The rural-urban divide in
Gujarat has become even sharper in these elections than five years ago. Consider this. Of the 39 urban seats, BJP won 33,
Congress just six; of the 45 'rurban' seats, BJP won 26 and Congress 18. But of the 98 rural seats in the state, BJP won a mere 39, Congress and its allies 55.
Interestingly, BJP's vote share was higher than Congress's in each of these three groups of seats, though the gap was narrowest in the rural seats and most pronounced in the purely urban ones where it got 59.2% versus its rival's 35.5%.
BJP managed to enhance its vote share over the 2012 levels in urban, rurban and rural seats, though in each case they were below the 2014 levels. However, with Congress also improving its share, the saffron party ceded a little ground compared to five years ago even in the urban and rurban seats, where it had won 35 out of 39 and 30 out of 45 respectively last time.
But what explains BJP winning far fewer rural seats despite a clearly higher vote share? Unfortunately for the party, a lot of the votes were used up in chalking up huge victories. Thus in the 39 rural seats it won, BJP had an average margin of nearly 18,000. In contrast, Congress had an average margin of just under 13,000 in the 52 seats it won. As many as 11 of the 52 seats were won by margins of under 5,000.
The same pattern held for the rurban seats too, with BJP averaging margins of over 26,000 in its 26 wins while the Congress average just about 14,000 in its wins. As a result, the six percentage point gap between the two parties did not quite deliver as much to the BJP as it typically would have in a bipolar situation.
In the urban areas, too, the average margin of BJP wins was way higher than that of Congress, but here the difference in vote share of almost 24 percentage points was just too much to allow Congress to benefit from a more even spread of its votes.
TOI photo by Rajesh Mehta.
