With the Congress clinching victory by recording its best performance in Karnataka Assembly elections after 1989, and the BJP holding its fort with just a marginal dip in vote share, the state appears to be heading towards a bipolar electoral landscape as the JD(S)'s base shrinks to its lowest level in the last two decades. By Saturday evening, the Congress had won 131 seats and was leading in five others, effectively taking its tally to 136. This would be the highest since 1989, when the party had won 178 seats. The Congress’s vote share, too, reached a high of 42.9% — also the highest after 1989, when it had won 43.76% of the votes polled. In the 2018 Karnataka elections, the Congress had won 79 seats and its vote share was recorded at 38.04%, the highest among the parties in the fray that year. While the Congress defeated BJP by a huge difference in the results declared on Saturday, the saffron party, however, managed to largely hold its base, getting 35.9% of the votes polled, just marginally down from 36.22% recorded in 2018. But BJP’s seat tally came down drastically — from 104 in 2018 to an expected 65 this time (by evening, the BJP had won 61 seats and was leading in four others). The BJP’s performance this time is way better than in 2013 Assembly polls, when the party had won only 40 seats and got 19.89% of the votes polled. The JD(S), the principal regional force in the state, has been decimated further, as Saturday's results show — its seat tally and vote share have both decreased. Having won 37 seats in 2018, the party this time saw its seat tally nearly halved — to 19 — while its vote share came down to 13.31%, from 18.36% five years ago. The decrease in JD(S)’s seats and vote-share points towards the state's electoral landscape becoming bipolar. In the last 20 years, the JD(S) notched up a sizeable chunk of the vote pie in successive elections, getting 20.77%, 18.96%, 19.89% and 18.36% vote-share, respectively, in 2004, 2008, 2013 and 2018 Assembly polls. The Congress was a dominating force in Karnataka from 1957 to 1978, a period when the party’s vote-share in the Assembly elections was recorded in the range of approximately 44% to 52%, and the number of seats stood in the range of 126 to 165. The period between 1978 and1989 saw the Congress’s position challenged — first by the Janata Party and later by the Janata Dal — and the state’s politics remained largely bipolar. But after 1989, the emergence of BJP, and the formation of JD(S) in 1999, played a crucial role in its politics, making the state’s electoral fight triangular. That, if Saturday's results are any indicator, could be changing.
