Has the Congress broken new ground in Karnataka?

The Congress was able to win both the BJP strongholds in Old Mysuru, two of the four in Mumbai Karnataka, and one each in the rest.

With victories in 135 assembly constituencies in the 2023 Karnataka assembly elections, the Congress has achieved its best performance in the state since 1989. Its lowest seat tally was 34 in the 1994 elections. Between 1989 and 2018, the Congress’s best seat tallies that are close to its 2023 performance were 132 in 1999 and 122 in 2013, when it had an exogenous advantage because of BS Yediyurappa’s exit from the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Congress workers celebrate the party's win in Karnataka Assembly elections, outside Vidhana Soudha in Bengaluru.

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Does the 2023 performance mean the Congress has broken new ground or reclaimed some of its lost territory? Unfortunately, this question cannot be answered with comparisons to 1989 because the delimitation process in 2008 changed constituency boundaries. This makes post-2008 results incomparable with pre-2008 results. But HT has looked at results for 2008, 2013, 2018 and 2023 and here is what the analysis shows.

From 2008 to 2018, 165 of 224 seats (74%) in the state changed parties in at least one of the three elections held in the period and 59 re-elected the same party in all three elections. As many as 27 of these 59 stronghold constituencies re-elected the Congress in all three elections, 22 re-elected the BJP, and 10 re-elected the Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S).

While the numbers confirm that the Congress has broken new ground in this election, this is not the case in all parts of the state.

To be sure, these numbers could have been different had the BJP not had to deal with Yediyurappa’s exit (he also formed a party that played spoiler) in the 2013 elections. However, considering the short-lived splinter group (the Karnataka Janata Paksha, or KJP) as a BJP proxy may not be correct, although even doing so only increases the number of BJP strongholds by just one, although the KJP won six seats. This one extra seat has been won by the BJP in this election.

An analysis of the election results in 2023 shows that 14 of Congress’s 135 wins have come from the strongholds of the BJP and the JD(S) , seven from each, 22 from its own stronghold of 27 seats, and 99 from seats that changed the incumbent party in the three elections from 2008 to 2018.This means that the Congress held on to 81% of its own stronghold seats and won 32% of BJP’s 22 stronghold seats and 70% of the stronghold constituencies of JD(S).

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While the numbers confirm that the Congress has broken new ground in this election, this is not the case in all parts of the state. For example, of the 22 seats that re-elected the BJP from 2008 to 2018, nine were from Bengaluru. The Congress did not win any of them in this election. Of the remaining 13 seats, six were from the Mumbai Karnataka region; two each from the coastal, Hyderabad, and Old Mysuru region; and one from central Karnataka.

The Congress was able to win both the BJP strongholds in Old Mysuru, two of the four in Mumbai Karnataka, and one each in the rest. All the 10 JD(S) stronghold seats were in the Old Mysuru region, of which Congress won seven. This is in line the overall region-wise performance of the Congress, which shows that it did not improve its performance in Bengaluru, but did so in the other regions.