Explaining Cong’s bittersweet result in K’taka LS polls

The Congress added eight seats to its 2019 tally but the results are a let down from the party’s massive assembly election victory in May 2023

Updated on: Jun 5, 2024, 07:56:07 IST

By Roshan Kishore, Nishant Ranjan, New Delhi

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The Congress has won nine out of the 28 parliamentary constituencies (PCs) in the state of Karnataka. With this, the Congress has repeated its 2014 tally in the state. Both 2014 and 2024 were Congress’s best ever performance in the state since 1999, when it had won 18 PCs in Karnataka.

Explaining Cong’s bittersweet result in K’taka LS polls

While the Congress added eight seats to its 2019 tally, the results are a let down from the party’s massive assembly election victory in May 2023.

What explains the Congress’s bittersweet performance in the state?

A sub-regional dynamic and an alliance between the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Janata Dal (Secular) is the answer. Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) classifies Karnataka in six sub-regions -.Bengaluru Karnataka, Bombay Karnataka, Central Karnataka, Coastal Karnataka, Hyderabad Karnatka, and Sothern Karnataka. Bombay and Southern Karnataka are the two biggest sub-regions with seven parliamentary constituencies (PCs) each. Central and Hyderabad Karnataka have five and four PCs each. Bengaluru Karnataka has three PCs while Coastal Karnataka has two PCs.

Congress’s best performance has come in the Hyderabad Karnataka sub-region where the party has won all four PCs. The rest of the state has given the Congress just five more PCs. Hyderabad Karnataka is the region where Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge comes from. The Congress had done very well in this area even in the 2023 assembly elections.

The region wise performance of the Congress shows a huge departure from its performance in the state assembly elections held just a year ago.

In the 2023 state assembly elections, the Congress had got at least 50% of the seat share in each region of the state, except coastal Karnataka.

Even in the regions of Bombay and Central Karnataka, it had a seat share of 66% and 75% respectively. Both these regions are considered as a stronghold of ex chief minister BS Yediyurappa who comes from the Lingayat community which is a dominant caste in these regions.

The BJP removed Yediyurappa as the state’s chief minister before the 2023 assembly elections, but made his son BY Vijayendra the state president of the party after the 2023 results. The Lok Sabha election results show that this has done a lot of damage control for the BJP.

Another factor which might have kept the Congress’s tally down in the state is the BJP’s alliance with the Janata Dal (Secular), which might have led to a complete consolidation of the Vokkaliga vote behind the NDA. Region-wise vote share numbers show this clearly as the Congress’s vote share gap with the NDA is the largest in Southern Karnataka.

If the BJP and the JD(S) stay together and ensure a consolidation of Lingayat and Vokkaliga votes, then it could entail a new churn in the state’s politics.

A look at how parties fared in Karnataka.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roshan Kishore
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.Read More
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nishant Ranjan
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.Read More

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