69 % of Indian voters did not vote for BJP or Modi.

69 % of Indian voters did not vote for BJP or Modi.

The total population of India today is 1.27 billion people. The total electoral is 810,000,000 (810 Milllion people), out of which the total polling percentage in this election was 66.3%, which brings the number of people who voted to roughly 541,000,000 people. The election commission website says that 165,480,309 people voted for the BJP. In other words, the BJP’s vote share in this election hovers around 31% of those who voted.
If you add to the number of people who are not eligible to vote (the very young, the uncounted, the ones who were missing from electoral rolls for some reason) it is clear that Narendra Modi cannot claim to represent a billion Indians. The people who voted for the BJP in this election do not amount to more than 14% of the current Indian population. Is /Was this transformative history in the making (in India/Germany) or is/was this sleight of hand or is/was it both?

Comparison with vote shares of winning tickets in past elections is instructive. In 1977, the Janata Party got 41.1% for 295 seats. If we add the Janata Party’s allies, who took part in the government, it got 52% votes for 345 seats. The combined NDA vote share (BJP + allies) of votes polled in 2014 does not exceed 35%.

Interestingly, in 1977 in the post Emergency election which saw a decisive defeat for the Indira Gandhi regime, her party, the Congress (I) got 34.2% of the vote share, which is 3% more than what the BJP has managed to get in 2014.

In other words, the defeated Congress in 1977 was more representative (if vote shares are assumed to represent the popular will) than victorious BJP’s of 2014. There has been a persistent decline in the ‘representative’ character of elected governments in India over the last twenty five years. But if we take a cold look at the numbers than it is clear that the 2014 elections have given us the least representative government so far.
courtesy Shuddhabrata Sengupta on Kafila.org