People's Democracy

KARNATAKA

BJP's 'Resounding'  Victory: Facts & Fiction

S R Sharma

THE BJP and its flagbearers in the media are going to town about its �resounding� victory in the Karnataka assembly elections. They are seeing this as a sign of the BJP breaching the �final frontier� in the form of the southern states and as a signal of things to come in the Lok Sabha elections. L K Advani, who has been named as the BJP�s prime ministerial candidate for the next general elections, has himself made noises to this effect. A closer look at the election results, however, reveals that the hyperbole by the saffron mob is hardly justified by the reality on the ground.

For starters, the BJP continues to remain behind the Congress in terms of votes in Karnataka. The detailed results show that the Congress won 34.6 per cent of the votes against the BJP's 33.9 per cent. If you add to that the 19.1 per cent won by the Janata Dal (S), the secular vote in the state is not just well ahead of the BJP, but in excess of 50 per cent.

Secondly, if the voting patterns of the assembly elections were exactly mirrored in a Lok Sabha election today, the BJP would have won just 10 of the 28 seats in Karnataka compared to the 18 it won in 2004. In contrast, the Congress would have increased its tally from 8 in 2004 to 14 now and the JD(S) from 2 to 4 seats.

If you consider how a JD(S)-Congress alliance would have fared, the situation becomes even more unpalatable for the BJP. The saffron party would then have won just 5 of the 28 seats, with the alliance winning the remaining 23 seats. The only Lok Sabha seats in which the BJP�s vote share exceeded the combined votes of the Congress and JD(S) were Bangalore South, Bellary, Davanagere, Shimoga and Bagalkot.

The fact that the BJP won almost half the assembly seats is thanks to the peculiar nature of the electoral arithmetic in Karnataka. While it may look like a triangular contest between the Congress, BJP and JD(S), the fact is that in most parts of the state, it is essentially a two-way fight between either the Congress and the BJP or the Congress and the JD(S).

Of the 29 districts in the state, there were only 8 districts � Bangalore Rural, Mysore, Raichur, Chickmagalur, Kolar, Tumkur, Koppal and Chitradurga in which each of the three major parties got at least 20 per cent of the votes. In the remaining 21 districts, while the Congress had at least 25 per cent of the votes in each case, either the BJP or the JD(S) had less than 20 per cent of the votes.

This pan-state presence of only one party meant that much of the Congress vote share comes from seats that it lost to the BJP or the JD(S), while the latter two have not won too many votes in each other�s constituencies.

The vote shares in the latest elections represent a swing of about 0.7 percentage points away from the Congress since the last assembly elections of 2004, a positive swing of 5.6 per cent for the BJP and a subtraction of 1.7 per cent from the JD(S) vote share in the 2004 elections. A large chunk of the BJP�s gains have come from the near disappearance of its erstwhile partner, the JD(U).

These are not huge swings indicating a wave in favour of one party or against any other and are by no means enough to justify the kind of euphoria that the sangh parivar has been indulging in since the results came out.

They do indicate, however, the risk that secular forces � or those that are not avowedly communal -- run of letting communal forces gain an entry when they precipitate a division of their votes.