The following blog post was originally published by the Brookings Institution on 13 December 2018.
On December 11, the results of five Indian state
elections – in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Mizoram
– were announced. These will be the last state elections before the 2019 Indian
general election, about which speculation will now begin in earnest. Predicting
national elections is a notoriously difficult exercise; the last three defied
many expectations. Given that media commentators project every state election
as a trendsetter for national politics, a simple exercise to start thinking
about next year’s outcome involves transposing the results of every state
election over the past five years onto a national election map. Basically, this
means taking the number of seats a party won in the last election in each
state, dividing it by the total number of seats in the state legislature, and
multiplying that number by the Lok Sabha seats representing that state.
Crunch the numbers in this manner, and it brings up the
following results: the BJP drops some 103 seats and its allies another 7,
giving the BJP a total of 179 and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
coalition about 207 seats. (For context, no winning party won more seats than
that in five general elections between 1996 and 2009.) The Congress would
certainly gain in this calculation – particularly in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya
Pradesh – but would make only about 107 seats total. Along with its allies, the
Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) would have 163 seats. This would
represent a big increase from 2014, but is still over 40 short of their
competitors. Other regional parties, led by the All India Trinamool Congress,
All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Biju Janata Dal, Telugu Desam Party,
and Telangana Rashtra Samiti would be among the largest contributors to 172
seats for third parties and independents.
Now, the caveats. These numbers offer a useful starting
point, but should definitely not be interpreted as a prediction, for at least
four reasons. The first is that Indian voters have historically distinguished
between state-level and national-level issues when they voted, and parties will
campaign on very different concerns and personalities. A particularly good
example of this was the fact that the 2008 Uttar Pradesh elections – won
convincingly by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) – was followed shortly thereafter
by a strong showing by the Congress in that state in the 2009 general election.
A second reason is that enough time has elapsed from several state elections,
notably in Bihar, Delhi, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh, to suggest that they
could have little bearing on the next general election.
The third reason is that both pre-poll and post-poll
alliances will alter calculations, sometimes significantly. How the likes of
the BSP, TDP, and others position themselves will make a meaningful difference,
as would campaign strategies between allies. Finally, state election results
disproportionately favour state parties and smaller political movements, who
are more likely to be crowded out in a general election when fewer and larger
seats are at stake. Nonetheless, despite these important considerations, a
simple transposition of recent state election results on a national electoral
map provides a basic starting point for anticipating what is in play in the run
up to the 2019 elections.