Behind Congress’s shock defeat in Haryana
In 11 seats where Congress finished second, Independents finishing third polled more votes than party's margin of defeat. In a few seats, AAP got more votes than defeat margin of Congress.
New Delhi: If the INDIA bloc had stayed together in the Haryana assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would have fallen short of the majority mark of 46 seats, an analysis of the state’s poll verdict shows.
Four candidates of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and one of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar) secured more votes than the Congress candidates’ margins of defeat. If these candidates were not in the fray, the BJP’s tally would have come down to 45 from 48.
The Congress has rejected the Haryana verdict, calling it an outcome of “manipulation and subterfuge”, but what also really appears to have hurt the party is a clutch of strong Independents, which include at least two Congress rebels and many faces with past ties with the party.
A third Congress rebel went on to win. Rajesh Joon, who contested as an Independent from the Bahadurgarh seat after being denied a ticket by the party, won the seat handsomely by 41,999 votes. On Wednesday, Joon joined the BJP.
The Congress also suffered to some extent due to the AAP, its INDIA bloc ally, which may have cornered a vote share of just 1.79 percent but polled enough votes in three seats to pave the way for the BJP to race ahead and helped the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) win in one. The INLD itself played spoiler for the Congress in three seats.
Political analyst Asim Ali told ThePrint that while the Congress and BJP got similar vote shares—39.09 percent and 39.94 percent respectively—in terms of the median vote share, which refers to the vote share minus the outliers where the margins of victory and loss are too high, the BJP had an edge.
“Seen from that angle, the BJP led the Congress by five percentage points. It means that the Independents and the INLD and BSP clearly played a factor. And naturally, the ticket distribution of the Congress, handled by the Bhupinder Singh Hooda faction, will come under question. That resulted in dissidence and the decision of some of these faces to contest independently,” Ali said.
In Ambala Cantt, for instance, the BJP’s Anil Vij scraped through. But it was Congress rebel Chitra Sarwara, who was also expelled by the party, who finished second, losing by a margin of 7,277 votes. The official candidate of the Congress, Palvinder Pal Pari, was placed third, over 45,000 votes behind Vij.