The incumbent alliance of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and Congress has trumped the Bharatiya Janata Party-led alliance in the race to form the next government in Jharkhand. Based on the Election Commission of India (ECI) data, here are five charts that capture the election results of Jharkhand, counting for which took place on Saturday.
The incumbent Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) was the single largest party, winning 34 of the 81 seats in the state assembly. It was followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with 21 seats. However, as a combine, the INDIA bloc, led by the JMM and Indian National Congress (INC), won 56 seats. While the INC maintained its tally, the JMM and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) increased their seat count over 2019. The BJP ended up four seats below its 2019 tally.
In terms of alliances, the INDIA bloc was relatively more distributed among partners than the NDA, where the BJP was a significant mainstay. This also reflected in the vote share numbers for the state. The BJP was the leading party, with a vote share of 33.2%. Along with its main ally in the state, the All Jharkhand Students Union Party (AJSUP), this increases to 36.7%.
However, this was lower than the 44.3% vote share that the four main partners of the INDIA bloc had cobbled up. For the INDIA bloc, this is also an increase over the 36.5% total vote share that these four partners secured in the 2019 election.
The alliances worked well for the INDIA bloc, though the INC was the weak link there, relatively speaking. The JMM, which was contesting the maximum seats from the alliance (43), had a strike rate of 79%. The RJD’s strike rate was 57%, while that of the INC was 53%. By comparison, the BJP had a strike rate of 31% and the AJSUP only 10%.
The numbers indicate the absence of close contests, which was also the case in 2019. In 58 of the 81 seats, or about 72%, the difference in margin between the leader and the runner-up was more than 5%. There were only 7 seats where the difference was less than 2%, four of which were won by the BJP. In other words, wherever parties from either alliance were winning or leading, they were doing so more decisively.
For the JMM, in as many as 25 of its 34 seats, its win margin was more than 10%. For the BJP, this was the case in 9 out of its 21 seats.
Jharkhand has a significant population of scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST). Reflecting that, 37 of the 81 seats in the state are reserved for SC and ST candidates. Like last time, these were the seats where the JMM had its biggest haul. In 2019, it won 21 of these 37 seats. In 2024, it won 22 seats. The INC too increased its count on Sc-ST seats, while the BJP saw its count in such seats halve. And the JMM-led INDIA bloc returned to power.
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