In normal course, the forthcoming assembly elections in Karnataka – they will be held in late April or early May – will mark the beginning of the countdown to the 2024 general elections. The Karnataka elections will be followed by the elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh towards the end of this year. These four states have 93 Lok Sabha constituencies between them, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 86 and 79 of these in the 2019 and 2014 elections respectively.
As one waits for these four elections , there is an interesting political churn taking place in another two states, which account for almost as many Lok Sabha constituencies as the four described above. They are Maharashtra and Bihar, where the BJP’s alliances during the last Lok Sabha and assembly elections have been disrupted. If things continue the way they are, the 2024 Lok Sabha contest in Bihar and Maharashtra will be the first of their kind. Here are four charts that describe the importance of this political turmoil in detail.
The importance of Bihar and Maharashtra for BJP’s national ambitions
Between the two states, Bihar and Maharashtra have 88 Lok Sabha constituencies. In the 2014 and 2019 general elections, the BJP won 45 and 40 of these. With seats won by its alliance partners, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) tally in these two states increased to 71 and 80. These numbers underline the importance of these two states for the BJP. Since the BJP won 303 Lok Sabha constituencies in 2019, factoring out its own seats from these two states brings it below the halfway mark of 272 in the Lok Sabha. And since the NDA won 351 Lok Sabha constituencies, factoring out its allies’ seats together with its own from these two states brings down the NDA’s tally to just below the halfway mark.
Chart 1
What has happened in Bihar and Maharashtra?
Immediately after the 2019 assembly elections, the Shiv Sena broke its pre-poll alliance with the BJP and formed a government with the support of the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra. The BJP struck back in 2022, when it managed to break a faction of the Sena – this has now been recognised as the official Shiv Sena – and formed a government once again.
In Bihar, it was the BJP that subtly undercut the Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) in the 2020 assembly elections when the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) openly put up candidates against the JD(U) despite being a part of the NDA at the Centre. While Nitish Kumar was made the chief minister despite being the smaller partner in the alliance, he jumped ship (once again) in 2022 to form a government along with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Congress and Left parties. Now, with Upendra Kushwaha quitting the JD(U) once again, there are signs that all is not well in the party
If one aggregates party-wise vote shares into pro- and anti-BJP camps in Bihar and Maharashtra, the BJP and its allies do not enjoy same advantage they had in 2014 and 2019.
Chart 2A and 2B
But it will not be easy for either the opposition or the BJP to forge a grand alliance
Even setting aside the caveats around pre-poll alliances not leading to simple addition of party-wise vote shares, both the BJP and the Opposition (more so the latter), will find it difficult to have seamless alliances in 2024 in Bihar and Maharashtra. The BJP would like to increase its seat share in the alliance in Maharashtra, and it is not exactly certain how Eknath Shinde and his official Shiv Sena will react to this demand. Meanwhile, the opposition in Maharashtra will have a far more difficult time putting together an alliance as both the NCP and Congress will have to accept significant cuts to accommodate the Uddhav faction. In Bihar, the RJD contested only 19 out of the 40 seats in 2019 to accommodate other alliance partners, most of whom are currently a part of the state government. If the JD(U) has to be accommodated in 2024, everybody else will have to contest fewer seats. In both Maharashtra and Bihar, the two regional parties are likely to try and squeeze the Congress to satisfy each other’s ambitions.
To be sure, both the Shiv Sena and the JD(U) have contested elections on their own – the Sena in 2014 assembly and the JD (U) in 2014 Lok Sabha – and their performances were quite underwhelming. This factor will only complicate the seat-sharing negotiations.
Chart 3