two of the state’s 42 seats. In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party has signalled it would contest in 65 seats, leaving just 15 for allies Congress and Rashtriya Lok Dal. In Maharashtra, for which seat-sharing talks began on Tuesday, the Shiv Sena (UBT) has demanded 23 seats, with the remaining 25 to be split between the Congress and Sharad Pawar’s NCP.
The Congress, though, appears to be willing to make concessions for its allies. Talks are being held with the 27 INDIA partners on a state-by-state basis, led by a five-member national alliance committee comprising former chief ministers Ashok Gehlot and Bhupesh Baghel and senior leaders Mukul Wasnik, Salman Khurshid and Mohan Prakash.
Though the party has plans to appoint coordinators for all Lok Sabha seats to assess the political situation and send feedback, Congress national president Mallikarjun Kharge conveyed last week that the party would focus on 255 seats.
If Kharge’s statement means that the Congress will contest 255 seats, it will be the fewest the seats the party has fought in Lok Sabha elections since Independence. Across the 17 Lok Sabha elections so far, between 1951 and 2019, the Congress has contested an average of 478 seats in each.
The fewest seats it has contested so far was in 2004 – which was the India Shining election brought forward by the ruling BJP, led by A B Vajpayee – when it contested in 417 constituencies. The highest number of seats it fought was in 1996, after its five-year government led by P V Narasimha Rao, when it fought in 529 seats.
In 2014 and 2019, against the Narendra Modi-led BJP, the Congress contested 464 and 421 seats, respectively.
In contrast, the BJP went from contesting 229 seats in 1984 – its poll debut (the party was known as Jan Sangh before it) – when it won just two seats, to 436 seats in 2019. Since 1991, it has not contested fewer than 300 seats.
In terms of its strike rate – the number of seats won as a percentage of the seats contested – the Congress has been falling from its early days. In 1951 (the country’s first general election) and 1957, it won more than 75% of the seats it contested, and in 1984 (the polls held after Indira Gandhi’s assassination), it peaked at 80%. Until 2014, its strike rate did not drop below 25%. But in 2014, its strike rate was 9.48%, when it fell to its lowest ever Lok Sabha seat tally of 44, and in 2019, it was 12.35%.
The BJP, since recording its lowest strike rate in its 1984 debut at 0.87%, has not dropped below 25%. It peaked at 69.5% in 2019, when it won 303 seats.
In the 2019 polls, the Congress finished as the runner-up in 209 seats, or just under half the seats it contested. It finished in third place or lower in 160 seats. On paper, successful seat-sharing talks could help the Congress reduce these figures in the absence of multiple non-BJP parties cutting into each others’ vote shares.
The Congress had struggled even more in 2014, finishing as the runner-up in 224 seats but in third place or lower in 196 seats, which is the highest for it.
Until 1991, the Congress had finished third or worse in only a handful of seats, suggesting it was the main rival to most other parties. The party’s highest second-place tally came in 1977, the post-Emergency election, when it won 154 seats and was the runner-up in 332 seats.
If the Congress is to stake a claim on only 255 seats, which is almost half the total Lok Sabha seats, and leave 288 seats for the remaining 27 members of the INDIA bloc, it will have to vastly improve its strike rate from the 2019 polls.
Among the INDIA bloc members who contested the most seats in 2019 were the Shiv Sena (98 seats), CPI(M) (69 seats) and TMC (62 seats). A united Shiv Sena at the time, it had a strike rate of 18.37%, having won 18 seats. Among the larger parties, the TMC had the best strike rate at 35.48%, with 22 seats. The CPI(M) managed just 3 seats, at a strike rate of 4.35%.
Of the 28 INDIA bloc members, the DMK had a 100% strike rate, winning all the 24 seats it contested in Tamil Nadu, followed by the JD(U), which won 16 of the 25 seats it contested, or a strike rate of 64% .
The states where the INDIA bloc is likely to see protracted and difficult seat-sharing negotiations include Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, West Bengal and Kerala.
