The Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in the 2022 Gujarat elections is the biggest ever in the history of the state. Not only has the BJP added 29 seats to its previous all-time best of 127 seats in 2002, it has also beaten the record of 149 seats that the Congress achieved under the leadership of Madhav Singh Solanki in the 1985 elections. To be sure, the Congress victory of 1972, when it had won 83% (140) of ACs, was slightly bigger in terms of seat share than the 1985 one, but there were only 168 ACs in the state then. The BJP has done better than that too in terms of seat share.
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The question worth asking is whether the BJP has made inroads into new areas? An HT analysis of election statistics since 2012 shows that this is indeed the case as far as assembly elections are concerned. To be sure, the BJP’s latest election victory still looks smaller if one were to compare it to the party’s 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha performance in the state. This analysis is not possible for the pre-2012 period, as constituency boundaries were redrawn in the 2008 delimitation.
Out of the 182 ACs in the state, the BJP has won 81 in every assembly election since 2012. To be sure, this number could possibly be bigger if a comparison of elections was possible for elections before 2012 and excluding 2017. This is because BJP’s 2017 tally was the lowest since 1995. On the other hand, there are 49 ACs which the BJP lost in both the 2012 and 2017 assembly elections. The party has won 36 ACs out of these 49 in the 2022 elections, which takes the number of ACs which the BJP has not been able to win since 2012 down to 13.
To be sure, the BJP’s performance in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections is slightly better than its assembly elections as it led in 165 and 173 ACs in these elections. There are only four ACs that the BJP has not been able to win even once since 2012 if the AC-level results of Lok Sabha elections are also included.
{{/usCountry}}To be sure, the BJP’s performance in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections is slightly better than its assembly elections as it led in 165 and 173 ACs in these elections. There are only four ACs that the BJP has not been able to win even once since 2012 if the AC-level results of Lok Sabha elections are also included.
{{/usCountry}}There is also a seat category-wise pattern to the seats that the BJP had not been able to win before. While it had never been able to win (since 2012) only 33 of the 142 (23%) ‘General’ category seats and two of 13 seats (15.4%) reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs), it had failed to win more than half of ST seats (14 of 27) in the last two assembly elections. These patterns have reversed this time. It has not been able to win the two SC-reserved ACs in 2022 either, but reduced its losses in unreserved ACs to 12 (6%) and in ST-reserved ACs to three (11%).