Sharp Reversal in Rural Seats Dislodge Raman Singh

What unfolded in Chhattisgarh was a clear consolidation of votes in favour of the grand old party across sections.

On the much-anticipated counting day, if Madhya Pradesh was a cliffhanger, its cousin Chhattisgarh’s mandate proved to be as decisive as it could have been.

Contrary to the exit polls, which predicted a close fight in the state, Congress zoomed past the two-thirds majority mark.

So remarkable was the victory, that even Chhattisgarh Congress President Bhupesh Baghel conceded that even they had not expected this performance.

There were talks of anti-incumbency against the 15-year-old Raman Singh government. There were speculations on how the Maya–Jogi alliance will play out. Yet, what unfolded on ground was a clear consolidation of votes in favour of the grand old party across sections.

However, when Raman Singh and Co. go back to the drawing boards, they will probably receive the rudest shock from the fact that their returns from the rural seats in the state were particularly poor. In the 2013 assembly election, BJP won 41 out of the 78 rural seats while Congress bagged 35 of them.

Five years down the line, Congress is headed to win more than 50 of those seats while BJP is down to less than 20.

The reversal of trend is a body blow to Raman Singh’s ‘Chawal Baba’ image, built over the years on back of his scheme to provide rice at Rs 2-3 for the poor.

The one-sided nature of the results is such that shift in any one section of the electorate will not suffice that. Quite naturally then, Congress has made a dent in the urban seats as well, which are traditionally believed to be BJP’s stronghold.

In the last election, BJP won 8 of the urban seats while Congress won 4. This time round, Congress is ahead in as many as 10 of these seats.

Another factor that hurt the saffron party was how the Jogi-Maya alliance panned out. A section of the poll pundits had predicted that Ajit Jogi, being a former tall Congress leader, will eat into the party’s vote bank. However, the vote shares suggest otherwise.

Congress which garnered 40.43 percent of the votes in the last election, has gone up to a little more than 43 percent, gaining slightly more than 2.50 percent votes. The BJP on the other hand, came down from 41.18 percent to about 33 percent – an erosion of more than 8 percent.

Clearly thus, the BJP has conceded its votes not just to Congress, but to other contenders in the fray as well.

In the last election, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party got 4.27 percent, fighting in all 90 seats in contention. In this election, the party fielded candidates in 33 constituencies and has been able to hold on to its voter base, getting 3.8 percent of the votes.

Ajit Jogi’s Janata Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC), in its first election, fielded 55 candidates and managed to rake up more than 7 percent votes.

Along with Communist Party of India (CPI), the third partner of the combine, the alliance has in its kitty, more than 11 percent of the votes.

The alliance thus, has made clear inroads in the BJP’s vote share.

The picture becomes clearer in the 10 Scheduled Caste (SC) reserved seats, where BJP had made a near clean sweep, winning 9 of them, in 2013. Notably, the BJP didn’t just win 9 seats, it won them convincingly. In 8 out of the 10 seats, the margin of victory, in terms of vote percentage, was more than 6.5 percent.

The newly formed alliance placed its bets on this chunk, with Mayawati’s Dalit and Ajit Jogi’s tribal vote base converging. In two out of these 10 seats, the alliance is leading and is placed second in two more, thereby eating into what proved to be a bastion for BJP in the last election.