In this new show political analyst Amitabh Tiwari discusses the three key players in the election puzzle– BJP, Congress and the Regional Parties. He discusses them in detail and how they are placed for the general elections due next year. The episode talks about the history of both Congress and the BJP in detail from the independence era. The episode has brief details about the different regional parties of India and how they work in this political field.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Jai Hind! Namaste Viewers! Welcome to the second episode of Election Simplified.
00:15 In the first episode, we saw how the elections are still 7 months away. It's difficult to
00:21 predict the results as bulk of the voters in India are late deciders, almost 64-65%,
00:29 and bulk of the voters are ideologically neutral, almost 70%. Further, we saw how the top 5
00:37 states, UP, Maharashtra, Bihar, Bengal and Tamil Nadu could well decide the fate of both
00:44 the alliances, the NDA and the INDIA. We also discussed about the durability of the Modi
00:50 factor, which could play a key role in determining who wins the elections.
00:57 So now, who will win 2024?
01:03 Now there are three players in this key election puzzle. One is the BJP, second is the Congress
01:10 and third there are a pool of regional parties, a number of regional parties. We will now
01:14 talk about them in detail, about how they are placed for the general elections due next
01:20 year.
01:21 Now let's talk about the two parties, the BJP and the Congress. Of course, they are
01:26 the two biggest political parties in India. The BJP has 303 MPs in the Lok Sabha while
01:33 the Congress has 52. The BJP has 90 odd MPs in the Rajya Sabha while the Congress has
01:40 30 odd. The BJP has close to 1400 MLAs while the Congress has 700+. The BJP won more than
01:49 one seat in 25 states whereas the Congress won more than one seat in 18 states, implying
01:57 that these are the only truly national parties. In Election Simplified, in all the episodes,
02:04 we consider only BJP and Congress as the national parties. All other parties for us are regional
02:11 parties.
02:12 Apart from Congress and BJP, only two other parties, NCP and CPM won more than one seat
02:21 from two or more states. While BJP today has 10 chief ministers, Congress has 4. AAP is
02:29 the only other party in India which has more than one chief minister apart from BJP and
02:34 Congress.
02:35 So, in terms of centrality of the Indian politics, these two parties occupy the key positions
02:40 today and not only today, from a large part of now, let's say 50 years. BJP in its original
02:47 avatar, BJS and Congress before 1980 and today the BJP and the Congress. While the BJP received
02:56 23 crore votes in 2019, the Congress received almost half at only about 12 crore votes.
03:04 Now friends, let's talk about Congress. The Congress party has dominated the national
03:09 political scene since independence to almost you can say 1989. It benefited largely from
03:17 being credited with getting India independence from the British. It has won all the elections
03:23 from 1952 to 1971, losing for the first time in 1977 to a united opposition due to the
03:32 public anger against the imposition of emergency by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
03:39 In 1980, the Congress made a comeback because of the disintegration of the Janata Party but
03:45 lost again in 1989 in the aftermath of the Bofors scam. Since 1989, it has lost its pole
03:53 position in Indian politics. It won on an average more than 300 seats from 1952 to 1984
04:00 barring the 1977 election where it won almost 150 seats and has in the same period of 1952
04:08 to 1984 recorded an average vote share of 43%.
04:13 After 1989 also, the party has been in power for 15 years. First from 1991 to 1996 under
04:20 the leadership of P V Narasimha Rao and then from 2004 to 2014 under the leadership of
04:26 Manmohan Singh. However, both the times it had to form an alliance with regional parties
04:32 as it couldn't achieve the maturity mark on its own.
04:35 Now, the loss or the decline of the vote share in the Congress has been fairly gradual. First
04:41 in the coalition era, two regional parties, due to Mandal and the BJP due to Kamandal.
04:47 From 40% in 1989, its vote share fell to almost 29% in 2009 elections. The final blow to the
04:55 Congress has been handed over by the Narendra Modi led BJP in the last two elections.
05:01 In 2014, the Congress couldn't even score half a century, its lowest ever tally losing
05:08 more than 150 seats compared to 2009. In 2019, it received a second rubbing of swords, barely
05:16 managing to better its 2014 tally by 8 seats. In the last two elections in the Modi era,
05:23 Congress's vote share has fallen below 20%.
05:26 Now the big question is, has the Congress party bottomed out? Could it fall even further
05:31 in 2024 or from here it will only rise? Only time will tell. The fact that in the last
05:38 two elections, it has recorded around 20% vote share shows that a significant part of
05:45 this could be its loyal ideological voter and this could stay with the party no matter
05:52 what.
05:53 So, friends, what has happened to Congress? What's the issue with the Congress party today?
05:58 You must have read and heard a lot about it. And I am not going to repeat it. It will take
06:03 many episodes to decode that and it's pretty simple. The problem faced by the Congress
06:09 is summed up beautifully in this chart which is showing on your screen now.
06:13 Friends, the Congress got 12 crore votes in 1989 in the election when Rajiv Gandhi lost
06:20 to V P Singh. Do you know how many votes the party got in the last election in 2019? The
06:26 same 12 crore votes. So now, the interesting part is that in the last three decades, the
06:34 vote share of the Congress party has remained stagnant as shown in the graph below. Whereas,
06:40 the number of total votes polled have doubled in this period from 31 crores in 1989 to almost
06:48 62 crores in 2019. So, that's the dilemma which the party has been facing in the last
06:56 three decades. It has not been able to add a single vote to what it got in 1989. Of course,
07:03 it's visible in its vote share which has fallen from 40% in 1989 to 20% currently.
07:10 So now, after Congress, let's talk about the BJP. Now, the BJP story has two parts to it.
07:18 One is a pre-1980s story and one is a post-1980s story. In its earlier avatar, the BJP was
07:26 called as the Bharatiya Janasangh, a Hindu nationalist party which was founded in 1951
07:32 by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. The BJP, as we all know, has close ideological and organisational
07:39 links to the RSS. The Bharatiya Janasangh, by the 1967 election, had emerged as the third
07:46 largest party in India, bagging 35 seats with 9.3% vote share. In 1977, under the leadership
07:55 of Jayaprakash Narayan, the Bharatiya Janasangh along with Ram Manohar Lohia's Socialist Party,
08:02 Chaudhary Charan Singh's Bharatiya Lok Dal and Murariji Desai's Congress Organisation
08:08 joined together hands to form a party called as the Chanata Party and this party ultimately
08:14 went on to defeat Indira Gandhi in the 1977 elections. The Chanata Party won 295 seats.
08:22 Out of this, 102 were won by Bharatiya Janasangh candidates and it recorded a vote share of
08:29 14%. This is the vote share of the Bharatiya Janasangh alone.
08:33 Now, by 1980, the Chanata Party in which the BJP had merged, disintegrated and after the
08:40 BJP elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party was formed by Atal Bihari Bajpai and LK Advani
08:46 and a few other leaders.
08:48 Now, in its new avatar, which is post 1980, the BJP made its debut with just two MPs in
08:55 1984. In 1984, as we all know, the Congress recorded its highest tally of 414 seats, benefiting
09:03 from the sympathy wave created after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. In the 1989 elections, the
09:12 BJP, capitalising on the Bofors case against Rajiv Gandhi and the "appeasement for none"
09:18 slogan in the aftermath of the Shah Banu case won 85 seats. It joined hands with the Chanata
09:26 Dal and the left parties to form the government. It provided outside support to the VP Singh
09:32 led government.
09:33 In 1990, 1990 is a very crucial year in the journey of BJP. In 1990, LK Advani started
09:41 the Rat Yatra in support of the Ram Chandu Bhoopi movement. And this Yatra, friends,
09:46 re-catapulted BJP to the national scene again with BJP emerging as the single largest party
09:53 in 1996, 1998 and 1999 elections.
09:59 During this period, just after the Yatra, in 1991 or so, the BJP formed its first state
10:05 governments in three states - Rajasthan, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
10:11 Now, Atal Vihari Vajpayee became the Prime Minister in 1996. However, his government
10:16 lasted for only 13 days as he could not muster the numbers to cobble up to 272. In 1998,
10:25 he was able to form a coalition but the government lasted again for 13 months only.
10:30 In 1999, the BJP led NDA won a simple majority of 299 seats and this time the BJP government
10:39 lasted its full term. The BJP won 182 seats with 24% vote share.
10:46 However, as we all know, the party was handed a shocking defeat in 2004 to the Congress
10:52 led UPA when all exit polls proved to be wrong. All the exit polls hoped that the NDA would
11:00 secure a simple majority on the back of its India Shining campaign.
11:05 From 2004 to 2009, its downward trajectory continued as Atal Vihari Vajpayee retired
11:12 from politics and Advani could not replace Vajpayee who was a more acceptable, a moderate
11:18 leader and that was what perhaps was required in a coalition era. The party could win just
11:25 116 seats with 19% vote share in 2009 elections.
11:31 In 2014, under the charismatic leadership of Narendra Modi, the BJP won a historic mandate
11:38 recording an all-time high of 282 seats, the only party to win a simple majority since
11:44 1984. It even bettered its record winning 303 seats with 37.5% vote share.
11:55 If we see the transition or the evolution of the vote share of the Bharatiya Janasangam
12:01 and the BJP over the years, we will see that it has gone through many cycles. It started
12:06 with a 3% vote share in 1952, reaching a peak of 14% in 1977 when it joined hands with other
12:15 parties to defeat Indira Gandhi. This fell to 8% in 1984 when the re-christianed BJP
12:23 contested its first ever election. This rose to 26% in 1998 when Vajpayee led NDA won the
12:31 elections and fell again to 19% in 2009 under the leadership of Adwani. Now, it is almost
12:38 at double the rate at 38% vote share in 2019 under the leadership of Narendra Modi.
12:46 Now, let's talk about the third piece in the puzzle, the regional parties.
12:53 Regional parties, big and small, have played a key role in Indian politics since independence.
12:58 There are many regional parties spread across the length and breadth of India. While some
13:04 have preferred to align with the central government for better grants, some of them have been
13:10 born out of anti-Congressism, because Congress was the pole of the national politics from
13:15 1952 to 1989, while many others have adopted a non-aligned approach. As BJP today occupies
13:23 the pole position of Indian politics, replacing Congress, many of these regional forces have
13:30 now adopted an anti-BJP stance. For example, Mamata Banerjee's DMC, Stalin's DMK, Ajit
13:39 Singh's RLD, Nitish Kumar's Janta Dal United, Uddhav Thackeray's Shiv Sena, they were all
13:45 with NDA at one point of time and all of these parties today are now with the INDIA bloc.
13:51 The regional parties occupy the CM chair in 16 states and union territories in India,
13:56 which is more than half of the states, some in alliance with the BJP and Congress while
14:01 some are non-aligned. Seven of these chief ministers are in alliance with the BJP, which
14:07 means they are part of the NDA, six with the Congress, which means they are part of the
14:11 INDIA alliance and three states, which is essentially Odisha, Andhra and Telangana,
14:18 belong to regional parties which are non-aligned. In the national elections, regional parties
14:24 have significant presence. Now, if we consider the national elections from 1952, the first
14:31 to the last, which is 2019, the pool of regional parties combined together, which is excluding
14:38 Congress and BJP, have recorded an average vote share of 49% during this period. On the
14:45 other hand, the Congress and the BJP combined have recorded an average vote share of 51%.
14:50 So, the regional parties have received almost 50% of the vote share while Congress and BJP
14:58 combined have received the other 50%. So, they are very important. A clarification here
15:03 of course, some of these parties would have contested in alliance with the BJP, some with
15:08 the Congress and some have remained non-aligned over the years. They have also flipped partners
15:14 as we have discussed earlier. Now, the best performance of the regional parties was in
15:19 2009 when they recorded a combined vote share of 53.6%. And what was their worst performance
15:27 in 2019 when they recorded just 43.1% vote share as the contest became largely bipolar.
15:36 In terms of seats, the regional parties best performance was in 1989 when they won 261
15:44 seats while the worst performance was in 1984 when they could win just 127 seats. This was
15:51 when Congress won 414 seats in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi s assassination. Again, a
15:57 clarification here, all parties other than BJP and Congress have been considered as a
16:02 regional party in this analysis. Now, as we have discussed, the regional parties have
16:08 got 50% whereas BJP and Congress combined the other 50%. As we see in the graph on the
16:14 screen, whenever BJP gains vote share, it is at the cost of Congress and whenever Congress
16:21 has gained vote share, it is largely at the expense of the BJP, while the regional parties
16:25 have more or less remained at constant level except for a big blip of 6% in the last elections.
16:33 Now, the role of the regional parties has gained importance in the coalition era which
16:38 lasted from 1989 to 2009. The regional parties during this period won 43% of the seats whereas
16:47 the BJP and Congress combined 57% of the seats. In fact, from 1989 to 2009, the regional parties
16:56 on a combined basis have won a higher number of seats than both the BJP and the Congress
17:02 individually except for 1991 when Congress won more seats than regional parties because
17:09 of the sympathy wave created in its favour due to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi during
17:15 the campaign period.
17:16 Let us delve more into these regional parties. Most of the regional parties are confined
17:22 to their home states and get almost all their votes from there as we see in the graph below.
17:28 For example, the Trinamool Congress gets 99% of its votes from Bengal, the Biju Janata
17:34 Dal from Orissa, the Samajwadi Party from UP, JDU and RJD from Bihar, the TDP and YSRCP
17:42 from Andhra Pradesh, BRS from Telangana, NCP and Shiv Sena from Maharashtra, DMK and AIADMK
17:50 from Tamil Nadu etc. So, they are confined to the perimeter of one state. Only the Aamadni
17:56 Party, the CPM, the Communist Party Marxist and the Bajan Samaj Party have presence in
18:02 more than one state.
18:04 The regional parties could play a crucial role in 2024 elections and that's why we see
18:10 both the BJP and the Congress have started wooing them. While the BJP has revived the
18:17 NDA, the UPA is now re-branded or re-christianed as INDIA.
18:23 Most of the big regional parties have already decided whom they are backing. While the NDA
18:29 boasts of 36 parties, the INDIA has 26 parties in its fold.
18:35 The prominent parties which are in the INDIA block are the DMK, the TMC, the Uddhav Sena,
18:44 the Samajwadi Party, JDU, CPM, CPI, AAP, JMM, NCP, RJD etc. These combined have 92 seats
18:55 currently and have recorded 17% vote share in 2019.
19:01 The prominent parties aggregating to 29 seats and 4% vote share like the Shiv Sena, the
19:09 NCP Ajit Pawar, the Lok Jan Shakti Party, the Apna Dal, the AIADMK, the AJSU and some
19:17 of the North Eastern parties like NDPP, NPP, NPF and SKM are part of the NDA block.
19:27 On the other hand, we have parties like Jagan Reddy's YSRCP, Naveen Patnaik's Biju Janata
19:33 Dal, Mayawati's Bhaujan Samaj Party, Chandra Babu Nayadu's Telugu Desham Party, Prakash
19:40 Singh Badal's Akali Dal and KCR's Bharatiya Rashtriya Samiti which account for 58 seats
19:46 and have 12% vote share. They have not decided to join any other alliance till date.
19:52 Now, all these regional parties, whether part of INDIA or NDA or non-aligned, account for
19:58 almost 190 seats between them with 43% vote share.
20:03 So who will win 2024 depends a lot upon how these regional parties perform and whether
20:10 they propel or sink the chances of their NDA and INDIA blocks.
20:19 So who will win 2024 also depends upon whether it will be a Modi vs Rahul fight again.
20:29 While the BJP wishes to make it a presidential type of a contest, many parties of the INDIA
20:38 block are shying away from it as they feel that this could take the focus away from issues.
20:44 On the other hand, many in Congress argue that Rahul's popularity has received a boost
20:49 post the Bharat Jodo Yatra and he should take the lead in charge.
20:54 In Lok Sabha elections 2019, for 37% of voters, the PM face was the most important consideration.
21:02 So if the INDIA alliance does not declare a PM candidate, then they run the risk of
21:08 excluding a big chunk of voters from their target addressable market.
21:14 Despite the 9 years of rule, the heartening fact for the BJP is that Narendra Modi's popularity
21:20 is intact.
21:21 As per a CSDS survey, in May 2023, 43% people want to see Modi as the PM.
21:28 This is just a marginal drop of 1% compared to 2019.
21:33 At the same time, 27% want to see Rahul as the PM.
21:38 This is a 4% increase versus 2019 but the heartening fact for Congress is that this
21:45 number is almost double the 2014 popularity rating of Rahul Gandhi.
21:50 So Rahul Gandhi has closed the gap from 21% in 2019 to 16% now but this 16% is still very
21:58 huge.
21:59 Rahul is also now the popular choice of one third of the voters who feel that he is best
22:07 suited to take on the PM Narendra Modi, followed by Arvind Kejriwal at 11%.
22:13 Rahul's popularity has also increased post-BJY as 15% of the respondents have started liking
22:20 him after the Bharat Choro Yatra.
22:23 Now almost 25% of the respondents in CSDS survey said that neither they like nor they
22:29 dislike both Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi.
22:33 So these could be the part of the loyal voter segment of both these parties which we talked
22:38 about in the first episode, some 31%.
22:41 However, almost a quarter, 23% don't like Modi whereas 16% don't like Rahul Gandhi.
22:50 What does this mean?
22:51 This shows that Rahul is more acceptable and less polarising figure.
22:56 However, in elections, the votes are fetched by polarising figures who evoke strong emotions.
23:03 Even if today the INDIA block does not declare Rahul Gandhi as PM candidate, the BJP is going
23:10 to make it a Modi vs Rahul contest.
23:14 So who will win 2024 will also depend a lot on the performance of these two leaders Rahul
23:21 and Narendra Modi and we could again see a battle between Modi and Rahul in 2024.
23:29 Friends, now we have come to the end of this episode.
23:34 To recap, we discussed about the possibilities of the three key players in this election
23:40 puzzle - the BJP, the Congress and the regional parties.
23:44 Who will win 2024 depends a lot on the performance of these parties as well as the regional parties
23:51 which could propel or sink the chances of the BJP led NDA or the Congress led INDIA.
24:02 Also the form of the two captains Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi could also decide who
24:08 is ultimately going to win the battle of 2024.
24:12 Rahul Gandhi is starting a second Bharat Jodo Yatra and the Congress party is hopeful that
24:18 this could increase his popularity and help him to bridge the big gap which we discussed
24:23 of 16% which still exists.
24:26 Can he bridge this gap and help the Congress, Trump, Modi and BJP in 2024?
24:34 Only time will tell.
24:35 Namaste, Thank you.
24:36 [Outro Music]
24:40 [Outro Music]