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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Bihar surprise: Biggest landslide with smallest share of votes

Bihar surprise: Biggest landslide with smallest share of votes

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published Published on Nov 26, 2010   modified Modified on Nov 26, 2010

The Nitish Kumar-led JD(U)-BJP alliance has won more than four-fifths of the Bihar assembly seats, but there is one unusual aspect to this landslide. The alliance got a little less than two-fifths of the votes cast.

Why should this be unusual? Check out the accompanying chart and you will find that other wins of similar magnitude in terms of seats have invariably been the result of substantially larger vote shares.

The comparisons with Sikkim or Tripura may seem misplaced given the much smaller size of these states. Similarly, the 1987 Jammu & Kashmir elections, which the National Conference and Congress fought as an alliance may seem an unfair yardstick given the doubts about the fairness of those polls.

However, even in a larger state like West Bengal, the massive verdict in favour of the Left Front government in 2006 was based on a vote share of nearly 50%. Similarly, when Rajiv Gandhi won a landslide in 1984 riding the crest of the sympathy wave generated by the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Congress polled almost half of all votes cast.

Both these landslides have been dwarfed by the NDA's victory in the Bihar assembly polls, where the ruling combine won an astounding 85% of all the seats.

How is this possible with a vote share of under 40%? To put the apparent surge in favour of the Nitish-led alliance in perspective, its vote share in the latest elections was barely 2.9% higher than in the 2005 assembly polls, up from 36.2% to 39.1%. Creditable as it is for an incumbent government, that is hardly the kind of swing that would normally deliver such a huge swing in terms of seats.

What really made the difference was the complete collapse of the major opposition alliance. In 2005, that consisted of Lalu Prasad's RJD, the Congress, CPM and NCP. Between them, these four parties had polled 31.1% of the votes, just 5% less than the JD(U)-BJP combine. This time round, the main opposition alliance was the RJD-LJP combine, which together polled only 25.6% of the votes.

As a result, the gap between the NDA and its biggest rival went from 5.1% in 2005 to 13.5% in the latest elections. Much of this was a result of a drastic decline in the votes of both the RJD, down from 23.5% to 18.6%, and the LJP, from 11.1% to 6.7%. In short, the swing against the Lalu-led alliance was much sharper than the swing in favour of the Nitish-led one and that is what caused the landslide.


The Times of India, 26 November, 2010, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Bihar-surprise-Biggest-landslide-with-smallest-share-of-votes-/articleshow/6991340.cms


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