Saffron party’s vote share dips by 12%

Geetanjali Gayatri

Chandigarh, June 4

Ahead of the October Assembly poll, the result of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections does not augur well for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state despite the party winning five seats.

Down by an equal number of seats from 2019 when the party made a clean sweep, the BJP won the Karnal, Kurukshetra, Faridabad, Gurgaon and Bhiwani-Mahendragarh seats today, with former Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar netting 5,04,123 votes, defeating his rival Congressman Divyanshu Budhiraja by a margin of 2,32,967 votes to record a convincing win. Naveen Jindal won from Kurukshetra, Rao Indrajeet Singh from Gurgaon, Krishan Pal Gujjar from Faridabad and Mohan Lal Badoli from Sonepat.

The BJP had a vote percentage of 58.208 per cent when it won all 10 seats while it stands at 46.11 per cent in the results declared today. The saffron party is down by nearly 12 per cent.

The anti-incumbency against the 10-year rule in the state, the rural distress and the anti-farmer sentiment which resulted in protests in the khap-supported Jat belts, growing unemployment, the fallout of the Agniveer scheme and the timing of the change of Chief Minister in the state seem to have weighed heavily against the BJP. It seems the party failed to consolidate the non-Jat vote bank and urban population in its favour.

Though the party and its leadership were not expecting a repeat performance since the BJP could only have gone down from the high of 2019, sources in the party said that the leadership got wind of the growing disillusionment on the ground from the multiple surveys it carried out through private agencies.

“We have done better than what we initially expected despite all the talk of anti-incumbency. Though the numbers are down, this mandate will push us to prepare for the Assembly poll in advance,” a senior party leader said.

With the Assembly elections four months away, the BJP will have to pull up its socks and redraw its strategy especially now since a resurgent Congress poses a bigger challenge. In the 2019 Assembly election, the BJP only cobbled together a majority by entering into a post-poll alliance with the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP). The going is likely to be tougher for the BJP this Assembly poll.