Madhya Pradesh 2023: Why Congress Will Find It Tough To Catch Up To BJP

The recent assembly election in Madhya Pradesh, which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) clinched handsomely, was a paradigmatic one for several reasons.

One, at the political level, the win marked a generational shift in the BJP’s state leadership.

Mohan Yadav, the new chief minister, will groom a new team that takes forward a rich legacy built by Sundar Lal Patwa, Uma Bharti, and Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

The Congress' drubbing means that Kamal Nath’s draw is now firmly on the wane.

If the party is to take on a BJP which has expanded its vote base considerably, and remain politically relevant in Madhya Pradesh, it will have to build up a fresh crop of leaders who can command popular appeal beyond the identity vote.

New leaders are necessary for the Congress' survival, with the BJP having rendered the minority-bloc vote largely irrelevant and made inroads into those caste groups which used to vote more for the Congress.

Two, the 2023 election was the most bipolar one in the state's history.

The vote share of the ‘Others’ category was at a historic low and stands to fall further in time.

As a result, triangular contests were much fewer this time. Only one seat was won by a party other than the BJP or the Congress, and it was a straight fight between the two national parties in 223 of 230 seats.

Three, the net result of this increasing bipolarity is that the BJP’s vote share surged across the board, allowing it to register thumping wins.

This showing is different from the past in one key respect: while the BJP had swept the state on several occasions previously, both its vote share and vote share differential with the Congress have never been this high (not even in 2013).

This is evident from an analysis of the victory margins.

In 2023, there were only 18 ‘lottery seats’ — those where the winning margin is less than 1 per cent. The Congress won 13 of those — a full fifth of the 66 they got.

The BJP won only five seats in this tranche, meaning that the party's final tally could have gone up to 171 with a little luck (163-5+13).

On the other hand, the BJP won 95 seats with a solid victory margin of 10 per cent or more against the Congress' 19.

As the table below shows, the vote swing towards the BJP, although more from Others than from the Congress, greatly benefited the BJP because of a resultant increase in bipolarity.

As a result, the BJP won 60 seats even in areas where the Congress vote share went up. Forty-eight of these seats were BJP holds from 2018, and the other 12 were gains.

Interestingly, in the tranche where the Congress gained between 10 to 20 per cent vote share, the BJP won half of the 26 seats because Others' average vote share went down by a whopping 27 per cent!

The Congress, too, benefited from the increasing bipolarity, but only peripherally. It won only five in the vote swing tranche where the party gained by 20-30 per cent, yet the BJP still won two (both gains).

In addition, three of the four Congress gains were not from the BJP, but from Others.

It is the same in the tranche where the vote swing towards the Congress was more than 30 per cent. Of five such seats, the BJP still managed to retain one, and of the other four Congress gains, only two were from the BJP and two from Others.

These trends continue to hold even when we analyse results by category. Be it in seats reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), or even in general seats, the BJP has outperformed the Congress by sizeable margins.

Most heartening for the BJP is the 9.3 per cent vote swing they received in SC seats; they won 26 of 35, gaining nine. The vote differential between the BJP and the Congress in this category is a yawning 10.2 per cent, and remarkably, bipolarity was 91 per cent.

But the Congress has managed to somewhat hold its own in the tribal seats, where they won 22 (a full third of their total of 66) and were behind the BJP by less than 3 per cent.

Nonetheless, the BJP has gained 11 crucial seats. This will be a growth segment for the party in the coming elections.

But both categories pale before the 113 general seats, where the BJP gained 54 seats and the Congress vote share dipped below 40 per cent. It is a position from which the Congress will find it very difficult to recover.

Thus, we see that the BJP has outperformed the Congress across the board, across multiple metrics, and in style. This is what a supracaste consolidation looks like, and it is only going to get more broad-based.

The implication is that it will be tougher for the Congress to win the next assembly election in Madhya Pradesh.

The final article in this three-part series will be a cartographic analysis of the election results in Madhya Pradesh.