As the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continues to be in a celebratory mood, an analysis of the results for the three coastal Lok Sabha seats suggests that the party got 1.43-times more votes in the 2014 polls than in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.
Both the times, the party swept all the three parliamentary constituencies. In hindsight, the 2012 Udupi-Chikmagalur by-election — in which K. Jayaprakash Hegde of the Congress trounced the BJP’s Sunil Kumar — may look like an aberration.
Pattern change
What had perplexed the poll observers is that in the 2013 Assembly elections, a sizable chunk of voters dumped the BJP in favour of the Congress, but returned to the saffron fold a year for the parliamentary elections.
In the Assembly election, the Congress bagged seven of the eight constituencies in Dakshina Kannada, four of the eight seats in Uttara Kannada, three of the eight segments of the Udupi-Chikmagalur Lok Sabha constituency — that is 14 out of 24 constituencies.
But in the latest Lok Sabha elections, the BJP has gone ahead of the Congress in 22 of the 24 Assembly segments.
The party has got 4.66 lakh more votes than the Congress in the three Parliamentary constituencies.
The party’s nominees — Nalin Kumar Kateel, Shobha Karandlaje and Ananth Hegde — humbled their respective Congress rivals by more than 1.40 lakh votes each.
Number 7 changes all
Interestingly, the number seven appears to have given a sense of euphoria to the BJP and dysphoria to the Congress.
In the case of the BJP, a positive shift of voters, accounting for a gain of seven percentage points (100 percentage points = 1%), has made all the difference.
In 2009, the BJP had bagged 47.45 per cent of the votes polled in the three constituencies put together. Turn to 2014, the figure goes up to 54.61 per cent.
Though the Congress, too, gained nearly 66,000 more votes than it did in 2009, its vote share dropped by 7 percentage points which apparently was quite a nerve-wracking blow for it. Adding to this was the BJP’s well-attended victory rally in the streets of Mangalore on Saturday.
