The verdict of 2024 general elections saw that NDA has got 293 seats which is 21 seats above the majority. But the BJP alone did not get a majority and has 240 seats ( 32 short of the majority) as against 303 seats which they had got in 2019.
The opposition India group on the other hand has got around 234 seats with the Congress party winning around 100 seats as against 52 seats which they got in 2019. The major gain of the opposition came from the seats which were won by BJP and their allies mainly from states like Uttar Pradesh(from 6 to 43), Maharashtra(from 5 to 30), West Bengal( from 24 to 30), Rajasthan( from 0 to 11), Karnataka (from 1 to 9), Haryana( from 0 to 5) and Bihar(from 1 to 9).
Gain of seats BJP and their allies had mainly came from others and from three states, Andhra Pradesh ( 0 to 21;gain from YSRCP), Odhisa( 10 to 20; gain from BJD) and Telengana (4 to 8 seats; gain from BRS).
If we go deeper into the nature of these seats we can clearly see a pattern that is emerging.
As can be seen from the above table, that while NDA lost 10 percent of seats in this election compared to 2019, the same loss was in the range of 18 percent for the seats designated as Scheduled caste seats and 22 percent for the seats designated as Scheduled tribe seats. Moreover for the scheduled caste seats, it is the India alliance which has more seats ( 49%) as against the NDA alliance which got 47% seats.
This clearly indicates that the NDA alliance suffered more losses in the SC and ST seats as compared to the General seats and India alliance gained significantly from these losses. It is the Dalit and the adivasi vote that seemed to move out more from the NDA alliance. This needs to be noted here that as per all economic parameters it is these segments who have been remained deprived in this country.
Economic Factors impacting the election
The three most important economic factors that had a significant impact in influencing the votes of the people of the marginalized communities are:
Growing Income Inequality: Thomas Piketty, French economist has alarmed about the growing income inequality in India. The recent data on GDP by the Ministry of Statistics, Programme and Implementation, Government of India shows that the agriculture sector where over fifty percent of the country is dependent on in terms of income ( and a vast majority of the marginalized community is dependent on agriculture as the primary source of income as they work as agricultural labourers) grew only by 1.4 percent in 2023-24 when the overall GDP growth has been around 7 percent. This clearly shows the economic stress the marginalized communities and the farmers have been going through in the last one year. The consumption demand grew only by 4 percent year on year in 2023-24 which is one of the lowest growth in decades. RBI data also suggests that household debt has been at its peak now.
Rising Food inflation: With the stress on income, there has been a rise in inflation specially food inflation impacting the marginalized people more harshly. Food inflation has been hovering around 8 percent in the country since November 2023. The prices of vegetables grew by 27.8 percent in the month of April, 2024. All of these have a severe impact on the election outcome. The post poll survey conducted by CSDS suggests that over 20 percent people consider rising inflation as a factor to vote against the government in the election. The same stood at 4 percent in 2019 as per the similar survey conducted then.
Growing Unemployment: Unemployment has remained a concern in India since 2017-18. The PLFS data published by the government just after the 2019 election suggested that the unemployment numbers were at a 45 year high. Since then there has been some control on the numbers. However the unemployment number of youth in the age group of 20 to 29 years remains a concern. The Agneeveer scheme launched by the government has seen a backlash and in many states this has been a primary focus of the youth for this election.
Political Factors impacting the election
Over reliance on Modi: For the BJP in the last five years, every election has been fought in the name of prime minister Modi. This has led to over centralization of power. Now there are pros and cons of every action. The biggest cons of this over centralization of power is that the impact of Modi started to yield diminishing returns to scale. If you make the prime minister face every election, then he becomes answerable to even local issues like paper leaks in Rajasthan and UP and all of this has a negative impact. This also shows why one nation one leader one election is not always good.
Localised elections : There has been no one centralised theme in this election contrary to 2014 and 2019 when corruption and nationalism became the central theme respectively. Ram Mandir was assumed to be taking the central theme but it only had an impact on certain regions and castes. In the absence of any central theme localised issues started to gain more momentum and hence this election became more localised in nature. The only central theme perhaps is the economic issues discussed above, the impact of those varied across regions and segments of people though.
India alliance ability to form social engineering: The India alliance was able to form effective social engineering in key states like UP, Rajasthan and Bihar among others. In UP, the alliance of PDA ( Pichda, Dalit and alpasankhyak) has been vastly effective in ground. So has been the social engineering in states like Rajasthan, Bihar, Karnataka, Maharashtra among others.
NDA’s ability to form key alliances in key states: In spite of all the factors discussed above, NDA was able to manage to get the required majority and this was mainly because of two key alliances they formed in the last minute before the election. One was Andhra Pradesh, where their alliance with TDP proved to be a key factor. The main reason for this alliance was the momentum they created that BJP is winning for sure making the TDP alliance inevitable. Also there was the Madiga factor. Madiga is a SC community which has over 10 percent vote in AP. The prime minister has been focusing on this community and BJP has ensured that the Madiga community gets benefits from the centre. This Madigas was traditionally supporting YSRCP. Now with them having some alligance to BJP it became a win win for TDP to go in an alliance.
Next is Bihar. With Nitish Kumar’s JDU in the India alliance, the result in Bihar could have been just the opposite of what it has been in 2024, as we have seen in 2015 assembly elections. Now by ensuring the alliance is broken they reversed the result. If the result would have been similar to that of the 2015 assembly election, that would have made the national picture much closer than now.
So it is these two alliances in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar that ensured that NDA is able to get a majority in spite of all the above factors discussed in this article.
Indian Political Debate 