The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) posted a historic mandate in the Gujarat Assembly elections, winning a record-breaking 156 out of 182 seats. This is also the seventh win in a row for the party in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s native State. The party’s vote share in Gujarat jumped to 52.5% compared to 49.1% in 2017.
The ruling party swept cities and rural districts alike as the triangular contests involving the BJP, the Congress and new entrant, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), catapulted it to power with unprecedented numbers.
The AAP’s win in five seats and a vote share-capture of 17%, marked the party’s entry into Gujarat politics and ensured the decimation of the main Opposition party, the Congress, which won just 17 seats compared to a handsome 77 in 2017 and saw its vote share shrink to a mere 27.3%. Not only could the Congress not win a single urban seat in cities such as Surat, Vadodara, Rajkot, Jamnagar, Bhavnagar and Gandhinagar, it also clocked a complete collapse in the State’s tribal belt. The BJP won 23 out of the 27 seats reserved for the Scheduled Tribes (STs) across the tribal belt from north to south.
In the face of its damaging performance in Gujarat, the anti-incumbency factor in Himachal Pradesh and its hyper-local campaign led the Congress to make a comeback in the State on Thursday, by winning 40 seats in the high-stakes contest for the 68-member Legislative Assembly. However, the victory is instructive of a long-standing pattern- Himachal Pradesh has seen a bipolar electoral system for more than three decades, with the Congress and the BJP alternately forming the government. The BJP’s hopes of staying in power were dampened despite its high-pitched “mission repeat” campaign as the party failed to go beyond the 25-seat mark. While incumbent Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur did win his seat, eight of his 10 Ministers lost the election. The AAP could not leave a mark in the hill State, not clinching even a single seat.
The results in both States, despite the Himachal loss, are only evident of the BJP’s reinforced sway over India’s politics. Case in point, while votes for the AAP and the Congress together did not add up to 40% vote share in Gujarat, the BJP saw a jump in its share even in a poll that saw a 4% drop in turnout. Even in Himachal, despite a fall in its seat tally, the saffron party’s vote share only came down from 48% to 43%, almost equal to the winning Congress’s vote share.
As this editorial in today’s edition of The Hindu points out, the results show that the BJP’s status as the hegemon remains unchallenged in Indian politics. While it has a universal formula that is largely successful across regions, the opposition to it can sustain only with State-specific strategies. The AAP’s Gujarat entry and its gaining of a national party status, however, has the potential of muddying the waters for the Opposition.
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