BJP workers decorate Ballari town with partial flags on Friday, ahead of the party’s Scheduled Tribe convention on Sunday. , Photo Credit: Sridhar Kavli
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost deposits in 31 constituencies – 13.8% of the seats the party contested – in the recently concluded elections karnataka assembly election, Notably, the party won 66 seats in the election, which is 29.5% of the seats it contested. These two data points make for interesting reading as, when read together, they indicate a state of bifurcation in Karnataka. More importantly, compared to all the recent state elections in which the BJP has won a significant share of seats, Karnataka is markedly different in terms of the share of seats in which it has lost deposits.
As per the provisions mentioned in the Representation of the People Act of 1951, it is mandatory for general category candidates in the assembly elections to deposit Rs. 10,000 and candidates belonging to Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) have to deposit half of it. To get their deposit back, candidates must secure at least one-sixth (16.67%) of the total votes polled in their constituency. While deposits were introduced to reduce the number of competing candidates, they later became a point of pride with deposit losers facing humiliation.
Scatter Plot 1 | In the horizontal axis, the chart shows the seats won by the BJP as a share of the seats contested in all recent state elections. As part of the seats on which the BJP has contested in the vertical axis, the accumulated capital of the BJP has fallen.
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As can be seen from the chart, in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Mizoram, Punjab, Kerala and Meghalaya, where the BJP won less than 5% of the seats, it lost deposits in more than 70% of the seats. This is an understandable result. Given that the party was defeated in these states, it was expected to lose deposits in many of them as well. On the other hand, in all the states where it won more than 10% of the seats, the share of seats where hoarding took place was much smaller.
Scatter Plot 2 | Chart shows states where BJP won more than 10% seats and seats won by BJP as share of seats contested in all recent state elections (horizontal axis) and seats won by BJP Hoarding occurred is plotted as the share of seats contested by it (vertical axis).
As shown in Scatter Plot 2, among the states where the BJP has more than 10% of the seats, the party’s performance is most different in Karnataka. The 13.8% of seats it has lost deposits in Karnataka is the highest among these states, with Goa coming close with 12.5%. Among major states, Odisha is the second where the BJP has lost its deposit on 8.8% of the seats. Interestingly, in West Bengal, where the BJP won 26.3% of the seats in the recent elections, it lost deposits in only 3.8% of the seats. In Gujarat, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh and Delhi, it did not field even a single seat in the recent elections. Of the 22 states where the BJP won more than 10% of the seats, in 16 it lost its deposit in less than 5% of the seats. So, clearly, the BJP Karnataka results were outliers.
Scatter Plot 3 | In this chart, the circle size corresponds to the number of seats contested by the BJP as a percentage of the available seats in a state. The bigger the circle, the more seats the BJP will have.
Scatter Plot 3 adds another dimension to Scatter Plot 2. As may be noted, the share of seats contested by the BJP in Tamil Nadu was relatively low, due to its alliance equations with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Perhaps because the BJP contested only a select number of seats, it did not lose a single seat despite being a relatively weak party in the southern state.
Chart 4 | The chart shows the seats in which the BJP lost deposits as a share of the seats contested in Karnataka regions.
The BJP lost deposits in 38.4% of the seats it contested in South Karnataka, the highest such share among all regions.
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Source: Political Career Tracker, Trivedi Center of Political Data, Ashoka University
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