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POLITICS & POWER
A data-centric access to the approaching elections in India.
Politics, in its broadest sense, is the activity through which people make, preserve and amend the general rules under which they live.
But in India, it remains an integral part of our society and culture.
Still how much we understand these elections?
What are the factors that really make or break the results?
Let's take an unconventional approach to understand this election.
After the British exited India in 1947, at 71 years India has come a long way in which the Britishers believed would not survive in its then form. and right now India has evolved into a vibrant Constitutional democracy by being the biggest democratic country which also possesses growth in itself.
And When Considering Growth, Indian political system has also had a major part in it . And especially after the 2014 election, We can see a huge increase in the involvement of people towards the vote.
If you are a beginner or just needed some understanding of Indian politics, I recommend first to understand
Wikipedia - Elections in India
India's semi-final elections, explained in five charts
Now to keep things simple we will focus on analyzing 2019 general elections which in term will decide who will become Prime Minister for the next 5 years.
The Current state of Indian Politics
The last election Contested for Lok Sabha was in 2014, where BJP led NDA party became Majority party and INC led UPA Party Became Minority.
As you can see both NDA and UPA are just collation of multiple parties that try to have a majority vote share in the elections.
We can also observe that majority vote share of NDA was given by BJP and for UPA it was INC. Rest other parties doesn't contribute much comparing to these two parties. So it's safe to say that major elections depend on BJP and INC.
Understanding the Trend
So we understood that BJP led NDA had a major lead in the elections, but if we compare Lok Sabha elections from 1984, we see that 2014 elections were unusual both in terms of vote share and seat share.
From 1984 till 2009 Mostly INC was enjoying as the majority party in Lok Sabha, and when it lost the elections, they were having marginally less vote share than BJP.
Now focus on 2009 and 2014 elections, the gap between vote share and seat share was in favor if INC in 2009 by almost 56% and suddenly in the next 5 years this gap reversed and now BJP was ahead by 146% by INC, Highest votes by BJP and lowest votes by INC.
Understanding 2009 and 2014 elections
Now let's focus more between these two elections because not only the two parties have reversed their ranking, but also by a very big margin.
Comparing previous and this chart, 2014 is the worst performance of INC till now and best for BJP.
On hindi heartland, it managed to gain only 7 seats of 251 in contrast in 2009, it won 98 seats.
Almost all North and Northeastern territory that belongs to INC and some regional states were won by BJP.
The Biggest surprise was UP elections where BJP did well
And Comparing to other regional parties, vote share between 2009 and 2014 hasn't changed much.
This all constitutes one thing. That is BJP gained power only because INC lost power.
How Bjp won in 2014 elections
The general election is not an organizational exercise - it's a mass media exercise
When something huge like this campaign has done then there can't be only one factor to win over this so we will break it and understand only some of its topics.
BJP Successfully projected the "Gujarat model" as a panacea to all problems of India.
An increase of Corruption scandals among INC and revolt of Anna Hazare over INC for Lokpal bill.
The electorate was somehow misled into voting Narendra Modi to power.
At that period INC Leader Rahul Gandhi proved to be incompetent throughout his career.
Use of Social Media and the use of Ads over the internet.
BJP won
BJP lost
BJP did not contest
Social media
Let's understand the social media aspect of these political parties.
Everybody knows that the 2014 social media campaign of BJP was one of the most successful election campaigns in the whole world. Comparing to BJP, INC hadn't kept itself ready to adopt the new social media platforms for their campaign, hence were far off lagging behind in this race.
Rahul Gandhi (Leader of INC) joined Twitter only in April 2015 while Narendra Modi (Leader of BJP) had 16 million followers on social media (Facebook and Twitter) at the time of 2014 elections.
So as of Now, where do they stand?
Comparing BJP and INC social party and their leaders account handle.
No. of Followers
As we can in terms of Followers in Twitter Narendra Modi crushes them all.
Retweets
In No. of Retweets Narendra Modi dominating all of them, but when comparing average no. of retweets per tweet, we see Rahul Gandhi takes the cake.
No. of Likes
The same result was also shown in likes. Based on sheer numbers, Narendra Modi wins, but if we take average likes per tweet, Rahul Gandhi wins.
No. of Followers
In Facebook too Narendra is the most popular person in terms of politics.
No. of Reactions
Here the result is not so similar to Twitter. Here Narendra Modi crushes all both in numbers and also in average reactions per post.
No. of Shares
In terms of shares, we expected that political party pages will gain in numbers, but in average shares per post will go to Narendra Modi.
And rise in Digitization, India witnessed most youth voters in 2014
This all leads to more and more people engaging in politics and these new generation people need to handle by the way of their means of communication.
If the numbers will rise as per the above record, Social media campaigns will become the most influential platform for election campaigns.
Current scenario
As of 2019, Elections have reached their climax scene where total majority party i.e BJP has lost its power in some states where it has lost in some of the states like MP, Rajasthan, and Chattisgarh and INC became a majority party in them.
So overall although BJP is ready to tick almost all of its boxes to make a winning party in General Elections, INC quickly reacted to its loss, thus diversifying their reach.
Closure
In Conclusion, this was merely a simple visualization example of Indian Politics.
In all of my analysis, I have mentioned sources from which data has been captured. Thanks to Lokdahba, Scroll, The Quint and many other sources for analyzing and providing resources of Indian elections for these years.