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As Gujarat goes to polls in December, an IndiaSpend analysis of election data show that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) still appears strong in Gujarat.
Gujarat Assembly elections are scheduled to be held in two phases on 9 and 14 December, and the results will be declared on 18 December.
PM Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014. He succeeded Keshubhai Patel in October 2001, after his resignation from the post.
In the 2012 state Assembly elections, the BJP, with Narendra Modi as its chief ministerial candidate, won 115 out of 182 seats, with an average vote share of 53 percent in these seats.
In 2012, more than half the voters, or a clear majority, in constituencies where the BJP won the Assembly elections voted for the BJP, showing strong support for the party.
IndiaSpend analysed BJP’s vote share in all 115 Assembly constituencies won in the 2012 Gujarat poll, and compared it with the votes the party secured in the 2014 parliamentary elections in these same Assembly segments.
In 31 of the 115 seats the BJP won in the 2012 Gujarat Assembly polls, they had a margin of less than 10,000 votes–0.5 percent to 8 percent of the total votes cast in the constituency.
In a ‘first past the post’ system, where there are more than two parties contesting, the candidate who gets the highest number of votes is the winner. A thin margin means a very close contest, and in the following election the runner-ups may only have to pursue a few thousand extra voters to defeat the party that won the previous election.
But in Gujarat, even among the constituencies with the thinnest margin of victory for the BJP (of less than 10,000 votes) in 2012, Assembly segments from 2014 in all but two constituencies showed an increase in votes for the BJP.
This shows that BJP voters in its incumbent constituencies and Assembly segments did not change between 2012 and 2014.
These trends show that though this Gujarat election is different from previous ones – with Narendra Modi no longer leading the BJP in the state – there had been little anti-incumbency against the party until 2014. Still, the BJP in Gujarat has not been stable since Modi became the PM. Anandiben Patel succeeded Modi as the CM of Gujarat in 2014 and in August 2016, Vijay Rupani from Rajkot west constituency took over the post.
Out of 29 states and two union territories (that have assemblies and appoint CMs), 13 have BJP chief ministers at present.
In March 2017, the BJP returned to power in Uttar Pradesh (UP) after 15 years, and also won in its sister state of Uttarakhand.
Maharashtra and UP were the most important victories for the BJP as these are the biggest states in India in terms of population, and appoint the maximum number of Members of Parliament (one-fifth of total) to the Council of States, the Rajya Sabha.
In Jammu & Kashmir’s 2014 elections, the BJP – which secured the second position both in terms of seats won and vote-share after the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party (JKPDP) – formed the state government with the JKPDP.
Gujarat is one of the few Indian states that have had long-serving CMs and political parties.
Similarly, in Odisha, where the Biju Janata Dal has been in power since 2000, it had a 43.4 percent vote share in the 2014 elections.
But over the past decade, two of these states have witnessed strong anti-incumbency against these long-serving governments, with a significant loss in vote share.
The AITC gained about 20 percentage points in their share of votes in the seats they contested, data from the two consecutive elections show.
In February 2015, after the Congress-Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) alliance disbanded, the AAP formed a majority government in New Delhi.
Further, in the 2014 parliamentary elections, the Congress’ vote-share in New Delhi went to the BJP, a January 2015 IndiaSpend analysis of the Assembly segments showed.
(Tewari is a PhD scholar at the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This article was first appeared on IndiaSpend and has been republished with permission.)
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