Murphy votes in 2024 Indian Elections

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" - Edward A. Murphy Jr.

The Lazy Reasons Problem

The 2024 Indian general elections are over, the results are out, the new Modi 3.0 government has been sworn in and all those Indians who electorally and politically wake up every 5 years can now go back to what they were doing earlier.

However, for a few others, these results are a mystery. It is one of those occurrences in life where the "Why" feels more important than the "What". And then we turn to media and experts for the answers, and all we hear are macro statements like "Brand Modi is diminishing", "Muslims consolidated against BJP", "Unemployment", "Inflation", etc. While all of this may be directionally correct, for a more discerning follower of politics, they feel like Lazy reasons. For the truth is, none of these factors are either particularly novel or uniformly applicable. In a waveless election without extreme anger or a strong challenger, such macro statements cannot alone determine the results. In a parliamentary (non-presidential) democracy, there are always a 100 reasons!

The objective of this article is to try to identify the "Pipping Factors" or the real delta that caused the results to be what they are. For example, why did BJP lose in UP, but sweep neighbouring MP, Uttarakhand despite both states facing the same macro, lazy reasons mentioned above. The answer lies in the "Pipping Factors"

This analysis is based on publicly available Election Commission results data of the current and past elections to get the numbers right and media news reports (local and national) for constituency-level qualitative intelligence .

2024 v/s 2019: What really changed?

In a waveless election, the best place to start our analysis for identifying the "Pipping Factors" would be to pinpoint what exactly changed between the current and the previous elections in terms of seat results.

So the answer to what really changed in terms of seat results between 2024 and 2019 is:

• 1. In 2024, NDA lost 113 of the seats it had won in 2019
• 2. In 2024, NDA won 52 of the seats it had lost in 2019

Now let's dig deep to understand what were the "Pipping Factors" in these 165 seats that changed hands.

113 Existing seats lost: Anger, anger everywhere? Or something more?

One unique narrative during these elections has been the existence of multiple regional issues in different parts of the country that have had certain groups being angry with the national government. All of them seemed to have risen almost at the same time, much to the dismay of the incumbent NDA government.

Let's call this the "Group Anger" effect.

However, a closer look at the above table suggests that while this has been a key factor in causing the incumbent NDA defeat in many seats, it only seems to explain half of the "113 Existing seats lost" story. It was certainly not the only "Pipping Factor".

There have been Local Issues also at play in most of these 113 seats.

1. 1. The Alliance Effect
2. 50 of these 113 seats were lost either because of a newly formed, formidable Opposition alliance or because of loss of alliances that the NDA previously included. Some were also lost because of absence / diminished strength of a vote-cutting party that helped the NDA win in 2019 or because of local seat-level infighting between the NDA partners.

2. The Candidate Issue

In 80 of these seats, there were issues with the NDA candidate such as anti-incumbency against the sitting NDA MP, denial of ticket to a sitting NDA MP, acquisition of turncoats from other parties who turned out to be duds or strong NDA candidates moving to the Opposition.

Also as indicated in the table above, to make matters worse for the NDA, the Opposition played the Candidate card well in 61 of these 80 seats by either fielding a new candidate or acquiring strong candidates from the NDA. Interestingly in few of these seats, the Opposition also managed to prop up strong anti NDA rebels or Independent candidates that ended up cutting into NDA votes and causing the defeat of the NDA candidate.

Bringing it all together

We explored 3 broad "Pipping Factors" - Group Anger, Alliance Effect, Candidate Issue. Out of the 113 existing seats lost by NDA, atleast 86 seats had 2 or more factors playing a role.

Thus, it is not one macro issue that caused NDA to lose 113 seats in 2024 that it had won in 2019. It was the coming together (or rather falling apart from an NDA perspective) of multiple regional / local "Pipping Factors".

This analysis will not be complete without exploring the reasons behind NDA winning 52 new seats in an election where everything seemed to be falling apart in rest of the country. In fact, it is due to these 52 new seat wins, that the NDA was able to cross the 272+ majority mark.

52 New seats won: Anti-incumbency and Alliances saved the day

Atleast 35 of the 52 new seats won by NDA in 2024 can be attributed to major state-level anti-incumbency and smart state level alliance stitched by the NDA against the Opposition. The remaining few seats were won by a combination of smart, tactical local alliances, candidate acquisition from other parties, etc.

Final Verdict

The 2024 election results have been a fitting tribute to the complexities of the Indian democracy and polity. And unfortunately for the NDA it was the culmination of multiple regional / local factors all going wrong together in 110+ seats. There is no single easy, lazy, macro explanation. Also, two factors saved the day for the NDA - new alliances and specific state-level anti-incumbencies that worked in their favour. And since we have been focusing only on the deltas in this article, let's not forget, they retained 237 seats that they had won in 2019. The fact that they managed to retain such a high number of seats, despite so many factors going wrong as listed above, also seems to suggest that there is still some macro goodwill going for them. I wouldn't hazard a guess on what that goodwill is, let the reader decide!