Message in voting numbers

Congress is inching back to its pole position in Indian politics, helped by its resurgence in the heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar

Now that the detailed voting numbers are available, some firmer conclusions can be drawn about the nature of party performance in 2009. The Congress has increased its vote percentage by 2 percentage points, to 28.6 per cent. But—and this is the interesting point—its vote share this year is only fractionally more than it was a decade ago, in the 1999 elections, when it won just 114 seats with 28.3 per cent of the vote. The real difference is that the BJP has been losing ground. In 1999 it got 23.8 per cent of the vote; this dropped to 22.2 per cent in 2004, and has now dropped further to 18.8 per cent. Between them, the two parties today have a lower vote percentage than before, totaling no more than 47.6 per cent (48.7 per cent in 2004 and 52.1 per cent in 1999).

In other words, don’t write off the regional parties just yet; if anything, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party has increased its vote share—from 4.2 per cent to 5.3 per cent to now 6.2 per cent, while the vote of the two main Communist parties has fallen back to roughly where it was in 1999, at a little less than 7 per cent. The real loser among the regional parties is Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, which has lost nearly half its 2004 vote share of 2.4 per cent.

The Congress would therefore seem to be inching back to its pole position in Indian politics, helped by its resurgence in the heartland states of Uttar Pradesh (where its vote share has gone up from 12 per cent to 18.3 per cent) and Bihar (up from 4.5 per cent to 10.3 per cent). If these numbers climb further to reach somewhere near the party’s national average, the resulting seat multiplier could be substantial. Already, a 4 per cent increase in its all-India vote this time has led to a 40 per cent increase in its seat tally.

One of the advantages of becoming the pole party is that a fragmented voting pattern yields this seat multiplier—Indira Gandhi used to win two-thirds of the seats with no more than 40 per cent of the vote. The Left Front in West Bengal has swept elections for more than 30 years, with only about half the vote. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, three states (Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh) saw the vote get further fragmented following the entry of Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, Vijaykant’s DMDK and Chiranjeevi’s Praja Rajyam. In almost all such cases, it is the pole party that benefits from the splintering of the electorate, and that is what has yielded results for the Congress in 2009. Equally important in this scenario is the shrinking of the BJP vote base; remember that the BJP won 182 seats in 1999 with just 23.8 per cent of the vote.

The numbers are the end result, not the motive force. That has come from a Congress that has carefully focused its message on inclusiveness, economic and social, and reaped the rewards. The general consensus that the Mandal-Masjid phase of Indian politics is over may not be entirely correct because, as the figures show, some of the caste-based parties have retained their vote base. The game-changer has been the decline of the BJP, which has to ask itself some hard questions as to what it should stand for, now that the Mandir issue has been played out.