When A State Party Is More Than A State Party
Both the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party are planning to leverage partnerships with India’s powerful regional parties as part of their respective strategies for the 2019 national elections. Some of these regional parties have a surprisingly strong reach beyond their home states. This could provide an incremental — and potentially significant — boost to the Congress and the BJP, with small voting shifts for individual seats often translating into important seat gains.
The BJP’s stunning victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha election ended a decades-long period of coalition governments. We will likely see coalitions re-emerge in Delhi within the next few elections, simply by predicting a return to the norm. This could happen as early as 2019. For all the discussion of the BJP’s dominance in 2014, it managed to secure a single-party majority by just ten seats. Its seat total, 282, was 100 seats above the party’s previous high-water mark.
Maintaining ties with key National Democratic Alliance coalition allies such as the Shiv Sena, Telugu Desam Party, and the Shiromani Akali Dal may yield dividends for the BJP in the near future. Similarly, new and renewed ties with parties such as the Janata Dal (United) and the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party will help cushion the BJP should the main coalition stumble.
A fundamental aspect of the Congress’ 2019 strategy is to build a range of coalitions, state-by-state, to challenge BJP candidates. Such a strategy was successfully employed by the JD-U, Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the Congress in Bihar’s 2015 state election. In 2014, the BJP had won a majority of Parliamentary seats in the state after its split with the JD-U. But a year later, the JD-U/RJD/Congress coalition won a combined 178 seats out of 243 seats in the state assembly. The BJP could only manage 53 seats.
Such tie-ups by the BJP and Congress, while clearly targeting a specific state, could have wider ramifications for these national parties.
Looking at the key Bihar parties, the RJD has a Rajya Sabha seat in Jharkhand, has won multiple state assembly seats in Jharkhand and Manipur in recent years, and even won two Lok Sabha seats from Jharkhand in 2007. The JD-U currently has a Rajya Sabha seat in Kerala and state assembly seats in both Gujarat and Nagaland. In the last fifteen years, the party has won state assembly seats in Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. The JD-U even won a pair of Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh and Lakshadweep in the 2004 Lok Sabha election.
In the 2014 national election, six parties were considered “national” parties: The BJP, Congress, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Nationalist Congress Party. In real terms, experts tend to consider the BJP and Congress as the only two true national parties, with the ability to win a significant number of seats from a range of states. This is particularly true as the three main communist parties have been in recent decline, as indicated in the chart below.
These include Nationalist Congress Party, Janata Dal (United), Communist Party of India, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Aam Aadmi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Samajwadi Party, Shiromani Akali Dal, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), and Janata Dal (Secular). Among these, the Sharad Pawar-led NCP, the JD-U, the CPI, and the RJD have the strongest national showing outside their home states. To be clear for this interpretation, for the CPI and the CPI(M), three states are considered “home”- West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura.
NCP has a wide reach, currently holding seats in seven states apart from Maharashtra, including two Lok Sabha seats – Bihar and Lakshadweep. JD-U, CPI, and RJD all hold Rajya Sabha seats secured from outside their home state.
The BSP holds state assembly seats, sometimes multiple, from five states outside of Uttar Pradesh.
Such modest representations by the regional parties outside their own dominant states may prove quite useful to the Congress or BJP in their national calculations. The Aam Aadmi Party has bumped this dataset recently, with its strong showing in the Lok Sabha and state assembly elections in Punjab.
Looking back over the last ten years, these regional parties’ collective reach has generally declined somewhat outside of their home states. In 2007, these eleven parties combined to hold 3 Rajya Sabha, 14 Lok Sabha, and 154 state assembly seats from non-core states. In 2012 these same parties did not have a single Rajya Sabha seat outside their core states, though they did hold 5 Lok Sabha seats and 105 state assembly seats. Currently, these parties combine to hold 3 Rajya Sabha, 6 Lok Sabha, and 61 state assembly seats outside their core states.
The relative strength of these regional parties in their home states will be an important factor in both the BJP and Congress election strategies for upcoming state elections as well as the 2019 national election. Congress believes its path to success lies with strong pre-election coalitions. The BJP has managed to maintain its traditional coalition allies, with building new coalitions in Jammu and Kashmir and Goa. They also recognise that expanding partnerships with state parties is important to counter the Congress party’s plans. But the campaign benefits to Congress and BJP through these alliances may prove to be a bit wider than anticipated, due to the ability of some state-level parties to win votes beyond their respective home states.
The entire data-set for this study can be found here.
Richard Rossow is the Wadhwani Chair in U.S. India Policy Studies at The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.
The views expressed here are those of the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.