Elections 2014: BJP's 31% lowest vote share of any party to win majority

The fact that the BJP has won a majority on its own in the 16th Lok Sabha has, inevitably, drawn comparisons with previous elections in which parties have won a majority of seats on their own. What has not quite figured in most of these comparisons is the fact that no party has ever before won more than half the seats with a vote share of just 31%. Indeed, the previous lowest vote share for a single-party majority was in 1967, when the Congress won 283 out of 520 seats with 40.8% of the total valid votes polled.

This statistical fact points to an important aspect of the latest 'wave'. Far from spelling the end of a fractured polity, the 2014 results show just how fragmented the vote is. It is precisely because the vote is so fragmented that the BJP was able to win 282 seats with just 31% of the votes.

Simply put, less than four out of every 10 votes opted for NDA candidates and not even one in three chose somebody from the BJP to represent them. Those who picked the Congress or its allies were even fewer, less than one in five for the Congress with a 19.3% vote share (which incidentally is higher than the BJP's 18.5% in 2009) and less than one in every four for the UPA. Unfortunately for the Congress, its 19.3% votes only translated into 44 seats while BJP's 18.5% had fetched it 116 seats.

With the combined vote share of the BJP and Congress - the two major national parties - adding up to just over 50%, almost half of all those who voted in these elections voted for some other party. Even if we add up the vote tallies of the allies of these two parties, it still leaves a very large chunk out. The NDA's combined vote share was 38.5% and the UPA's was just under 23%. That leaves out nearly 39% — or a chunk roughly equal to the NDA's — for all others.