The historic Lok Sabha elections held just after the Emergency brought a non-Congress party, the Janata Party, to power in 1977 for the first time. Karnataka, however, went against the national mood, electing the Congress in all 27 seats.
The party won with a comfortable majority in the 1978 Assembly polls.
Karnataka has a history of having, more often than not, the party in power at the Centre forming the Opposition here and vice-versa.
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Interestingly, in the 1980 Lok Sabha polls, the Karnataka voters gave the thumbs-up to the Congress, but they elected the Janata Party in the 1983 Assembly elections. This trend turned starker when the Congress won a landslide in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections, held after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, but the Assembly polls the next year brought the Janata Party to power.
Again when the National Front captured power at the Centre in 1989, Karnataka elected the Congress for the State in the same year.
This pattern is more or less consistent, with the non-Congress parties forming governments in the State when the Congress came to power at the Centre in 1991, 2004 and 2008. On the other hand, when the National Democratic Alliance formed the government in 1999, the Congress was voted to power in the State.
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The exception was in the 1990s when the Lok Sabha elections of 1996 saw the United Front coming to power at the Centre, while the Janata Dal (then undivided and part of the alliance) was ruling the State?.
This trend of discriminating between the two elections is often attributed to the “maturity” of the State’s voters.
*This report has been corrected for a factual error