Elections
Lok Sabha election: Some metros veer towards Cong; BJP leads overall
Summary
- Lok Sabha election results: The Bharatiya Janata Party has seen a significant rise in vote shares in 30 constituencies across Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. The vote share was 44% as per latest trends, up from 39% in 2019.
Voters in some of India’s largest metro cities showed significantly increased affinity towards the Congress in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, with the party getting 36.4% in 12 such seats where it contested, as compared to 28.7% in 2019.
These 12 seats were among a select set of 30 seats across six cities considered for this analysis. In the other 18 seats, the Congress did not contest directly; its partners in the INDIA bloc did.
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Overall, in these 30 constituencies, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), too, gained vote share, rising to 41.3% from nearly 39% in 2019 and 32% in 2014, a Mint analysis of the latest data from the Election Commission of India shows.
The 30 seats are spread in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru, and they accounted for nearly 6.2% of all registered electors in the just-concluded Lok Sabha election.
The counting of votes cast in the seven-phase Lok Sabha election took place on Tuesday, and this analysis is based on trends as of 7 pm.
Since the Congress didn’t contest all seats, its overall vote share in the 30 constituencies marginally declined, from 17.8% in the previous national election to nearly 16% as of the latest data. The Congress' vote share had declined from 26% in the 2009 election to 15% in 2014.
The ‘none of the above’ option, which was introduced in a Lok Sabha election for the first time in 2014, has not found too many takers in these cities, getting just 0.8% vote share in 2024 compared to 1% in 2019 and 0.9% in 2014.
However, these figures may not reflect the sentiment of these cities entirely, since they have grappled with declining voter turnouts, particularly this year, a problem flagged by the Election Commission of India as ‘urban apathy’.
Kolkata saw the biggest drop in voter turnout this year, when it fell nearly 4.7 percentage points since 2019, provisional data show. This was followed by Chennai, where the voter turnout fell to 56% from 59.7%. The voter turnout in Delhi dropped from 60.5% to 58.7%. Hyderabad was the only metro city in the analysis to witness a rise in voter participation, but it remains below the majority mark: the turnout rose from 47.4% to 49.7%.
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The list of constituencies covered in this analysis: Secunderabad, Hyderabad and Malkajgiri (Hyderabad); Dum Dum, Diamond Harbour, Barasat, Jadavpur, Kolkata Dakshin, Kolkata Uttar, Howrah and Serampore (Kolkata); all seven constituencies of Delhi; Mumbai North, Mumbai North West, Mumbai North East, Mumbai North Central, Mumbai South Central, Mumbai South (Mumbai); Chennai North, Chennai South, Chennai Central (Chennai); Bangalore North, Bangalore Central, and Bangalore South (Bengaluru).
