How many seats can the BJP win in 2024?
The Bharatiya Janata Party has won a resounding majority in the Lok Sabha elections. It secured 303 seats on its own, while its allies picked up 49 to take the National Democratic Alliance’s figure to 352. The Congress, on the other hand, won just 52 seats, while its allies won 39, keeping the United Progressive Alliance down to 91.
This article does not intend to make an analysis of states, constituencies, demographics, voter preferences or voting percentages. Instead, we examine a simple question — how many seats can the BJP possibly win in 2024? Simply, we look at the best-case scenario for the BJP in 2024.
(I also plan to publish articles with the kind of analysis mentioned above, or what the Congress needs to do in the next five years, and what we can expect from the Modi government. However, these issues will be examined in separate blog posts).
This question of BJP’s possible seats in 2024 is important because we got it wrong in 2014, and we got it wrong again in 2019. We knew there was a Narendra Modi wave in 2014, but we underestimated the scale of his victory. Most pollsters, apart from Today’s Chanakya, predicted under 280 seats for the NDA in their exit polls, and we as Indians believed that the era of coalition governments was not over despite the Modi wave. We thought the BJP would win about 230 seats at the most. It won 282, and NDA won 336.
In 2019, again, we underestimated the scale of the BJP’s victory. Most exit polls gave the NDA around 300 seats. The BJP however, itself secured 303 seats, and the NDA crossed 350. Once again, Chanakya got it right, and this time India Today did too.
BJP’s massive win in 2019 was due to 1) Its astonishing achievement of repeating its near-clean sweep in the Hindi heartland and in Gujarat from 2014, 2) The amazing performance in West Bengal, where the party secured a staggering 18 seats and destroyed the Left’s anti-Mamata vote, 3) The inroads the party made into Odisha and Telangana, and 4) Its incredible performance in Uttar Pradesh, where the party lost just 11 seats from 2014 despite the two most powerful state parties coming together.
These factors helped the BJP overcome the reversal of the BJP-SAD alliance’s fortunes in Punjab (which was along expected lines). Apart from Punjab, it either held on to its seats or increased them in most other states.
With the overwhelming political machinery the BJP possesses now, and the astute president that Amit Shah is, the sky is the limit for the party. The BJP seems to have employed a conscious strategy over the last five years of building its organisation in states where it is weak, and holding on to its organisational power in states which it swept in 2014. Largely, it has succeeded in doing so.
I say largely and not entirely, because Tamil Nadu and Kerala have again managed to spurn the Modi wave. The BJP won zero seats in Tamil Nadu and the same number in Kerala. In Tamil Nadu the unpopularity of the AIADMK, with which the party was in an alliance, brought about its doom. In Kerala, the Sabarimala campaign helped the BJP increase its vote share, but the anti-Left sentiment generated by Sabarimala saw voters shift to the Congress, not the BJP. The Congress and its allies swept Kerala, winning 19 out of 20 seats.
However, I think the relentless organisational effort the BJP is making in Kerala will pay dividends in 2024. Sabarimala can be a perennial issue especially if the Supreme Court refuses to revise its judgement granting women of menstruating age the right to enter the shrine. However, the BJP cannot rely on a single issue to win it seats in the state. It will be interesting to see what line the party organisation takes in the state, and what issues it pursues over the next five years. However, with good strategies and identifying voter segments to tap into, the BJP could hope to win about 5 seats in Kerala in 2024.
One could conceive of the BJP getting five seats in Tamil Nadu next time, especially if it decides to distance itself from the AIADMK and builds up its organisational strength. However, it would be more difficult to win five seats here than in Kerala, simply because the parties which keep winning and losing are purely regional parties with 50-year-old organisations. On the other hand, in Kerala, a fading Left and a national party, the Congress, have held fort for decades. Could the BJP marginalise the Left in Kerala and then enter a direct contest with the Congress? This is possible, and we have seen enough proof that in straight BJP-Congress contests, the former has been triumphant since 2014.
I also believe the BJP can sweep Odisha in 2024. Its is gathering popularity there, and even during the 2019 polls, voters had been talking about “Modi for PM, Naveen for CM”. But Naveen Patnaik has won a fifth term in the Assembly. Anti-incumbency will eventually set in, and even if he manages to retain the state he could lose the Lok Sabha. So we shall add 10 seats to the eight BJP won in 2019.
In Telangana, the BJP’s performance was surprising as nobody expected it to win more than one seat. It ended up winning four, and could double its tally in 2024.
All other things remaining constant (as they say in physics), the BJP can almost sweep West Bengal in 2024, adding about 15 seats to its tally of 18 this time. Now that the Left vote has transferred to the BJP and Congress is virtually non-existent in the state, expect the BJP to make inroads into the disgruntled Trinamool Congress vote-bank. However, it is possible that the Congress could end up winning part of the TMC vote in 2024, helping it win up to as much as five seats.
Punjab may once again move to the Akali Dal and the BJP, but the BJP being the junior partner here can hope to gain two seats at the most, making it four in 2024.
Can the BJP make a clean sweep of Assam in 2024? It remains to be seen how the party handles the National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Bill issues, and whether it manages to keep its allies. The BJP could add about one seat in 2024, making it 10. We can also assume that the BJP could win the Manohar Parrikar seat it lost in Goa this time, so add one seat in Goa.
It is also possible that the BJP gains about five seats in Andhra Pradesh at the cost of the YSRCP and reduces Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party to zero in 2024. Now that the party has won such a large majority, its bonhomie with the YSRCP is unlikely to last forever. I expect the BJP and the YSRCP to contest against each other in 2024.
It is not necessary to analyse how many seats the BJP could win in states it has either swept (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana etc) or where it won a large majority of the seats (Karnataka, Chhattisgarh). This is because we have begun with “all things remaining constant”, meaning we presume that the BJP maintains its performance from 2019 in 2024 in these states.
So we now get five in Kerala and five in Tamil Nadu (?), 15 in West Bengal, 10 in Odisha, five in Andhra Pradesh, two in Punjab, one in Assam and one in Goa. 5+5+15+10+5+4+2+1+1= 48. Add 48 to 303 and we get 351. The BJP could conceivably win 351 seats in 2024 on its own, and we shall add a positive error of about five to seven seats here (especially for Kerala and West Bengal). This means the BJP could get close to 360 seats in 2024. Along with its NDA allies (assuming, as before, that they have the same allies and they win exactly the same number of seats), the NDA could conceivably easily cross the 400-mark in the 18th Lok Sabha!
Of those, this is just arithmetic, an attempt to show people who believe the BJP has reached its peak in 2019, that they might be wrong — just as they were wrong in 2014. Many factors — the government’s performance, 10 years of incumbency (which means possible voter fatigue and a creeping anti-incumbency), shifting alliances, a change in the BJP’s organisational leadership, or a disastrous policy mistake on the part of Narendra Modi could change BJP’s fortunes for the worse in 2024.
If the Congress finally decides to make drastic changes to its organisation and focus on specific constituencies instead of attempting to appeal to all and sundry, we might see some improvement from their 2019 tally, and this could somewhat cut into the BJP’s votes (and seats). However, I doubt the Congress will cross 100 in 2024 even after these measures. A long, long period of wilderness and struggle is in the works for the party.
