E-Paper
Number Theory: What’s at stake in the sixth phase of voting?
.
Published on: May 30, 2024, 19:10:34 IST
Share via
Copy link
Fifty-eight parliamentary constituencies (PCs) across eight states and UTs will vote in the penultimate phase of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections today. This will conclude polling in 486 of India’s 543 PCs. The 486 number includes Surat, where no voting took place, but an MP was elected unopposed. Voting will conclude today in the state of Haryana and UTs of Delhi and Jammu & Kashmir, taking the total number of such states and UTs to 28. Among the eight states where polling will conclude only in the last phase, six will finish polling in at least 70% of their PCs after today. Here are four charts that put today’s polls in context.
Most challenging PCs for the Congress in 2014 and 2019
Most challenging PCs for the Congress in 2014 and 2019Of the 58 PCs voting today, past results are available for the 57 PCs outside Jammu & Kashmir. Past results for Jammu & Kashmir PCs voting in the 2024 elections are not available because PC boundaries have been redrawn in the region after 2019 in a delimitation exercise. Of the 57 comparable PCs, the Congress won just Rohtak in Haryana in 2014 and none in 2019. Its allies in these elections did not add anything to this tally. This makes the sixth phase the most challenging for the Congress. To be sure, the BJP and its allies did not win everything the Congress lost in the 2019 elections. Of the parts of the seven states voting today, the BJP and its allies swept four in 2019: Haryana, Delhi, Bihar, and Jharkhand, where 29 PCs vote today. In the remaining 28 PCs across Odisha, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh, BJP and allies won 16. The remaining 12 PCs in these states were won by the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the Samajwadi Party (SP), and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).- Alliance-level anti-incumbency was low between 2014 and 2019, but high between 2009 and 2014While the BJP’s performance was good in these PCs in 2014 and 2019, that was not the case in 2009. The BJP won just seven of the 57 comparable PCs in 2009 and its allies won another two. Therefore, these PCs show low anti-incumbency between 2014 and 2019, but high anti-incumbency between 2009 and 2014 if parties are grouped as BJP and allies, Congress and allies, and others. For example, only 13 of the 57 PCs consistently voted for the same group in all past three Lok Sabha elections. However, 30 PCs voted for the same group in 2014 and 2019, which was different from the group they voted for in 2009. Another 14 PCs either changed their group in 2019 (eight PCs) or voted for a different group in each successive Lok Sabha election from 2009 to 2019 (six PCs).
- This phase has a higher-than-average share of rural PCs70.5% of the population in the PCs voting today is rural, according to data from the 2011 census aggregated to PC-level by How India Lives, compared to the national average of 68.8%. The median (the middle value in a series) share of rural population in these PCs was 83.5%, compared to 76.9% nationally. This makes the sixth phase the third most rural of the seven phases of 2024 by overall share and the second most rural phase by the median share of rural population. To be sure, some PCs voting today – for example the PCs in Delhi or in urban centres such as Gurugram and Faridabad in Haryana; Dhanbad, Ranchi, and Jamshedpur in Jharkhand; and Bhubaneshwar in Odisha – are indeed very urban. However, such urban PCs are a relatively small fraction of the PCs voting today, as the median rural share suggests.
- The only phase where turnout declined between 2014 and 2019If India’s PCs are divided by the phases of the 2024 election, the PCs voting today are the only group where the overall turnout declined between 2014 and 2019. To be sure, the decline was only of 0.5 percentage points, and the 64.9% turnout in 2019 was still a big improvement compared to the 56.3% turnout in 2009.
