Assam’s Lok Sabha: Behind the results

As the results are out and actual vote related data are being crunched, there are some interesting takeaways which need further debates and analysis. These datas are provided by http://www.chanakyaa.com/.

Top Points:

• Every political party of Assam except AIUDF vote share have increased.
• NDA's vote share in Assam increased by 5.3%
• Congress vote share in Assam increased by 4.2%
• AIUDF's vote share in Assam decreased by -6.5%
• Of the AIUDF's migrated vote, 61% have gone to Congress and 39% have gone to NDA.
• NDA did exceptionally well in Barak valley with 18% positive swing.
• In Upper, Assam Congress did well with 8.6% increase while NDA grew by 1.6%.
• In Lower Assam,  NDA gained 3.1% , Congress gained 7.2%

Region wise

We have made three regions for the data analysis. They are Barak Valley, Upper Assam and Lower Assam. The Congress has given some competition to the NDA alliance in both Upper and Lower Assam, but the gape is too wide in Barak Valley, signifying that Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) had a tremendous positive impact in the Barak Valley.  However overall results are too far one-sided with BJP winning 9 leaving 5 to opposition.

Barak Valley

In the Barak Valley, the NDA has a positive swing of 18% and the difference between NDA and Congress was a jaw-dropping 26.1%. Which means not only Bengali Hindus but some section of Muslim too has voted for the BJP.

Moreover, the Congress vote share has gone down by 9% in the Barak valley. It was too much for them hence they lost both the seats and in Karimganj they got turned into a fringe player.

Upper Assam

In the Upper Assam, there is an interesting development .Although the BJP have comfortably won all the four seats of Lakhimpur,Dibrugarh, Jorhat and Tezpur, but behind the façade, the vote shares gives aninteresting twist.

If we take AGP's vote share of 2014 into NDA account, wefind that NDA in 2019 have marginally increased in upper Assam, which is just1.6 per cent.

Contrary to that there is strong gain of the Congress but they could not gain any seatexcept retaining Koliabor. Congress gained a massive positive swing  of 8.6 per cent votes in Upper Assam and thiscould be an anti CAB votes, which the NDA defeated consolidating pro CAB votes.

Lower Assam

The story is quite similar or even rather more interestingin lower Assam, which was never been a BJP stronghold due to large populationof Muslims from Nagaon onward.

Here the NDA has made the growth of 3.1% growth. In contrast, Congress has 7.2% growth which is almost twice the size, Of which 4.3% could be attributed to the migration of votes from AIUDF to Congress. However still another 2.9% increase for Congress. Now can this be attributed to the anti CAB, which has been repeatedly projected as a non issue in the state?

Decadal growth of the BJP

If you see the decadal growth of the both BJP and the Congress, although the latter in the number of seats are touching oblivion, actually they have not only increased their vote share but have also kept the vote base consolidated.

The Congress after reaching the lowest point in 2014 Lok Sabha, has started climbing up from 2016 to 2019 but that is not going to have any major impact in the final result as the BJP's social engineering and the micro management to the booth level have reached a point where conventional politics with emotional rhetoric are out of place to win any elections in foreseeable future in Assam.

(Disclaimer: the basic data are sourced from the www.chanakyaa.com and this write up is written based purely on those data)