Coming barely after the exact mid-term (two-and-a-half years) of the Narendra Modi government at the Centre, calling the elections in India’s largest State, Uttar Pradesh, a referendum on its performance will not be an understatement. After all, the Bharatiya Janata Party, unlike its rivals such as the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, has not even projected a chief ministerial candidate and is running its campaign with Prime Minister Modi as the chief mascot, just as it did in the Lok Sabha elections of March-May 2014.
The Lok Sabha elections had delivered a spectacular win for the BJP in U.P. and its ally, the Apna Dal. Together, they garnered 71 of the 80 seats — coming to 337 of the 403 Assembly segments — and increased their vote share from 15% in the 2012 Assembly elections to 42.5% in 2014, a whopping 27.5 point increase. While previously, a shift of 3-5 percentage points towards any of the dominant party among the four (SP, BSP, BJP and Congress) helped it win a majority of seats in both the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, the 27.5 point jump helped the BJP garner a lion’s share, putting it in the driver’s seat in 2017.
2004, 2009 and 2014 are Lok Sabha elections
To understand if the BJP can retain or come close to its past performance, we need to explain the victory in 2014.
Was it merely the effect of the Modi wave (his projection as a decisive leader committed to development) that helped the BJP win a significant number of seats in northern and western India in 2014, or did religious polarisation due to the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots also play a role, apart from other factors such as candidate selection?
Mapping vote share
An Assembly constituency-level map that charts the increase in vote share by each Assembly segment between 2012 and 2014 shows that the BJP-led alliance gained uniformly across the State, but it did very well in select parts such as western (the Muzaffarnagar-Shamli areas) and south-eastern (Varanasi, in particular, where Modi registered a facile win) U.P.
Data not available for constituencies marked in red. Darker the green, greater the vote share increase for BJP.
A cursory reading of this map would suggest that both the aforementioned reasons helped the BJP in different geographic locations based on anecdotal evidence, but this is not enough. We need to show clearly that polarisation benefited the BJP in Muzaffarnagar-Shamli.
Here is where we take recourse to a new map — this time constructed on the basis of polling booth-level results.
Journalist Avinash Celestine utilised data for 1.3 lakh polling booths in 2014, released by the Election Commission, to create an electoral map that was shaded on the basis of the median vote share of the winning party in each polling location. Darker colours indicate higher vote share for the party in each polling booth (represented by a dot in the graphic).
Darker shades
Note how areas around Muzaffarnagar and Shamli show darker dot colours, meaning the winning party — mostly the BJP in these constituencies — romped home with very high margins; in some cases, vote shares were even greater than 90%.
In other words, apart from increasing their vote share from 2012, the BJP managed to romp home very comfortably here. This could not have been possible without the sharp religious polarisation.
To counter these twin effects that helped the BJP win, the SP and the BSP have adopted contrasting strategies. The SP has tried to pitchfork the U.P. Chief Minister as the face of development to undercut the Modi appeal, while the BSP has sought to break the polarisation in western U.P. in particular by attempting a Dalit-Muslim alliance.
Considering the reasons for the BJP’s rise, their plans make sense.
