The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has retained Haryana for the third consecutive time while the National Conference and Congress alliance has managed to win a clear majority in the first assembly elections in the Union territory of Jammu & Kashmir. The results are contrary to what almost all exit polls predicted: that the Congress would comfortably win Haryana while Jammu & Kashmir would not give a clear majority to any alliance. What explains these results? Here are three charts that
- Complacency might have snatched Haryana from the CongressThe Congress won five out of the 10 Lok Sabha constituencies in Haryana in the 2024 general elections held in May. This was a big improvement for the Congress, which won just one Lok Sabha constituency in 2014 and none in the 2019 general elections. With the momentum of 2024 Lok Sabha elections behind it, 2024 assembly contest was the Congress’s to lose. And this is exactly what happened. HT has compared the assembly constituency (AC)-wise vote share of the Congress and its alliance partner Aam Admi Party (AAP) from 2024 Lok Sabha elections to the AC-wise vote share of Congress and its allies in the 2024 assembly elections. Data shows that the Congress has seen a fall in its vote share in 79 out of the 90 ACs between May (Lok Sabha elections) and October in 2024. Even in terms of headline vote share, the Congress’s performance in the 2024 assembly elections is 4.6 percentage points lower than its contested vote share in 2024 Lok Sabha. If the Congress wants to understand why it failed to win Haryana it must engage with what happened in the last four months.
- The National Conference has made a huge comeback in KashmirIn terms of the larger polarisation of Jammu voting for the BJP and the Kashmir region voting for non-BJP parties, nothing has changed in the Jammu & Kashmir elections compared to the 2014 contest. What is remarkable about the results this time, though, is the big revival of the National Conference in the Kashmir region. With 42 MLAs in an assembly of 90 members, 35 out of which have come from the Kashmir region, this is the National Conference’s best performance in Jammu & Kashmir since the 1996 elections. It’s a big change in the electoral politics of Kashmir region, which had not given a majority of ACs to the National Conference since 1996, as was pointed out in these pages earlier. The corollary of the National Conference’s resurgence in the Kashmir region is the almost complete decimation of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) which has managed to win just 3 ACs, its worst ever performance since its first elections in 2002. That the PDP allied with the BJP to form a government in Jammu & Kashmir after the 2014 elections is a fact which cannot be ignored if one wants to understand the PDP’s decimation.
- Different polarisation stories in two statesDescriptive statistics aside, is there a larger reason which can help us understand the election results? The Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir results are best described by two kinds of social polarisation: Muslim vs Hindu in Jammu & Kashmir, and Jat vs non-Jat in Haryana. The best way to look at this data is to compare the BJP’s performance in all districts of Jammu & Kashmir by the share of Hindu population. Its strike rate shows an almost perfect positive correlation (R-square value being 0.93) with the share of Hindu population in each district. The reason the BJP has fallen short of the majority mark in Jammu & Kashmir is that 73% of ACs are in districts which have at least 50% Muslim population. In Haryana, the best way to understand the results is to look at the strike rate of the BJP and Congress by two broad groups of candidates: Jats and non-Jats. As was pointed out in these pages, the Congress alliance had fielded 27 Jat candidates while the BJP had put up just 16 of them. The strike rate of Jat candidates put up by the Congress is 51.9% which is higher than what this number is for the BJP’s jat candidates. However, the Congress is way behind the BJP in terms of strike rate of non-Jat candidates, the numbers being 37.5% and 59% respectively. The BJP’s continued effort to consolidate the non-Jat other backward class (OBC) vote has clearly worked.
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.
Nishant Ranjan has been working as a data journalist with Hindustan Times since 2023. In this short period, he has established a niche for creating original datasets and utilising them to produce journalistic work that pushes the boundaries of journalism. The list of datasets and stories done by him include the following: a dataset of all 717 chief ministers India has had since 1952, a dataset of all 3,350 members of India’s council of ministers, a dataset of all 190 deputy chief ministers in India and a dataset of all 279 Supreme Court judges in India (1950-2025). He has also profiled each elected Muslim MLA/MP since 1952. He is a mining engineer by training who decided to pursue a Master's in Development Studies from TISS after working in a coal mine for 10 months. He also worked as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, researching local governance in India. He also has a keen interest in analyzing electoral politics and political executives in India.
Abhishek Jha is Assistant Editor-Data at Hindustan Times. He uses statistical programming to generate newsworthy insights from large datasets. He is part of the team that produces Number Theory, a daily data story feature of the paper’s print edition. Since March 2024, he has been writing Weather Bee, a weekly column for the Hindustan Times website. He is a chemical engineer by training, who specialises in stories related to weather, climate, and the environment. Jha has been at HT since 2018, where he offers data-driven perspective and analysis on politics, environment, weather, climate, economy and society. His work includes data coverage of elections in India and abroad, including the 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections; the disasters and extreme weather resulting from changing climate, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves, and dwindling snow cap in the Himalayas; the factors that drive poor air quality in northern India; the changing patterns of land use; the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on labour market conditions; the changing pattern of consumer spending seen in the new consumer spending surveys; and social norms seen in the surveys such as the National Family Health Survey.