As Madhya Pradesh votes today to elect its new assembly, many may remember that the counting for the last assembly elections in 2018 stretched beyond midnight. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led the Congress in terms of votes but the latter emerged as the single largest party in the 230-member assembly though it fell short of a majority by two seats. Are we likely to see a close contest again?
The answer depends on three interrelated factors.
First, while Madhya Pradesh has a classic bipolar party system dominated by the Congress and the BJP, there has been a significant third player, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), since the late 1990s. The BSP’s core vote, the Dalits, form roughly 16% of the state’s population. The BSP’s influence, however, is largely restricted to certain pockets of Madhya Pradesh, mainly the districts bordering Uttar Pradesh, in the Gwalior-Chambal belt and parts of the Bundelkhand and Vindhya region. This belt accounts for approximately one-third of seats in the assembly.
Winning the 2007 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections created momentum for the BSP in the neighbouring states. The party’s vote share in the Delhi and Haryana assembly elections at that time crossed the double-digit mark. In the 2008 Madhya Pradesh assembly elections, the BSP won nine per cent votes and won seven seats. Its gains were concentrated in three regions: Gwalior-Chambal, where it had 21% votes, and the Bundelkhand and Vindhya regions where it had 15% each.
However, the party has seen a steady decline at the national level, including in MP, since then. Between 2008 and 2018, the party’s vote share and seats halved. It won just two seats and five percent votes in 2018. It also witnessed a proportionate decline in its strongholds in MP. However, it is not clear which party will benefit if the BSP gets further squeezed in a two-horse race. The BSP’s decline in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh indicates that the BJP gained a substantial segment of Dalit votes. Will the same pattern play out in MP 2023?
Second, the BJP has been consistently polling 40% and above vote share in state assembly elections since the separation of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in 2000. In the 2008 assembly elections, the party’s vote share dropped to 38%, which was largely due to Uma Bharti’s Bharatiya Janshakti Party polling around five per cent votes. In comparison, the Congress’s vote share has hovered around 35%. In the 2013 assembly elections, the gap between the vote share of the BJP and Congress was eight percentage points, which became negligible in 2018 with both parties polling around 41% votes. The BJP has ruled the state since 2003, except for a brief interlude between 2018 and 2020 when the Congress held office.
Furthermore, an analysis of constituency-level results since 2008 indicates that the BJP has won 75 of 230 seats in all three assembly elections, whereas the number of such seats for the Congress party is merely 11. This begs the question if Madhya Pradesh has become a dominant party state in favour of the BJP.
The features of a dominant party system are very different from a competitive party system. In the former, while elections may look ex-ante close, but because the dominant party has serious advantages over its competitors in terms of various resources (leadership, organisation, agenda-setting power, financial muscle, among others), it is not easy to dislodge them from power.
On many occasions in the past, for example, assembly elections in West Bengal and Gujarat have appeared competitive, but the outcome has been in favour of the dominant party — in West Bengal, the CPM and Trinamool Congress have been beneficiaries while the BJP has dominated Gujarat. Normal elections are less likely to displace a dominant party regime.
Third, most opinion polls have indicated that there is no strong anti-incumbency sentiment either against the state or the central government. However, a sense of fatigue seems to have set in with the current chief minister (CM), Shivraj Singh Chouhan. This also became evident with Chouhan juggling between his two images — the soft ‘mama’ image that he had created pre-2018, which made him extremely popular, especially among young women voters, and then the ‘bulldozer baba’ image post-2020.
While he continues to lead the popularity race in opinion polls, it seems Chouhan has failed to carry these two contradictory personalities in this term. The polls indicate that the gap between him and the Congress’s face in this election, Kamal Nath, has been narrowing. The BJP has gambled by not projecting Chouhan as the natural choice for CM if the party is voted back to power. It has also nominated many heavyweights (nine MPs including three Union ministers) to contest the assembly elections.
We will need to wait till December 3 to know if the gamble has paid off for the BJP.
Rahul Verma is fellow, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi. The views expressed are personal
A bipolar polity or a dominant party state?
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16.11.2023
As Madhya Pradesh votes today to elect its new assembly, many may remember that the counting for the last assembly elections in 2018 stretched beyond midnight. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led the Congress in terms of votes but the latter emerged as the single largest party in the 230-member assembly though it fell short of a majority by two seats. Are we likely to see a close contest again?
The answer depends on three interrelated factors.
First, while Madhya Pradesh has a classic bipolar party system dominated by the Congress and the BJP, there has been a significant third player, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), since the late 1990s. The BSP’s core vote, the Dalits, form roughly 16% of the state’s population. The BSP’s influence, however, is largely restricted to certain pockets of Madhya Pradesh, mainly the districts bordering Uttar Pradesh, in the Gwalior-Chambal belt and parts of the Bundelkhand and Vindhya region. This belt accounts for approximately one-third of seats in the assembly.
Winning the 2007 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections created momentum for the BSP in the neighbouring states. The party’s vote share in the Delhi and Haryana assembly elections at that time crossed the double-digit mark. In the 2008........
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