Three is a crowd, feel voters; firm alliances the way to go

With the fights turning increasingly bipolar, the 2014 summer elections may witness a common thread among states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan — decisive mandate for a particular formation.

Updated on: Mar 19, 2014, 01:00:22 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With the fights turning increasingly bipolar, the 2014 summer elections may witness a common thread among states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan — decisive mandate for a particular formation.

Assembly voting patterns in about 20 states since the 2009 general elections show that fragmented outcome, a hallmark of the 1990s and early 2000, has become a thing of the past and the 2014 polls would be a bipolar contest between the Congress-led UPA and the BJP-led NDA.

“Pre-poll alliances have turned the exercise into a bipolar affair. Having realised that vote division can harm them, parties are formalising alliances for decisive results,” says Sanjay Kumar of the Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). Cases in point: The winning parties in UP and Bihar, which together send 120 MPs to the Lok Sabha, got a thumping majority in the last assembly elections.

The clear preference in 2012 in UP was Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, which got 30% of the polled votes.

The SP got 224 seats, the highest for any party since 1989, as compared to arch-rival BSP’s 80.

Bihar was even more emphatic. The JD(U)-BJP alliance got more than 40% votes in the 2010 assembly elections and the rivals — the RJD and Congress — were decimated.
The JD(U)-BJP alliance won 206 seats in the 243-member House, with the RJD-Congress alliance managing only 26 seats.

Voters also busted the CPM’s West Bengal bastion in 2011 by voting in Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress.

The TMC bagged 184 seats — as compared to 32 in 2006 — and got 39% vote share. The CPM shrunk to 40 seats from the previous 173.

In the 2011 Tamil Nadu polls, the AIADMK bagged 150 seats and received 39% votes. Its arch-rival DMK fared poorly with 23 seats, its worst record since 1971.

The Congress won a record number of seats in the 2009 elections in Andhra Pradesh and Haryana.

Last year, the BJP retained Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh with a clear mandate and returned to power with two-thirds majority in Rajasthan.

A Liberty Institute study has found that voting percentages in most states have not changed dramatically, with an average of 4-5% floating vote which could impact the final outcome.

“If a party is able to get majority of this neutral vote bank, the chances of that party coming to power are higher,” the study said.

Another trend emerging from the comparison of assembly polls with the 2009 general elections is that voters focus on national agenda in the Lok Sabha polls and local issues in assembly elections.

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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