While the debate is still on about what caused the Trinamul Congress increase its tally of seats from the 2019 tally and why the Bharatiya Janata Party lose its share of seats, Prof Asis Mistry, Calcutta University says there are that first-time voters have played a role, both in national and state level to defeat the BJP and the Trinamul Congress successfully managed to hold on to its women voters with the hike in Lakshmir Bhandar money.
Pointing out another important observation about the saffron party, Prof Mistry said, “In 2014, nationally BJP’s vote share was 31 per cent but they won with majority because they managed to ‘play’ with the Opposition. In 2019, they ‘managed’ the Opposition. This time, they wanted to ‘govern’ (or mal-govern) the opposition. Examples are, sending opposition CMs to jail and defending their own party leaders despite their glaring offences. This is called post-democratic syndrome. This was first coined in Britain by Colin Crouch. He said this is an evolving trend and it has now been seen in India. Institutions are being moulded. Within democracy, an undercurrent of authoritarian tendency could be seen. This is called ‘governing the Opposition’.”
Around 22 lakh first-time voters were added in the voters list in 2024. This section has not voted for the BJP, feels the political science professor.
He explains that there was 6 per cent addition of first-time voters (18-25 years). Their performance in the seats with less margin of victory played a major role. “The young voters were a lot influenced by YouTube influencers. This played a role in swinging votes against the BJP.”
Explaining further, the professor said that nationally, in the 2019 polls, there were 97 seats, where the margin of victory was less than 5 per cent. BJP won 41 of these seats. This time, of these seats, the BJP retained only seven. Taking a sample of 22 seats out of those 97 seats, the professor found that not only the BJP lost these seats, it lost by a good margin. And, he feels the young voters played a role in these seats.
“In the 2021 election, TMC’s vote share was 48.02 per cent. In this LS election TMC pooled 45.76 per cent votes share. So, we see TMC’S vote share has come down. In 2019 TMC’s vote share was 43.7 per cent, which means vote share rise for TMC is only 2.06 per cent. Whereas the Left and Congress combined vote share has been reduced by 1.4 per cent, while we were expecting Left vote share to go up this time. BJP’s vote share has remained more or less intact. They lost only 1.87 per cent,” said Prof Mistry.