2024 ELECTION RESULTS:

SUBVERTING EXPECTATIONS, HERALDING CHANGE

INTRODUCTION:

The 2024 Lok Sabha elections were shocking, but not in the way one would expect. While it
was no surprise that the Bharatiya Janata Party won the election, the extent of the
opposition’s success and their unexpected upsets were remarkable. Usually, the exit polls
are a good estimation of what the outcome of the elections will shape up to be. Exit polls are
surveys conducted immediately after voters leave the polling stations. Unlike pre-election
opinion polls, which predict how people might vote, exit polls ask voters how they actually
voted. This direct approach makes exit polls a powerful indicator of the electoral outcome,
often predicting results with a high degree of accuracy. On this occasion, however, the exit
polls failed to do so. This was also reflected in the views of the electoral candidates. Soon
after the results of the elections were announced, many ministers and members of the
political parties were interviewed. Most of them (particularly members of the BJP or NDA
bloc) expressed great surprise at the underperformance of the NDA. They were expected to
win by a landslide and were anticipating more than 350 - 400 out of the 543 seats as shown
in the exit polls. In the end, the NDA only won 293 seats with BJP winning 240 of them. The
INDIA bloc on the other hand was only slated to win between 100 and 150 seats according
to the exit polls but ended up winning 234 seats with INC (Indian National Congress) winning
99 of them. This unreliability of the exit polls has shown up quite a few times in the past few
years. In 2004 exit polls largely failed to predict the outcome, as most suggested a victory for
the BJP-led NDA, but the INC (Indian National Congress) and its allies ended up winning.
And again in the 2015 Delhi Assembly Elections, many exit polls underestimated the Aam
Aadmi Party's (AAP) landslide victory.
A BRIEF HISTORY:

Independent India’s first general elections were held between 25th October 1951 and 21
February 1952. It was a humongous exercise in which a sixth of the world’s population was
going to vote, making it the largest election conducted in the world at the time. There were
nearly 1874 candidates and 53 political parties, of which 14 were ‌national. These included
the Indian National Congress, the Communist Party of India, the Socialist Party, the Kisan
Mazdoor Praja Party, and Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, among others. The parties
were contesting for 489 seats. The Indian National Congress won a thumping majority with
364 seats and 45% of the total votes polled. The Communist Party of India, which won a
total of 16 seats, became the main opposition party. Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru became
Independent India’s first democratically elected prime minister. Despite attaining
Independence on August 15, 1947, the first election took place only in 1951. For the years in
between, India was a constitutional monarchy under King George VI, with Louis Mountbatten
as the Governor-General. The Jawahar Lal Nehru-led Constituent Assembly was serving as
the Parliament in the wait for the first elected government to take charge. While the nation’s
leaders started working on rolling out elections in July 1948, there were no laws on how to
hold elections. The Drafting Committee, under the leadership of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji
Ambedkar, put in rigorous hours to draft the Constitution which was ratified on November 26,
1949, but it came into effect on
January 26, 1950. India, on that day,
got the rules and bylaws to conduct
elections, and the country finally
became the Republic of India.

This was, however, only the

beginning of an extraordinary
journey. With the Constitution
coming into force, the Election
Commission had been formed. The
laborious task of conducting
elections fell on the able shoulders
of Sukumar Sen, an Indian civil
servant and the first Chief Election
Commissioner of India. Jawahar Lal
Nehru wanted the general election
to happen in the spring of 1951, and
his haste was understandable. India
had waited for over three years for
this new dawn of democracy to
finally begin. But to organize
elections on such a large scale and
conduct them in a free, fair, and
transparent manner was no
straightforward task. The first,
among many challenges, was the
sheer population of India, 360
million then. India adopted universal
adult suffrage when the Constitution was enacted, and this made 173 million people above
the age of 21 people eligible to vote. However, 85% of this eligible population could not read
or write. In this, the task of identifying, naming, and registering voters was a big challenge.
Parliamentary constituencies had to be finalized based on the census data, which happened
only in 1951. Then there were the issues of designing party symbols, ballot papers, and
ballot boxes for the uneducated population of the country. There also were polling stations to
be built and spaced out properly, and efficient polling officers had to be recruited and trained‌.
If these challenges weren’t enough, there was a food shortage in many states across India
and the administration had to occupy themselves with relief work. All these challenges took
their time to overcome. But when it finally happened, 45.7% of the eligible population walked
out of their homes for the first time to practice their right to vote. India became the largest
democracy in the world, with a government by the people and for the people.

BJP: BUT WHAT ABOUT 400 PAAR?

In South India, the BJP is often seen as a party with a focus on Hindi-speaking regions,
Hindu identity, and Hindutva ideology. This perception has hurt its electoral prospects, South
India generally boasts better, development indices, including education and health,
compared to the northern states. The region has been relatively immune to religion-driven
politics, which has been a hallmark of the BJP. Factors such as joblessness, rising prices,
growing inequality, and a controversial army recruitment reform contributed to the BJP's
decline in seats. Additionally, Prime
Minister Modi's divisive campaign,
particularly targeting Muslims, may have
alienated voters in some regions. Congress
General Secretary Jairam Ramesh on
Wednesday said that polling held so far
indicated that the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) had been wiped out of South India
and reduced to half in the rest of the
country. While addressing the media in
Ranchi, he also alleged that Prime Minister
Narendra Modi tried to polarise the voters
on religious lines.

Also, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has lost

its only stronghold in the country's south
after voters in Karnataka state rejected the
Hindu-nationalist policies of Prime Minister
Narendra Modi's party in crucial local
elections last week. Over the past few
years, rural India has been struggling with
the aftermath of demonetisation and
COVID-19 restrictions, followed by rising
inflation, unemployment, lower crop yield
and income inequality, Rural distress has
been visible in consumption data and has
also been spoken about by major FMCG
companies, which were seeing a decline in rural sales, the government faced discontent
among the farming communities, with the country seeing major protests in 2020, 2021 and
2024 over farm laws and MSP (minimum support price) demands. In Punjab, whose farmers
staged the biggest protests, the BJP has failed to win any seats, while Congress won seven.
However The NDA government, on its part, has rolled out several schemes for the
agricultural community such as offering income support for small and marginal farmers
under PM-KISAN along with other schemes that offered free grain, cash transfers, better
roads, etc. The government is also credited with bringing more of the hinterland into the
formal banking system, for digitalisation, among others. Despite this, many farmers have
said farming was becoming an invisible form of livelihood because of rising costs of
fertilisers, fuel, household expenses and the effects of climate change on crop yield. Further,
the government's decision to ban exports of certain items such as onions, wheat and rice
also impacted the incomes of several farmers.

THE WESTMINSTER SYSTEM: THE FACADE OF REPRESENTATION

At the advent of the 2024 general elections, social media platforms, forums, family
get-togethers, and other interactive spaces were fraught with fierce debates and discussions
among which was the particularly prevalent “Do the election results reflect market sentiment
or people sentiment?” Interlocuters were happy to shift the narrative according to the party
they supported (with market sentiment being reflected in the majority turnouts when the
winner was not their choice of party and vice versa). However, the unfortunate reality of our
body politic is that the winning party reflects neither. Our colonisers introduced to our
country, a voting system that would allegedly accommodate the plurality of voices and
communities within our nation—a voting system called the Westminster system or First Past
the Post. This operates by letting a party with approximately thirty per cent of the votes win
an outright majority in the parliament with a staggering 300+ seat count. Described here is
the result of the 2019 general elections. Essentially, political candidates contest in their
respective constituencies with non-party or party affiliations. The candidate can expect to be
sworn in as a member of parliament as long as they have a relative majority. When
candidates contest at the behest of their parties, even with a nominal vote, their party’s
policies will mould the social landscape of that constituency. With each constituency having
one seat doing its bidding, it becomes very easy for our representative government to
represent only 30% of the nation. And it becomes even easier for a cultural majority to vote
into parliament, a party that will favour its voice to the rest. Thus, unless we erect a more
representative voting system into place, we will perhaps never realise a truly representative
government where every vote scaffolds every seat in equal weight.
GERRYMANDERING: DELIMIT YOUR WAY INTO GOVERNMENT

In representative electoral systems, gerrymandering is the political manipulation of electoral

district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage for a party, group, or
socioeconomic class within the constituency. The manipulation may involve "cracking"
(diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) or
"packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their
voting power in other districts). Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents.
Wayne Dawkins, a professor at Morgan State University, describes it as politicians picking
their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.

In India, each elected representative has an equal voice in the legislature. The assumption is
that each vote has an equal weight. However, what if electoral districts have their boundaries
drawn in such a way as to weaken certain groups? Or what if electoral districts do not have
the same approximate voter size? This is what seems to have recently happened in the state
of Assam and the newly created Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir.In Kashmir, where
new constituencies were drawn up by a panel constituted by the Centre, the delimitation
process was completed in 2022. The exercise recommended a significant increase in seats
for Hindu-dominated Jammu over Muslim-dominated Kashmir. In effect, a Jammu resident
will now have greater representation in the Assembly compared to someone living in the
Kashmir valley. The impact, critics say is quite clear: the gerrymandering will have the effect
of disenfranchising Kashmiris, giving less value to their vote than if a strict
one-person-one-vote principle were to be followed. Something similar has happened in the
recently concluded Assam delimitation. Here the target is the state’s Bengali-origin Muslim
community who are marginalised in their state both for the ethno-linguistic as well as
religious identity. As Scroll has reported, “three assembly constituencies where Muslims play
a decisive role have been reserved for candidates belonging to Scheduled Castes and
Tribes, effectively debarring minority leaders from contesting”.