In Maps: An Electoral History Of Karnataka

As Karnataka prepares for another exciting assembly election, Swarajya invites its readers on a cartographic walk through the state’s electoral history.

It’s been 67 years since the first provincial elections were conducted in Karnataka. In that time, the boundaries of the state and its constituencies have changed, and it has become an industrial powerhouse, while political parties emerged, grew, split, thrived, or were voted out into oblivion.

As a table below shows, the state was overwhelmingly dominated by the Congress party for the first three decades after independence. While the party’s prominence has diminished post-1983, it still commands the largest vote share in the Vidhana Soudha.

A second strand is the sustained presence of a socialist, non-Congress-non-Hindutva vote base, which managed to seize the popular mandate a few times.

Between the 1950s and the 70s, this strand was represented by the Praja Socialist Party.

Since the Emergency, the position has been taken over by the Janata Party and its derivatives, with the current one being the Janata Dal (Secular), the JD(S).

A third strand is the influence which independent candidates have wielded in the state over the past seven decades.

Whether as rebels, or as genuine local luminaries who could hold their own against established parties, independents had always attracted a sizeable chunk of the votes until as recently as 2004, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) commenced its ascendant march.

They had done moderately well twice before, but as we shall see, both were temporary successes gained on the political woes of others, and not a widespread, grassroots, cadre-based win.

We commence our peregrination with the assembly elections of 1978.

To everyone’s surprise, Indira Gandhi’s Congress, state party leader Devraj Urs, and the electorate, swam against the tide for the second time in as many years, to hand the Congress a thumping win.

The party was wiped out in the north, in the general elections of 1977, and survived only because of its successes in the south (a region less affected by the travesties of the Emergency).

Unfortunately, Urs had a falling out with Indira Gandhi, left the party, tried to split it, failed, and was replaced by Gundu Rao, whose administration swiftly became mired in a sordid saga of corruption.

But Hegde chafed at having to be dependent on the BJP, and so he called mid-term elections in 1985.

But it worked, the BJP was wiped out, and Hegde’s Janata Party won 139 of 216 seats.

But 1989-1994 was an unhappy term for the Congress, which saw the Chief Minister being changed twice.

Having had enough of these musical chairs, the Kannadigas gifted the 1994 mandate to Deve Gowda of the Janata Dal. This is also when the BJP made its first real splash, winning 40 seats with 17 per cent of the popular vote.

By 2004, the state’s dynamics began to settle into the trend we see today.

The BJP was now firmly on a growth path, the JD(S) never really recovered from the split of 1999, to become largely restricted to the Mysore region, and the Congress remained as the only party with a pan-state presence.

Dharam Singh of the Congress held the post for under two years, before vacating it for Deve Gowda’s son, HD Kumaraswamy for a similar term.

But in this scramble for power, the Congress-JD(S) equation soured, there was a brief term of President’s Rule, followed by a futile week-long effort by BS Yediyurappa of the BJP, followed by one more period of President’s rule, before the house was finally dissolved.

The elections of 2008 were the BJP’s to sweep, yet they fell agonizingly short of the majority mark by merely three seats, because they were unable to make inroads into Southern Karnataka.

But like in Gujarat a decade before, success was the party’s undoing. Yediyurappa was replaced by Sadananda Gowda after three years, and Gowda by Jagdish Shettar for the last year of this term.

Yediyurappa’s reaction to his side-lining was explosive: he quit the BJP, started his own party, and decimated the BJP in the elections of 2013.

By 2018, though, the BJP under Narendra Modi managed to bring Yediyurappa back into the party, and undertake the laborious task of repairing the damage caused by the rebellion of 2013.

Unfortunately, while the BJP tended to its injuries, it was unable to revert to the growth path of 1999-2008.

Once again, Yediyurappa tried to prove his majority, but he failed within a week and had to make way for a Congress-JD(S) coalition led by HD Kumaraswamy.

Hardly anyone expected Kumaraswamy to head his coalition for five years without incident, but everyone was caught on the wrong foot by what happened next.

In July 2019, soon after the general elections in which the BJP swept Karnataka, the party engineered a dozen-odd defections, mainly from the Congress, and some from the JD(S), to reduce the Kumaraswamy government to a minority.

Not only did they sweep the north and the centre, but they also made strong inroads into the south for the very first time.

A map of the results at the assembly segment level says it all.

So, this is the whirling vortex which constitutes Karnataka politics. It is tough, bruising, with no quarters given, and they don’t take prisoners.

But there is a difference in 2023: the independents are no longer a force in the state, the JD(S) is going to lose many of its pockets of influence in the northern and central parts (largely to the Congress), the BJP will do much better in the south, and the Congress is riven by internal rivalries. Thus, this assembly election is, rather like 2008 was, the BJP’s to lose.