It's not Home Run Yet for Narendra Modi

Puja Awasthi, theindianrepublic,31 March 2014: The high decibel campaign of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) would induce one into believing that the installation of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister is a mere formality. Going by the numbers however the BJP’s task does not seem so easy.
The biggest hurdle in the achievement of the party’s Mission 272 is getting a greater vote share than that of its biggest competitor the Congress. This is a feat the party has not been able to achieve in any of the 15 Lok Sabha Elections, not even in 1998, the year of its best performance, when it won 182 seats by polling 25.59% of the votes, a shade less that the 25.82% that the Congress got. The anomaly was that the Congress managed just 141 seats-that is 18 less than the BJP.
In the last elections of 2009, the Congress vote share stood at 28.55%, almost 10 percentage points more than the BJP which polled 18.80% of the total votes, the first time since 1991 when the party fell below the 20% vote share mark. To assume that the party would cover that distance and go some more is over ambitious thinking, given that even its biggest leap, between 1989 and 1991, at the start of the Ram Mandir movement, was only 9%.
A year after getting its highest vote share, in 1999, though the BJP managed to win the same number of seats, in terms of votes polled its share fell to 23.75%. For the Congress, surprisingly though it turned in the worst ever seat tally at 112, it vote share went up to 28.3%.
In 2004, despite the ‘India Shining’ campaign the BJP registered a further fall getting only 22.2% of the votes and 138 seats while the Congress despite losing 1.6% of its vote share, won 145 seats. Between the 2004 and 2009 elections BJP’s tallest leader Atal Bihari Vajpyee retired and the party’s vote share fell by a further 3.4% and its seat tally fell to 116. The Congress improved its vote share by just 1.85% but the increase in number of seats was a sharper 61.

Two facts stand out in these numbers:
1. A small improvement in vote share for the Congress translates into a big change in the number of winning seats while for the BJP a small dip in the vote share translates into a larger loss in the number of winning seats.
2. For the Congress a rise on vote share has not always meant a rise in number of seats.
In the year of its most dramatic rise, 1991, for the first time the BJP touched the 20% vote mark, yet it remained much behind the Congress vote share of 35.66%. The next big leap was between 1991 and 1996, when the vote share improved by 5.3%, after which it has continued to fall.
Coming to UP, which sends the greatest number of representatives to the Lok Sabha, the party’s vote share has fallen sharply. It touched a high of 33.44% in 1996, when it won 52 of the 83 seats it contested on. In 1999, a fall of 5.8% had left it with just 29 seats. By 2004, this had fallen to 22.17% with the party winning just 10 of the 77 sates it had fought on. By 2009, the decline was complete with the party’s vote share just 17.5% to the 18.25% of the Congress. That seat share in that election was even larger- 10 to the BJP, 21 to the Congress. Thus the hope that Modi’s presence in the fray from Varanasi, will galvanise support for him throughout the state, seems vain. 
Given that the party’s election campaign is centered around Modi, it would be logical to assume that this flows from the party’s stellar electoral performance in Gujarat in the years that Modi has been at the helm. However, here too the numbers tell a different story. In 1999, the BJP polled 52.48% of the votes in the state and won on 20 of the 26 Lok Sabha seats it contested. Modi took office in 2001, and a year later the state was wracked with violence. In the subsequent Lok Sabha elections in 2004 which fell bang in the middle of Modi’s second term as CM (2002-07), the BJP got 47.37% of the vote share- a fall of 5.11%, and it won six seats less. Modi’s third term began in 2007, and the General Elections happened two years later in 2009.Once again the party’s vote share dropped to 46.78%, though it won one more seat to notch a total of 15.
Projecting Modi as the party’s biggest vote getter is thus more aspiration, less fact.
Gujarat also does not come up tops if compared with the vote share of the party in other states where it has traditionally done well. For instance in 2004, 49.01% and 48.13% of the votes in Rajasthan and MP went to the BJP against the 47.37% in Gujarat. In 2009 though, Gujarat did better with 46.78% of the votes while Rajasthan and MP pulled in with respectively 36.57% and 43.45% of the votes polled.
Add to these numbers the fact that the BJP is facing this election as a divided house. Senior party leaders such as LK Advani, Jaswant Singh and Sushma Swaraj have made their displeasure known. It is not winning many favours with the sants and mahatmas who, among other things, have taken umbrage to Modi being put at par with Hindu deities. It’s biggest vote catcher- the Ram Mandir movement is dead.
Add all this to the fact that the numbers have been stacked against it. Thus, riding on a just a wave of disenchantment with the present government might not prove to be its surest ticket to power.