Top Stories

Will the BJP led by Narendra Modi retake the majority?

In this year's Indian election, the first of seven voting phases got underway on April 19. Almost a billion people will have participated in the largest democratic election in history by the time the results are out on June 4. The last time was in 2019, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and its allies won 353 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the national parliament's lower chamber. They have set an even greater goal for themselves this time: 400 seats. You may discover historical results, a guide to India's election, and the most recent results as soon as they are available on this website. See whether Mr. Modi and his party can win even more on June 4th, or if Rahul Gandhi's Congress party, leading the opposition, can curtail the ambitions of the BJP.


See our Trump/Biden poll tracker, our British election tracker, and more at our election tracker site if you're interested in elections held overseas.


The Indian election is conducted in seven stages. The elections are dispersed around the nation on a map that seems splotchy due to rigorous calibration by the Election Commission of India. They are spaced out such that a week or so separates each round. Furthermore, until the results are made public on June 4th, nobody will know who won any particular seat. Why does this prolong the voting process? It takes time to travel throughout the nation; some of India's more than a million voting places are still rather far away. With the support of a sizable police and paramilitary force, a nomadic group of administrators works to guarantee a free and fair election. During more chaotic periods, the Election Commission's main priority was preventing vote boxes from being overfilled, stolen, or used as kidnapping targets. Currently, the main emphasis is on planning an impartial and well reported election.


There is little question as to the election's outcome: a return to power for Mr. Modi's BJP is quite likely. The party has emerged as a major force in national politics throughout the last 40 years, since it first entered elections. The decline of the Congress is as remarkable as the ascent of the BJP. The only other time a party has gone beyond the 400-seat barrier in the Lok Sabha was the Congress, which was driven by a surge of compassion after the prime minister's killing in October of that year. It received over half of the vote thanks to that. It could have trouble winning more than a sixth this year. It has joined forces with over thirty other parties in the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) to mount a more formidable defense.


The idea of overthrowing the BJP could appear intimidating to the opposition. The Hindi-speaking heartlands of India's north and west are the governing party's strongholds, where its Hindu-nationalist populism has found favor (see map below). In the affluent south, where the BJP has faced challenges from more formidable rivals in the area, the strategy has found significantly less traction. The opposition has more optimism at the state level as well. Just around one-third of India's more than 4,000 state assembly seats are held by the BJP. In Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, which have also had elections in the last month, it has lost to smaller, regional parties. 


Sources: Election Commission of India; Trivedi Centre for Political Data

No comments: