General Elections 2024: A Watershed Event?

2024 elections are right around the corner. While every election has cultural, historical and economic implications, this election can be very well counted as watershed as its results may very well prove to be a catalyst for tectonic ideological shift.

Some of the cornerstones of 2024 elections which manifests its significance are:

1. For the first time in the last fifty years a Prime Minister is seeking re-election after the completion of two full terms with a majority of his party.

2. The Grand Old Party of Indian politics, The Indian National Congress, is contesting the lowest number of seats ever

3. Total number of voters, 97 crores, is higher than the combined population of European Union, USA and Japan.

Analysis

For the purpose of analysis, we segregate states in 5 categories, basis chief players in the arena.

• Category 1 - BJP V/S INC

• Category 2 - BJP V/S Regional Party

• Category 3 - Regional V/S Regional

• Category 4 - Congress V/S Regional Party

• Category 5 - None of the other 4

Note: Numbers as per general elections, 2019.

• For simplification we have taken only those states which have more than 4 seats.

• BJP won almost all seats (285 out of total 303) of its tally from these states.

• For further simplification we can easily discount Category 3, 4 and 5 states as total BJP count among these states is only 5. So, BJP downside in these states is very low.

For Category 1 and 2, below are the datapoints about BJP performance in 2019

So, for BJP, its chief rival remains the grand old party, Congress. It’s very safe to deduce that except for U.P., BJP’s performance will be strongly linked to how much Congress can/cannot improve its performance.

Some of the highlights of the intensity with which Congress is waging the fight are as below –

• Number of seats fought by Congress as compared to last elections has come down by 22%

• Congress’ strike rate (seats won/total seats fought) in last election was 12%

• In two states of Category 1, BJP has already won 1 seat each, unopposed – Surat and Indore So, we did a simulation, where we assumed –

• Its zero-sum game between BJP and Congress, i.e. Congress gain of seats is equivalent to BJP’s loss of seats and vice versa.

• In other states where BJP’s downside is very limited (23 seats in total), there is status quo and BJP neither loss not gains any seats.

Simulation:

Let’s analyse probability of these scenarios’ basis historical trends. There is only one instance when Congress could improve its tally more than 2 times, that was in 1980.

Historically there is only one instance where Congress had been able to increase its tally by more than 50%. Now counter view to that maybe Congress may benefit from low base effect. But being able to win evert third of the seats that it is contesting, certainly looks highly unlikely.

Even if we assume this scenario of Congress tripling its strike rate (with all the above assumptions); BJP will still have tally almost double of Congress.

Summary

While basis above analysis any drastic change in power equations looks highly unlikely, but at the end of the day its just a guesstimate at its best. In highly diversified and complex country like India, it’s certainly nobody’s capability to gauge the mood of the electorate, but taking in view the huge divergence in numbers, any big surprises in results looks highly unlikely.

But who knows 😊

The views are expressed by Ankit Garg, Founder of Wealthy Nivesh

Disclaimer: The above is a contributor post, the views expressed are those of the contributor and do not represent the stand and views of Outlook Editorial.