Has BJP Lost Its Grip Over North India?

Political observers lauded the SP's choices in fielding several non-Yadav and Scheduled Caste candidates, the party's alliance with the Congress, and Rahul Gandhi's campaign around the danger to the Constitution if the BJP won a big majority.

Nearly 50 of the 60 seats the Bharatiya Janata Party has lost from its 2019 tally of 303 are on account of the reverses it has suffered in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Haryana.

In Uttar Pradesh, where the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance has won 43 seats of the state's 80 seats, the BJP has received a jolt even in Ayodhya, where a grand Ram temple consecration took place barely months ago on January 22.

The SP, which has won 37 seats, will become the third largest party in the Lok Sabha after the BJP and Congress, while the BJP, (33 seats), seems set for its worst performance since 2009, when it had won only 10 seats in the state.

In 2019, the BJP had won 62 of the 80 seats; its ally the Apna Dal (Soneylal) had bagged two. Five years earlier, in 2014, it had won 71 and the Apna Dal two.

These wins had formed the bedrock of the BJP's successive single-party majority governments at the Centre -- the first such accomplishment for a party since Indira Gandhi led the Congress to successive Lok Sabha wins in 1967 and 1971.

Political observers have lauded the SP's choices in fielding several non-Yadav Other Backward Castes and Scheduled Caste candidates, the party's alliance with the Congress, and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's campaign around the danger to the Constitution if the BJP won a big majority.

"I believe the decline of the Bahujan Samaj Party meant that the Dalits, especially its support base of Jatavs, shifted to the SP-Congress alliance," Ashok Bharti, a Dalit political activist who heads the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations, told Business Standard.

Bharti said the SP's outreach towards smaller communities among the OBCs and Dalits by fielding SC candidates in 'general' seats like Faizabad worked for it.

There also are significant gains for the Congress in UP, with victories on six of the 17 seats it contested.

Rahul Gandhi has won the Raebareli seat by over 390,000 votes and Kishori Lal defeated Union Minister Smriti Irani by over 167,000 votes in Amethi.

The Congress had won only one seat in 2019, and its vote share had reduced to two per cent in the 2022 assembly polls.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, its vote share has increased to over 10 per cent while the BJP's has fallen from nearly 50 per cent five years ago to 42 per cent.

Some of the BJP's reverses have come in the Purvanchal region, where only Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- with a much reduced margin of victory than 2019 -- and Union Minister Anupriya Patel of Apna Dal (Soneylal) have won.

In Rajasthan, where the BJP won 24 of the 25 seats in 2019 -- the Hanuman Beniwal-led Rashtriya Loktantrik Party had won the Nagaur seat -- it has lost 10 seats this time.

The Congress, on the other hand, learnt from its mistakes of the Rajasthan assembly polls in December and accommodated smaller parties in its alliance.

While it has bagged eight seats, its three allies -- the Communist Party of India-Marxist, the Bharatiya Adivasi Party, and Beniwal's RLP -- have won a seat each.

The BJP, however, has maintained its hold in the hill states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, where it has won all the nine seats on offer and protected its vote share.

It has also gained a seat each in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. In MP, the party has won the Chhindwara seat for the first time, as well as the remaining 28.

In 2019, it had bagged 28 seats but lost Chhindwara. In neighbouring Chhattisgarh, the BJP has won 10 seats, one more than the nine it had claimed in 2019.

The Korba seat, however, continues to elude the party.

In Haryana, where the BJP had won all 10 seats in 2019 -- eight with margins of over 300,000 votes -- the party has lost five seats.

The BJP's vote share has dropped significantly from the 58.20 per cent to 46.11 per cent.

In neighbouring Punjab, where BJP candidates faced sustained protests from farmers, the party has failed to hold on to the two seats it had won in 2019.

In Bihar, the BJP had secured all 17 seats it had contested five years ago. However, this time, it has won only 12 seats.

Its numbers are lower in Jharkhand, too -- it has won eight seats, compared with 11 in 2019.

In Delhi, however, it has been a sweep for the BJP, with victories on all seven seats in the capital and a vote share of over 54 per cent.

• INDIA VOTES, 2024

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com