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Lok Sabha elections 2019: Will Congress retain assembly poll gains in BJP’s Gujarat citadel?
In the 2014 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won all 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat with a vote share of 59%. In terms of vote share, the Congress was 26 percentage points behind the BJP.
In the 2014 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won all 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat with a vote share of 59%. In terms of vote share, the Congress was 26 percentage points behind the BJP. Although Gujarat has always been a stronghold of the BJP -- it has had a majority of seats in both assembly and Lok Sabha since 1991 -- the Congress had never performed this bad in the state.
It won 12 and 11 seats in the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha elections, respectively. The Congress’s graph fell sharply between 2009 and 2014, both in terms of vote share and seat share. The 2017 assembly elections saw a revival of the party when it managed to give a scare to the BJP, which suffered a significant fall in its 2012 seat share despite getting 49% of the popular vote.
BJP’s political dominance vis-à-vis the Congress in Gujarat is not uniform. This means that there are regions where the former is almost invincible, but it is vulnerable in select pockets in the state.
Eleven out of the 26 parliamentary constituencies (PCs) in Gujarat have stayed with the BJP in all elections held in the state since 2009. This includes the 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha and 2012 and 2017 assembly elections. For assembly elections, results have been extrapolated at the PC level. Comparisons before 2009 cannot be made because 2008 delimitation changed earlier constituency boundaries.
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Barring 2014, when the BJP won all 26 PCs, there is just one PC, Banaskantha, which has stayed with the Congress since 2009. However, this doesn’t mean the Congress has a big edge against the BJP in this constituency. While Congress’s victories in Banaskantha have been with slander victory margins, the party lost the seat with a margin of 23% in the 2014 elections.
There are five other PCs – Patan, Sabarkantha, Surendranagar, Anand and Dahod – which have flipped between the BJP and the Congress during this period.
The Congress’s revival in the state in 2017 in terms of vote share was such that, if extrapolated at the PC level, it had a lead over the BJP in seven PCs, including in the Congress’s stronghold Banaskantha. Three seats where the Congress scored a lead in 2017 are those which have swung between the two parties while three were traditional BJP strongholds. The BJP had a lead in these three PCs -- Mahesana, Junagadh and Amreli -- in all elections since 2009 but the Congress managed to overtake it in the 2017 polls.
Congress’s comeback in the 2017 assembly elections was primarily due to the party’s better performance in rural areas. It won a majority of assembly constituencies in the north Gujarat and Saurashtra sub-regions, which have 91% and 74% predominantly rural assembly constituencies.
It remains to be seen how these sub-regional dynamics unfold in Gujarat in the 2019 elections and how (and whether) this could change the Congress party’s fortunes in the state.
