What Really Happened

Electi ons// The fact that BJP won a majority on its own in the 16th Lok Sabha has drawn comparisons with previous elections in which parties have won a majority of seats on their own. What has not quite figured in most of these comparisons is the fact that no party has ever before won more than half the seats with a vote share of just 31 per cent. Indeed, the previous lowest vote share for a single-party majority was in 1967, when the Congress won 283 out of 520 seats with 40.8 per cent of the total valid votes polled. This statistical fact points to an important aspect of the latest wave. Far from spelling the end of a fractured polity, the 2014 results show just how fragmented the vote is. It is precisely because the vote is so fragmented that the BJP was able to win 282 seats with just 31 per cent of the votes. Simply put, less than four out of every 10 votes opted for NDA candidates and not even one in three chose somebody from the BJP to represent them. Those who picked the Congress or its allies were even fewer, less than one in five for the Congress with a 19.3 per cent vote share (incidentally higher than BJP’s 18.5 per cent in 2009) and less than one in every four for the UPA. Unfortunately for the Congress, its 19.3 per cent votes only translated into 44 seats while BJP’s 18.5 per cent had fetched it 116 seats. With the combined vote share of the BJP and Congress adding up to just over 50 per cent, almost half of all those who voted in these elections voted for some other party. Even if we add up the vote tallies of the allies of these two parties, it still leaves a very large chunk out. The NDA’s combined vote share was 38.5 per cent and the UPA’s was just under 23 per cent. That leaves out nearly 39 per cent— or a chunk roughly equal to the NDA’s—for all others. Is the 38.5 per cent vote share for the NDA the lowest any ruling coalition has obtained? No. The parties that constituted UPA-1 had just 35.9 per cent of votes polled and the Congress won just 38.2 per cent of the votes in 1991, when it ran a minority government under PV Narasimha Rao.

But, except in 1991, they had to depend on outside support to keep the government afloat, which meant that the total vote share of those in the government or supporting it was higher. In 1989, the National Front, consisting of the Janata Dal, DMK, TDP, and Congress (S) won 146 seats and a vote share of 23.8 per cent. To this was added the 85 seats and 11.4 per cent of the BJP and the 52 seats and 10.2 per cent of the Left, taking the total including those supporting from outside to 283 seats and 45.3 per cent of the votes.

The NDA does not need any outside support to form the government. Indeed, the BJP can form it even on its own. But unless it ropes in others, it will become the government with the lowest popular support in terms of vote share after the PV Narasimha Rao government.