Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There are many like Gopalkrishna Gandhi who cry foul that the BJP managed to win an absolute majority of seats with just 31% of the vote. In the age of data and the Internet, you will surely find someone who crunches the numbers differently. Like R. Jagannathan . He reminds us that the BJP fought as part of an alliance, which means that it didn’t contest all 545 seats. In fact, it only contested 428 seats on its own. Raju Limbachiya says that the vote share of the BJP in those 428 seats it contested is 40%. Or if you see the vote share of the NDA, it comes to 38.2%. Jagannathan provides context for these numbers: “In multi-party systems in the west no party usually crosses a 40 percent vote share; as for the gold standard of mandates – a 50-percent-plus vote – it happens only in two-party races.” In any case, as Jay Mazoomdaar says : “It is one thing to oppose the politics of Modi-led BJP; quite another to question its decisive mandate…(as is being done by the) many o...

There is a sea of orange in the map below, indicating the seats the BJP won in the just concluded elections: A lot of people were curious as to the vote share of the BJP nation-wide. Did they win a proportional number of votes? Or did they just get votes in places they won and did not have any “wasted” votes? (Here, a “wasted” vote is one cast in an electoral district where the party did not win). Equally, was the return of a single party majority a sign of the end of regional parties, at least at the national level? Was this the beginning of the move to a two party system? Good questions. Surprisingly, the first answer I saw to these questions was in the Washington Post by a non-Indian guy named Adam Ziegfeld ! So what are the answers? The BJP’s vote share this time was just 31%. In contrast, the Congress despite getting decimated got 19%. It was the distribution of votes that mattered: the BJP hardly had any “wasted” votes. To understand how “useful” every BJP vote w...