A slender two percent vote share could mean a huge difference in Indian elections. No one brought home the point better than the Congress in this general elections. Just 1.99% gains in national votes translated into 61 more seats — from 145 to 206.
For sure, there are several other reasons, which helped the Congress make such a huge stride — multi-cornered fight and spoilers, concentrated vote surge in select constituencies, and effective pre-poll alliances. But, fundamentally it is the first-past-the-post system that helped the Congress to convert such a slender gain into a whopping victory.
If the Congress fortunes changed so drastically with just a 1.99% increase in votes, for the BJP the story is very different. Despite dropping a whopping 3.33% of votes, the BJP lost just 22 seats.
There are two parties, the BJP and the RJD, which should be really worried by now, reading together the trends of national elections from 1999. The BJP is the only national party which has been consistently losing votes in percentage terms since 1999. In 1999, the BJP got 23.75%, while it dropped to 22.16 in 2004 and now to 18.83.
For Lalu’s RJD, it is actually a more frightening scenario, what even statistics cannot simply hide. Since 1999, Lalu’s RJD has been on a quick race to the bottom. In 1999, the RJD got 2.79% votes and 7 seats. In 2004, when Lalu was in alliance with the Congress and Paswan for the Lok Sabha polls, his vote percent dropped to 2.41 but the number of Lok Sabha seats went up to 24. One reasons for the drop could be that the RJD contested 10 seats less than 1999 and secondly, Jharkhand had been carved out of Bihar.
But that alone doesn’t explain the slide. In 2009, when Lalu and Paswan fought together, the RJD got only 1.27% of the national votes. The drop of 1.14% votes resulted in a loss of 20 seats for Lalu.
The CPM is another big loser, having shed 0.32% of vote share, compared to 2004. For the Left Front, it translated into a whopping loss of 62.8% of the seats. It has dropped from 43 seats in 2004 to 16.
For all that talk of Mayawati’s lacklustre performance, the BSP is one of the biggest vote gainers in the 2009 elections. Most of it was dispersed all over India, resulting in no noticeable gain for the BSP in number of seats. After Congress, the BSP is the second biggest gainer in vote terms among national parties — an increase of 0.85%. However, the BSP only gained two seats which meant just a 10.5% increase in number of Lok Sabha seats over 2004.
Though the NCP gained 0.24% votes compared to the 2004 elections, its total Lok Sabha seats have remained unchanged at 9. One of the reasons could be that NCP’s gain came in states like Orissa, where it was in alliance with the BJD.
