Karnataka polls: Will Cong push past halfway mark on its own?

Data from the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) website shows that the Congress has a vote share of around 44.5%, significantly higher than 38% during the previous elections in 2018, when it won 80 seats.

Updated on: May 13, 2023, 10:22:50 IST

By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With initial trends showing a clear edge for the Congress in Karnataka, the only question remains is whether it gets past the 113-seat majority mark in the 224-seat state assembly on its own.

Celebrations at the Congress headquarters in Delhi on Saturday. (PTI)

Data from the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) website shows that the Congress has a vote share of around 44.5%, significantly higher than 38% during the previous elections in 2018, when it won 80 seats.

To be sure, the BJP’s vote share has, at the time of publishing, not dipped from the 2018 level of about 36%. It won 104 in those polls, but was pipped to the state assembly after the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) stitched together a post-poll alliance.

The Congress edged the BJP in vote shares, even if not in seat share, in 2018, despite being outplayed by the JD(S) in the Old Mysuru region.

The key victim so far, then, appears to be the JD(S), with the contest sharpening into a bipolar one. The vote share of the party, led by former prime minister HD Deve Gowda, has dropped to just about 10%, nearly half of its 18% share in 2018.

Trends show the party holding on to its traditional seats in the Old Mysuru region, but failing to find traction anywhere else in the state.

To be sure, only about 10% of the roughly 38 million votes polled in the state have been counted so far. So, the numbers are sure to change over the next few hours.

While the Congress has done reasonably well in almost all regions of the state, it has performed much better in the northern parts, which is home to the party’s national president Mallikarjun Kharge.

The party seems to be ahead even in the Lingayat dominated Central and Mumbai-Karnataka regions, an indication that it was able to break the saffron party’s stronghold over the Lingayat vote bank.

Of all the regions, trends show that the BJP is ahead in Coastal Karnataka, which sends only 21 MLAs to the state assembly. However, the Congress’ performance still appears to be slightly better than most exit polls predicted.

The India Today-MyAxis exit poll predicted 122-140 seats for the Congress and 62-80 for the BJP.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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