what were the changes in indian politics after 2014
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In the federal election of 2014, the BJP claimed a landslide victory. The party won 282 of the 543 seats in the lower house of parliament by itself and 336 seats together with its allies of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), handing an unprecedented defeat to the incumbent Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which was reduced to 60 seats (of which Congress only captured 44). These results illustrate the rise of the BJP (up from just 116 seats in the 2009 elections). However, some scholars believe that the BJP win with only 31.3 percent of the vote share is underwhelming (Moussavi and Macdonald 2015). The illusion of a landslide, so they argue, was the result of the first-past-the-post system, where no minimum threshold of votes is required to win elections. Furthermore, although the BJP fielded 427 candidates (out of 543 single member-districts), its strike rate would have been considerably lower without seat-sharing arrangements or pre-electoral alliances. The BJP aligned itself with 10 parties in the National Democratic Alliance with which it made seat-sharing arrangements ahead of the elections (Sridharan 2014, 21).
Even so, 31 percent is a remarkable feat, especially in view of the fiercely competitive nature of elections in the coalition era since 1996. The vote share of the first party within the ruling coalition typically ranged between 23 and 28 percent. The BJP’s success in 2014 unfolded in a context in which elections had become even more contested (in 34.8 percent of constituencies there were more than 16 contestants as against 28.6 percent in 2009 (Election Commission of India, Electoral Statistics, 2016)). The results were also dramatic because the BJP improved its vote share by 12.5 percent whereas the support for Congress dropped by 9.2 percent.
The 2014 election results are a telling demonstration of the BJP’s ability to maximize the vote-to-seat multiplier, or vote efficiency, to swing tightly-contested seats in its favour. However, to what extent was the rise of the BJP territorially (un)even, and why? The question is relevant because the BJP – being traditionally weak in the Northeast and South of India – has long been seen as a Hindi Belt (north and central India except Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir) and western-India-centered party. To answer this question we organize India’s states under five categories: Hindi Belt, East, North, North-East, South, and West (see online Annex, Table A1). We compare the results of the 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Figure 1 reveals both the absolute and relative performance of the BJP in different states. In relative terms we compare low (0–10 percent vote share), middle-level (11–30 percent vote share) and high-level support states (31–50 percent vote share). Anything beyond the 50 percent mark would signify exceptionally high support levels. The entire Hindi Belt and the West gave high and middle-level support to the BJP in 2009, while most of the South and the North-East expressed low levels of support. Karnataka (South) and Arunachal (North-East) were exceptions as high-level support states and Assam (North East) was among the middle-level support states.
Figure 1. BJP vote shares in the 2009 and 2014 federal elections for 29 states.