Down To The Wire

After a tight assembly election, the Congress and the BJP look to mop up the Independents’ vote share

- Rohit Parihar

Over the past 20 years, Rajasthan has witnessed an interesting phenomenon. The party in power in the state assembly has won the most seats in the Lok Sabha election. This has been the case in the three general elections held after 1999. The BJP, which won the 2013 assembly election, swept all 25 Lok Sabha seats in the state in 2014. Now, both the BJP and the Congress, which runs a three-month-old government in the state, are tweaking their strategies and looking to maximise their gains.

A common hunting ground for both parties are the votes Independents and others won in the state polls. In the closely contested 2018 assembly election, Independents and others cornered 22 per cent of the vote share, winning 27 seats. The Congress’s 38.8 per cent vote share was just 0.5 percentage points more than the BJP’s, but it got 100 seats—27 more than the BJP’s tally of 73.