How saffron surge altered the swing on UP poll pitch

(This story originally appeared in on Jan 09, 2022)

A ‘chemistry’ that is capable of producing a strong polarisation either around anti-incumbency or Hindutva, with a dash of caste ‘arithmetic’, could be decisive in the upcoming assembly polls in UP, reveals an analysis of voting patterns in the past few elections in the state.

Between 1993, the first election after the formation of SP, and 2002, any party getting over 30% of the total votes polled could be sure of finishing first in a typically four-cornered contest, in undivided UP prior to 2001 and in what remained of the state thereafter. Given the quadrangular nature of the contest, even if not all corners were equal, a shift of 3-5% votes, whether due to caste-based permutations and combinations or anti-incumbency for the ruling party, would mean big gains in terms of seats and tilt the balance.

In 2007, for instance, BSP won just over 30% of the votes and SP over 25%. That gap of five percentage points was enough to ensure BSP won 206 seats and SP just 97. Five years later, SP’s vote share increased by just under four percentage points, while BSP lost four-and-a-half percentage points. Now, it was SP that had 224 seats and BSP just 80.

However, the Modi wave in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls changed UP’s poll arithmetic.

Since then, three elections – two Lok Sabha and one as BJP’s vote share catapulting to almost double that of the main opposition parties. That means in the upcoming polls, any party that wishes to upset the ruling BJP will have to bank on the

party’s vote share shrinking by something in the region of 10 percentage points and its own rising by a similar amount.

BJP won 47 seats in 2012 assembly polls with 15% votes. Five years later, it polled nearly 40% votes to bag a whopping 312 seats. Its allies won 19 seats and acted as a force multiplier. Hence, a loss of 10% votes could bring BJP’s tally below 200 in the coming elections, provided this loss is a gain to a party that holds on to its earlier base and also manages to chisel out votes from other opposition parties. margins in the 403 seats over the years also shows how the late. An assembly seat on an average has about 3-4 lakh voters. A winning margin of 10-20,000 votes (about 3-5%) is considered small. The runner-up can hope to catch up or beat the winner in the next election with a slight swing in votes.

In the 2017 assembly polls, only 158 seats witnessed winning margins of under 20,000 votes. The difference in 176 seats was 20,000-50,000 votes, or roughly 7-16% of total votes.