Constituents of the Opposition INDIA bloc have won 10 out of the 13 Assembly constituencies across seven States, where bypoll results were announced on July 13.
The Congress won in four seats — two each in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand; the Trinamool Congress won in all the four seats in West Bengal; the Dravida Munnetra Kazagam (DMK) and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won one seat each in Tamil Nadu and Punjab, respectively. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) managed to win only two seats — one each in Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. The lone seat in Bihar was won by an independent candidate.
In the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP was reduced to 240 seats and the NDA was limited to 293 seats, both numbers lower than the 2019 Lok Sabha results mark. Forty days later, the outcome of the bypolls has enthused the INDIA bloc, which has interpreted it as a signifier of a national mood swing in favour of the Opposition.
BJP spokespersons have countered this by citing that the party was an incumbent in only three of the 13 Assembly bypoll seats, all of which were in West Bengal, and attributed their losses there to “booth capture” and “rigging” by the ruling party in the State, the Trinamool. Citing their wins in the two seats in Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh as gains, BJP has sought to underplay the bypoll results as outcomes of local factors, which neither have any national cause, nor effect.
A clear overall trend
Assembly bypoll outcomes are often influenced by State-specific and even very local factors, as the results from Bihar’s Rupauli bypoll indicate. Contesting as an independent candidate, Rajput ‘bahubali’ (strongman) Shankar Singh defeated both the ruling-Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal candidates in Rupauli.
In some States, such as Tamil Nadu, bypolls have generally favoured the ruling party in recent years.
There is also some truth in the BJP’s allegations regarding electoral malpractices and strong-arm tactics practised by the Trinamool in West Bengal.
However, the overall trend that emerges from the bypoll results in 13 Assembly seats indicates a sharp decline in the BJP/NDA’s vote shares from the Lok Sabha polls held less than two months ago, as well as improvements for the INDIA parties (Table 1).
Table 1 | The table shows the NDA parties’s vote share in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the Assembly elections.
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Changes in vote share
The BJP had polled an average of about 50% of the votes in 11 out of the 13 Assembly segments in the Lok Sabha election; this has fallen to below 35% in the bypolls. With the exception of Uttarakhand’s Manglaur, which it lost narrowly to the Congress, the BJP’s vote share has declined in all the bypoll seats compared to the Lok Sabha polls.
In the two Assembly seats where the BJP won the bypolls — Hamirpur in Himachal Pradesh and Amarwara, a Scheduled Tribe-reserved seat, in Madhya Pradesh — its vote shares declined by 12.5 and 3.1 percentage points, respectively, compared to the Lok Sabha polls.
Even if the average decline of over 20 points in vote share in the four bypoll seats in West Bengal within weeks of the Lok Sabha polls are attributed to the Trinamool’s excesses, what can explain an average 20 percentage point decline in the BJP’s vote share in the three bypoll seats in Himachal Pradesh or Jalandhar West (Scheduled Caste) seat in Punjab?
On the other hand, the Congress increased its vote share in five out of the seven bypoll seats it contested, as did other INDIA parties such as the AAP, DMK and RJD.
The BJP’s NDA partners, too, did not fare well — the Janata Dal (United) witnessed a decline in vote share in Bihar’s Rupauli, while the Pattali Makkal Katchi’s improvement in the absence of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in the bypoll fray fell far short of the rise in the DMK’s vote share in Tamil Nadu’s Vikravandi.
While one can term the 20-point swing in favour of the Trinamool in the four bypoll seats in West Bengal as abnormal and excessive, the direction of change in the popular mood after the Lok Sabha results is unmistakable. Overall, it is the Opposition INDIA bloc parties that have gained, while the BJP and NDA have lost support, compared to the Lok Sabha elections.
Table 2 | The table shows INDIA parties’s vote share in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the Assembly elections.
Reasons for decline
What may have caused such a significant decline in BJP’s electoral support in less than two months? Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs to introspect whether his government’s hubristic response to the 2024 Lok Sabha verdict, which resulted in a net loss of 63 seats for the BJP, is leading to the alienation of a significant section of the electorate.
There are other reasons too. Political arrogance reflected in the continued persecution and vilification of the parliamentary opposition and wanton violation of human rights; pompous exaggerations of vacuous economic achievements and a deceptive denial of growing economic hardship and disparities; and manipulative social re-engineering which undermines social justice and solidarity have become the hallmarks of the Modi regime. The electorate seems to be losing its patience.
Prasenjit Bose is an economist and political activist
Source: Election Commission of India
Also read: INDIA bloc wins 10 of 13 seats in Assembly bypolls; BJP gets 2
