A+| A| A-
Karnataka Assembly Elections
The May 2013 election to the Karnataka legislative assembly saw the Congress decisively beat the Bharatiya Janata Party. Apart from the ruling party's many misdeeds, what worked against it in a big way was that the minorities, Other Backward Classes, and dalits swung back to their traditional platform, the Congress.
The result of the Karnataka assembly elections of May 2013 proved yet again that local issues dominate regional politics more than national ones and that misgovernance translates into anti-incumbency votes. It also proved that the electoral arithmetic changes when social groups return to their original fold. This election saw the return of minorities, Other Backward Classes (OBCS) and dalits (MOD), or what is now called AHINDA, to the Congress and the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The Congress is back in power after a gap of seven years, having won 121 seats, a gain of 41 seats over what it had in the last assembly. Nonetheless, its share of the vote did not increase much – only by 2.49 percentage points. In the assembly election of 2008, it received 35.50% of the total votes and this time it secured 37.99%. The BJP’s two-digit tally of 40 seats was humiliating for a party that had boasted of forming a saffron government on its own in south India for the first time in 2008. In the 2008 election, it won 110 seats with 33.86% of the votes. This now declined to 19.95% – a loss of 13%.
Dear Reader,
Or
To gain instant access to this article (download).
(Readers in India)
(Readers outside India)
