How will the BJP's Lok Sabha tally change in the 2024 general elections?

The nine state assembly polls in 2023 will tell us which way the political winds are blowing before the country goes to polls in general elections 2024

The year 2023 will see nine state Assembly elections, and India will have general elections in the early summer of 2024. So the next 16 months are going to be largely political. Will the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) employ an offensive or defensive strategy?

We can expect a lot of discussion and forecasting. But only one question needs answering: How many Lok Sabha seats will the BJP lose out of the 303 it won in 2019?

I had asked the same question in early 2019. The party had 273 seats then. A friend in BJP who read that article called and said the party expected to lose about 20 seats. Its best estimate was 240-242.

In economics, this is called "ceteris paribus" analysis, meaning that if all other things remain the same, this is what can be expected.

But they didn't remain the same. Balakot happened. And the BJP won 30 seats more than it had in the previous Lok Sabha — and around 60 more than it had expected in early February.

But the basic issue remains for any ruling party anywhere in the world: How many seats can it expect to lose, and what should it do about it?

In operations analysis and decision theory, this is called Minimax, short for minimising the possible maximum loss scenario. There are many ways of doing it. We need not go into them here.

So will the BJP adopt this essentially defensive strategy, or will it go for the opposite strategy, which is called Maximin? This is when you try to maximise your minimum expected gain. It's an offensive strategy. Usually, political parties use a combination of Minimax and Maximin.

A great deal will, of course, depend on the results of the assembly elections. There are three in February, in Nagaland, Tripura and Meghalaya. Then in May, we have one in Karnataka, and in November, three more in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram. Finally, in December, we have two in Rajasthan and Telangana. So you can see what a problem it will be for the BJP.

Anyway, by January 1, 2024, we will know which way the political winds are blowing. The interesting thing is that in almost all these states, it is a two-way contest. That makes a combination of Minimax and Maximin easier.

So in the general election of 2024, in which state will the BJP follow Minimax, and where will it stick to Maximin? It is hard for an outsider to say because only the top levels of the party will have the complete picture.

As I had written a few days ago, the expected breakdown of transitivity will be a major factor in deciding the eventual strategy. The BJP won massively in Gujarat and lost badly in Himachal. Preferences in one state don't always get transferred to another.

There's also the observed experience that voters distinguish between assembly and Lok Sabha elections. The extreme case of this will be if all ruling parties lose in the 2023 assembly elections. But this is quite unlikely.

Meanwhile, the converse of this is that because the voters distinguish between assembly and Lok Sabha elections, they vote back the BJP. We again return to the initial question: Will the BJP get more or less than 303 seats? If so, what will be the gain or loss?

Gain, you ask? Admittedly the probability is close to zero, but the probability of losing many seats is close to 1. Will it be more or less than 30? 30 is a crucial number because losing more seats than that would bring it below the simple majority mark of 273.

The question is how many. Given the usual culprits of inflation, unemployment and anti-incumbency, would anyone like to bet that, barring Balakot-type events, the BJP will lose its majority?