India’s 2014 Elections

Explaining the 2014 Lok Sabha Studies in Indian Politics

3(1) 5–6
Elections: Introduction © 2015 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2321023015575209
http://inp.sagepub.com

The 16th Lok Sabha elections have made history for more than one reason. Not only the number of
registered voters—814 million—had never been so high, but the number of those who exercised their
franchise—554 millions—also broke a new record. Hence an unprecedented turnout (66.4 per cent),
partly due to the mobilization of women whose turnout jumped from 55.82 per cent in 2009 to 65.3 per
cent and partly due—to a lesser extent—to the introduction of a new button on the Electronic Voting
Machines known as (NOTA: None of the above), which allowed those who did not want to vote for any
candidate to take part in the election process (the NOTA voters represented 1.1 per cent of the total votes
cast). The number of candidates increased also from 8,070 to 8,251 and that of the parties from 363
to 464—the others were independents.
But for the first time since 1984, a single party won an absolute majority and for the first time in the
Indian history, this party was not the Congress but the BJP (with 282 seats). However, for the first time
(again!), this party won an absolute majority with less than 40 per cent of the valid votes—and in fact
much less than that: 31 per cent. This result comes from the fact that the BJP’s strongholds were all
concentrated in the north and the west of India.
Certainly, the BJP progressed in areas where it used to be weak, such as West Bengal, where it nearly
tripled its 2009 vote share (from 6.1 per cent to 16.8 per cent), Assam (from 17.2 per cent in 2009 to 36.4
per cent), Jammu and Kashmir (from 18.6 per cent to 32.4 per cent) and, to a lesser extent, Kerala (from
6.3 per cent to 10.3 per cent, its 1999 level), but these performances did not translate into many seats
(1 in Kerala, 2 in West Bengal, 3 in Jammu and Kashmir).
By contrast, the BJP scored remarkably in areas of northern and western India where it was already
strong. It won 190 of the 225 seats of the Hindi belt: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh,
Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and Jharkhand—that is 84 per cent of the seats. That fig-
ure increases to 86 per cent if one adds Gujarat. It decreases to 80 per cent if one adds Maharashtra. But
if one includes the performance of its allies—including Apna Dal (2 seats in UP), Lok Janshakti Party
(6 seats in Bihar) and the Shiv Sena (18 seats in Maharashtra)—the BJP-led coalition bagged 86 per cent
of the seats in these 11 states. If the BJP obtained 31 per cent of the vote share nationally, it conquered
the Hindi belt states (and Gujarat) with 45 per cent of the average vote share. In Uttar Pradesh it sur-
passes in vote share its three opponents combined (Congress, BSP and SP) in 22 constituencies and won
an unprecedented 71 seats, out of 80 – which means that 25 per cent of its Lok Sabha MPs came from
this state.
For the Congress too, these elections were unprecedented. Never before had the party been reduced
to 44 seats (with 19 per cent of the votes), that is 60 seats less than in its first defeat against the BJP in
1998. The Congress has even failed to reach the 10 per cent seats bar required to obtain the status of
Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. By contrast, the regional parties remained very stable: they
won as many seats (212) as in 2009 (Jaffrelot & Verniers, 2015).

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6 Studies in Indian Politics 3(1)

The resilience of states parties in the southern and eastern provinces of India tends to confine the BJP
to a meta-regional force. But this qualification of its success does not mean that the 16th Lok Sabha
elections have not been a political earthquake. Commentators have even called it a ‘Tsunamo’ because
of the key role Narendra Modi, the BJP prime ministerial candidate, played in the election campaign.
The then chief minister of Gujarat has taken his party and then India by storm soon after his third vic-
tory in his home state in December 2012. Never before had modern means of communication (including
holograms) been used to such an extent in Indian politics. This is one of the reasons for the huge amount
of money that has been spent during the campaign. The personalization of the BJP’s campaign under the
leadership of Narendra Modi was also unprecedented (Jaffrelot, 2015).
However, the men who make history are usually the product of their time. They meet more or less
latent expectations of society. Certainly, the multi-facetted personality of Narendra Modi was a major
factor of the BJP success, but the transformations, frustrations and aspirations of India after years of high
rates of economic growth (and a sudden slowdown) have to be analyzed too.
This special issue of Studies in Indian Politics draws from such an analytical exercise that has been
conducted during an academic meeting in Delhi in August 2014. This meeting held at the Indian Council
of Social Science Research took place in the framework of a three-year research project called Explaining
Electoral Change in Urban and Rural India (EECURI) that I coordinate and that has been selected as an
Indian-European Research Networking Programme in the Social Sciences. This project, associating
the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Lokniti Programme at the Centre for
the Study of Developing Societies, Janaagraha (Bangalore), Sciences Po (via the Centre for International
Research and Studies [CERI] and the Centre for Socio-Political Data [CDSP]), King’s College London
(via the King’s India Institute) and the London School of Economics, is co-funded by the
ICSSR (India), the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France) and the Economic and Social Research
Council (UK).
This research network is exploring electoral politics in India by using quantitative and qualitative
methods. The articles which follow combine both perspectives. They throw some new light on the last
Lok Sabha elections from the campaigning phase to the outcome. While some of them concentrate on
one state (Assam, Bihar, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal), others take a macro-perspective, while
focusing on one social or socio-demographic category at the national level (women, the middle class).
The expertise of the authors and the data they mobilize will contribute to a better understanding of what
may well be a turning point in the political history of India.

Reference
Jaffrelot, C. (2015). The Modi-centric BJP 2014 election campaign: New techniques and old tactics. Contemporary
South Asia, Taylor and Francis.
Jaffrelot, C., & Verniers, G. (2015). The resistance of regionalism: BJP’s limitations and the resilience of state
parties. In Wallace, Paul (Ed.), India’s 2014 elections: Modi-led sweep replaces coalition system. New Delhi:
Sage.

Christophe Jaffrelot
Senior Research Fellow, CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS
Professor at the King’s India Institute and Princeton Global Scholar
E-mail: Jaffrelot@orange.fr

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