lok-sabha-elections

Updated: May 06, 2020 20:54 IST

Thirteen out of 25 seats in Rajasthan will go to polls today. Since 2004, the party winning the preceding state election in Rajasthan has won a majority of the 25 Lok Sabha seats. Does this mean that the Congress will get ahead of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state in 2019? To be sure, the 2018 assembly elections were really close in Rajasthan. The vote share difference between the two largest parties in the state was the lowest in 2018 in all assembly elections held since 1998.

In the 13 seats, which are scheduled for polling today, the Congress was actually behind the BJP in terms of vote share by 2.5 percentage points in the 2018 assembly elections.

The BJP would have won 10 of these seats and the Congress three if these results are extrapolated at the parliamentary constituency (PC) level. In the 12 seats which will go to polls in the fifth phase, the Congress is ahead of the BJP by 3.8 percentage points and stands to win nine seats, according to extrapolated assembly results.

Two significant changes have, however, taken place in the state’s politics since the assembly elections last year. One, of the 13 independent MLAs in the Rajasthan assembly, 12 have joined the Congress. The MLAs are Raj Kumar Gaur, Mahadeo Singh, Alok Beniwal, Babulal Nagar, Laxman Meena, Baljeet Yadav, Kanti Prasad, Ramkesh, Suresh Tak, Khushveer Singh, Sanyam Lodha, and Ramila Khadiya. HT had analysed the impact of this move in an earlier story.

While the Congress did win the polls, its performance, according to many commentators, was lacklustre since it only got a 0.5 percentage point lead over the BJP in terms of vote share and stopped one short of the halfway mark in the assembly.

More recently, Hanuman Beniwal, a former BJP MLA who floated his own party (Rashtriya Loktantrik Party) before the 2018 assembly elections, has formed an alliance with his former party. In the fourth phase, six of the 12 assembly segments held by MLAs who have joined Congress and 21 of the 58 assembly segments Beniwal’s party contested will go to polls.

While the addition of these turncoat votes would have meant an increase in vote share for both the parties, the extrapolated tally changes by only one seat in favour of the Congress in the seats that poll in the fourth phase. Does this mean that the BJP will win most of these 13 seats in 2019 too?

The 13 seats going to polls today have followed the assembly elections trend in the 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

The Congress had a 4.4 percentage point lead over the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in terms of vote share in the 2008 assembly elections in this region.

Extrapolating the result to parliamentary constituencies (PC) shows the seat tally would have been 9-4 in favour of the Congress. In the 2009 Lok Sabha election that followed, the Congress’s vote share lead over the BJP increased to 11.1 percentage points. The party won 11 of the 13 seats in 2009.

A similar trend was also seen in the 2013 assembly election and the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

The BJP won all the 13 seats in 2014 and its extrapolated seat tally for 2013 assembly election is also 13. Comparisons of assembly and Lok Sabha results before 2009 cannot be done because constituency boundaries have changed in the 2008 delimitation.

However, there is also evidence to the contrary. The remaining 12 seats in the state, which go to polls in the fifth phase, did not follow the trend of the preceding assembly election in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

The extrapolated tally here was 7-4 in favour of the BJP in the 2008 assembly election. This changed to 9-2 in favour of the Congress in the 2009 Lok Sabha election, following the overall trend in the state in the preceding assembly election.