BJP has an ambitious target

In mid-2023, economist Sabyasachi Das released a paper “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy”. This looked for signs of manipulation in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The paper had not been peer-reviewed. It triggered a firestorm, which forced Mr Das’ resignation from his post at Ashoka University. The incident has dire implications for academic freedom but that’s a subject for another day.

Mr Das used statistical methods to examine voting patterns in 59 Lok Sabha constituencies, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won or came second, in close contests defined as a margin of less than 5 per cent of the votes cast. It also looked at voter suppression, with a focus on the removal of Muslim names from electoral rolls.

It marked off constituencies in states controlled by the BJP, and looked at the possibility that state civil service officers (SCS) tasked with election duties may have been “pliable”. The paper also looked at discrepancies between turnouts and votes cast in the initial data released by the Election Commission of India (ECI). The ECI later released corrected figures. It’s still an open question if the discrepancies were due to manipulation or statistical error.

Mr Das’ conclusions: The BJP won a disproportionately large number of close-margin seats. It won 41 of the 59 seats he examined. Assuming as the paper did, that these seats were a near coin-toss, the BJP should have won close to half — say, around 30 seats. But as Mr Das acknowledged, the BJP has a strong ground game with many workers, financial clout and social media outreach. It may have won close contests because it campaigned better.

The paper claimed larger discrepancies in the ECI data in seats won by the BJP. Seats with election officials drawn from SCS cadres in states controlled by the BJP also had more data discrepancies. Growth in registered voters for seats with high Muslim populations was less than the national average of growth in voters — ergo, there may be some evidence of voter suppression.

But although Mr Das claimed to find a few such tell-tale signs, the paper acknowledged: “The tests are, however, not proofs of fraud, nor does it suggest that manipulation was widespread.” Subsequent examinations of the paper suggested that it may have had flawed methodology.

However flawed it was, the paper pointed to 59 constituencies with close contests. If the BJP is going to hit the target of 370 seats in 2024, it must hold the bulk of the 303 seats it won in 2019 (including the 41 cited above). It will also have to win another 70-odd seats. Even if it wins the 18 close contests cited, where it came second, it will have to win 50-odd seats where it ran at over 5 per cent behind the winner.

In the last two Lok Sabha elections (2014 and 2019), the BJP pushed its vote share to 37.4 per cent (2019) from 18.9 per cent (2009) and raised its Lok Sabha tally to 303 (2019) from 116 (2009). To go to 370, it would have to cross 45 per cent of the vote share. The aggregated National Democratic Alliance won 45 per cent of the vote in 2019, and 353 seats.

Such a large single-party vote share has not been registered since 1984, when the Congress won 47 per cent of the vote, and 414 seats after Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Indira Gandhi’s Congress won 43 per cent of the vote and 353 seats in 1980. The elections of 1980 and 1984 were unusual. Before the 1980 elections, India’s first non-Congress government had collapsed due to infighting, leaving no Opposition. In 1984, there was a huge sympathy wave.

Thus far, 2024 shows no signs of being a “wave” election. In the absence of Black Swans, the BJP has a massive edge in money. But in 10 years, it has failed to deliver on employment or inclusive growth — over 800 million on welfare is ample proof of that failure. After the release of the electoral bond data, the direct correlations with Enforcement Directorate cases, and the arrest of Opposition politicians, the narrative of being a clean party is also hard to push. Anti-incumbency — a well-known theme in Indian politics — makes it more likely it will lose some vote share and some seats, than that it will pick up enough vote share to surge to 370.