The Assembly elections for the largest state in central India, Madhya Pradesh, are fast approaching with 5.6 crore electors having the power to cast a vote. The Election Commission of India (ECI) released a schedule which mentioned that the polls will be held on November 17 across the state, for all the 230 seats of the state’s Legislative Assembly.
Out of the 230 seats, 35 will be reserved for candidates belonging to the Scheduled Castes, and 47 will be reserved for candidates belonging to the Scheduled Tribes.
Electors and the polling percentage
There are a total of just over 5.6 crore electors, including service electors, according to the data provided by the Chief Electoral Officer of Madhya Pradesh. This is 11% higher than the total electors that were listed before the elections held in November 2018, which, in turn, was around 8.3% higher than the total number of electors listed for the State’s assembly elections in 2013. The chart below shows the increase in the number of electors since 2008.
Since 1980, the number of electors have grown by 121%, as shown.
The polling percentage has also seen an increase with every election. Barring the election in 1998, where the poll percentage dipped by 0.3% when compared to the 1993 elections, there has been a better voter turnout in each of the elections. In the 2018 assembly elections, 75.63% of the total number of electors had cast valid votes. This is 25% higher than the elections held in 1980, where the polling percentage stood just under 50%.
When faceted across the electors in the three different types of constituencies, that is, the general, Scheduled Caste (SC), and Scheduled Tribe (ST) electors, we see that the polling percentage of electors in ST constituencies has improved the most since 1980, which stood at just 37.81% in 1980 and was 78.32% in the 2018 elections.
Assembly composition and party performance over the years
The 2018 elections for the 230 seats of the State’s legislative assembly led to the Indian National Congress (INC) emerging as the party with the largest share with 114 seats, followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which won 109. The INC garnered the support of Samajwadi Party’s one MLA, Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) two MLAs, and four other independent MLAs and formed the government with the INC’s Kamal Nath swearing in as the new Chief Minister of the State in December 2018.
However, just before the country went into the first lockdown in March 2020 due to coronavirus, 22 sitting MLAs resigned, thus leading to the resignation of Kamal Nath. The BJP came back into power and Shivraj Singh Chouhan returned as the incumbent Chief Minister of the state. Currently, the BJP holds 128 seats in the State government, with INC having 98.
In 2018, the INC had returned to power after 15 years, ever since it had lost the 2003 elections to BJP - who had won 173 out of the 230 seats. The chart below plots the performance of both, the INC and BJP since 1980. Out of the 5 elections that took place from 1980 to 1998, the INC convincingly won four of them except the 1990 elections where it won just 56 of the 320 seats (the State’s legislative assembly had 320 seats until 2003 - when it was reformed to 230), as shown in the performance chart below.
The share of votes that INC have received since their defeat in 2003 also shows an increasing trend, as plotted in the chart below. While the BJP’s vote share has not been higher than 45% since 2003, the two parties matched up almost equally in 2018 with BJP receiving 41.02% of the total votes, and INC with 40.89%.
Current ruling party of each Assembly Constituency, and the winning parties of the 2018 and 2013 elections
The map below shows the current ruling party in each of the 230 assembly constituencies of the State. The winners of the 2018 and 2013 elections can also be seen to show how the rule has shifted in constituencies from one party to another, over the past ten years. This can be done by selecting the buttons that read ‘2018 (Results)‘ and ‘2013 (Results)‘ in the graphic below.
Highlights of the performance of women candidates
In the past 5 elections, the share of women candidates in the entire pool of candidates has never reached or been higher than 10%, as shown in the chart below. In 2003, 9.16% of the candidates were women and that statistic has only fallen since then. Women of the Scheduled Tribes have consistently been over 11% of the total number of ST candidates that have contested since 2003.
Among all the 230 winning candidates since 2003, the share of winners who were female was greater than 10% in the 2008 and 2013 elections - at 10.87% and 13.04%, respectively. In fact, these were the only two times throughout the elections held in the past 43 years where the share of winning candidates who identified as female were over 10%.
Margin of victory
71 or 30% of the constituencies saw close battles with the winning by a margin of under 5%, indicating a strong battle between parties and candidates. Out of these 71 constituencies, BJP won 37 of them, while INC won 31 constituencies with a margin of victory under 5%.
As shown in the chart below, 65 or 28.2% of the constituencies saw margins of victory between 5 and 10%.
The chart below also shows the highlights of the result of each of the constituencies (represented by a dot), which is coloured as per the winning party.
