How The BJP Defeated Itself In Himachal Pradesh

Only in Himachal Pradesh can a candidate lose even after polling over 49 per cent of the popular vote. This is an infuriating phenomenon which usually manifests itself in constituencies with a small electorate, and where the contest is intensely bipolar.

In Sujanpur seat, Ranjit Singh Rana of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) polled 49.07 per cent, yet he still lost by 399 votes to Rajinder Singh of the Congress, who polled 49.79 per cent.

In Shillai, the BJP polled 48.58 per cent but still lost to the Congress who got 49.17 per cent — a margin of 382 votes.

And in Rampur, the BJP’s frustrations flowed over when their candidate polled 48.1 per cent, yet lost to the Congress who received 49.1 per cent.

In a sense, this is the story of the 2022 Himachal Pradesh Assembly elections, in which the popular mandate shifted decisively from the BJP to the Congress on the back of a vote differential of less than one percentage point.

And because the margins were so small, these elections were a lot tighter than Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan of 2018.

(In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP polled 41.02 per cent against the Congress’ 40.89, but won only 109 out of 230 seats, while the Congress won 114 — both short of the halfway mark, and separated by just 0.13 per cent. In Rajasthan, the Corinthian Canal twixt the Congress and the BJP was: 100 seats with 39.3 per cent to 73 seats with 38.1 per cent.)

Yet, as always, the devil lies in the details. What are they?

First, the results:

This is the results map:

And this is the seat-shift map, showing gains and holds from 2017:

Observations:

· The BJP lost more votes to rebels and others than to the Congress. As the results table above shows, of the 5.8 per cent negative vote swing the BJP suffered, over 3.5 per cent was to parties other than the Congress. The bulk of this was because of a strong rebellion within the BJP, which hurt them badly.

· Indeed, the Congress only gained 2.2 per cent from 2017, and won only because the BJP lost more to other entities.

·  The actual, slender nature of the Congress’s win is highlighted by their win margins. They won five seats by under a thousand votes, three by between one to two thousand, and three more, by between two to three thousand. That’s a total of 11 seats, and a cumulative of 20,000 votes.

·  In addition, the Congress won seven seats by just three to four thousand votes. This means that their tally could very easily have fallen to around 22-23 if, either the turnout had varied by even half a percentage point. This is not so different from the 21 they got in 2017.

·  On the other hand, the BJP’s average victory margin in their 25 wins was a robust 8,000 votes. And this is in spite of weathering a negative -2.4 per cent vote swing on average in these seats.

·  In contrast, the average vote margin in the 40 Congress wins was less than 6,000.

·  Coming to gains, the BJP registered five against the headwind of a negative vote swing of 4 per cent. The Congress made 23 gains with a positive vote swing of 11 per cent — mostly from the BJP.

Interestingly, this translates to a vote share gain of 3.2 per cent — much more than the Congress’s state total of 2.2 per cent. This is significant, because considering the very small number of electors in each seat, a party’s fortunes are effectively decided by one or two polling booths.

It also means that the Congress would do well to not treat this as a grand victory.

·  The BJP’s chances were also spoiled in three seats by a local outfit, the Rashtriya Devbhumi Party (RDP) (the RDP is led by Rumit Singh Thakur of the Devbhumi Kshatriya Sangathan, a movement advocating greater rights for forward castes, and is politically positioned against the BJP).

·  A heady pre-election media barrage said that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) would gain a sizeable foothold in Himachal Pradesh, with around 7 per cent of the vote. Instead, they flopped. The AAP polled only 1 per cent, and some material votes in only one seat — Paonta Sahib (5,090 votes, which the BJP held with a generous margin of 8,596 votes).

The intensely local nature of provincial elections is especially highlighted in Himachal Pradesh, where the fortunes of a candidate can be decided by a solitary village voting one way or another, en bloc. While this is great for democracy, it is hell on a politician’s nerves.

This is also one reason why a number of pre-poll forecasts (including one by this writer) predicted that the BJP would cross the halfway mark; the general mood was that the BJP would return, but they did not account for the uncertainties and vicissitudes which get amplified in smaller seats.

This aspect was further swamped by pollsters and media houses, who promoted the view that votes would shift from the BJP, the Congress, and ‘Others’ to, and only to, the AAP.

Such findings made little sense, since the AAP had no prominent local face, no grassroots network to bank upon, and campaigned but sparingly. And, as the final results show, the AAP failed to make even a minor mark in Himachal Pradesh.

One per cent of the popular vote versus projections of 7 per cent means that pollsters were wrong by 85 per cent, and off by 6 percentage points — both well wide of the standard margins of error.

The Congress may have won, but as our analysis shows, the results could so easily have been reversed by a minor variation in turnout. In the end, in a land of such small margins, and with a population of around 7 million, the outcome was decided by just 20,000 votes in 11 seats.

In a sense, it can thus be said that the BJP defeated itself in Himachal Pradesh. If they had tackled internal dissent with a little more vim, or neutralised the fringe RDP earlier in the year, well before the RDP snowballed into a crucial vote-cutter, the outcome may have been very different.

Nonetheless, and even though the mandate has shifted to the Congress, the party will go forward looking anxiously over its shoulder, since the lissom slimness of its victory is matched only by the girth of its ceaseless, simmering factionalism.

 All data from Election Commission of India website.