69% of Indian electorate voted against BJP and its allies

Rashmun wrote:BJP and its allies won around 334 seats altogether but only 31% of the voters cast vote in their favor. This is the lowest vote share in the history of the Indian elections for a party which has obtained a majority in terms of number of seats in the Lok Sabha. In contrast, Congress won 20% vote share for its 44 seats. This was pointed out by N Ram in the most recent panel discussion of Rajdeep Sardesai.

But taking the Gopal Gandhi logic of 69 percent rejecting Modi to its logical conclusion, it would still mean that Modi was the politician India objected to the least.  The Congress, with 19.3 percent of the vote, was rejected by over 80 percent of the electorate, the BSP by 96 percent of the electorate. If you consider the point that everyone, from Mulayam Singh to Nitish Kumar to Mamata Banerjee to J Jayalalithaa was also a contender for the PM’s job, one can well say over 95 percent of India rejected them. Only 69 percent “rejected” Modi. (Actually, the figure is 61.8 percent, since the NDA got 38.2 percent of the vote, and all NDA parties accepted Modi as their PM nominee).

Rashmun wrote:The fact that the BJP has won a majority on its own in the 16th Lok Sabha has, inevitably, drawn comparisons with previous elections in which parties have won a majority of seats on their own. What has not quite figured in most of these comparisons is the fact that no party has ever before won more than half the seats with a vote share of just 31%. Indeed, the previous lowest vote share for a single-party majority was in 1967, when the Congress won 283 out of 520 seats with 40.8% of the total valid votes polled.

This statistical fact points to an important aspect of the latest 'wave'. Far from spelling the end of a fractured polity, the 2014 results show just how fragmented the vote is. It is precisely because the vote is so fragmented that the BJP was able to win 282 seats with just 31% of the votes.

Simply put, less than four out of every 10 votes opted for NDA candidates and not even one in three chose somebody from the BJP to represent them. Those who picked the Congress or its allies were even fewer, less than one in five for the Congress with a 19.3% vote share (which incidentally is higher than the BJP's 18.5% in 2009) and less than one in every four for the UPA. Unfortunately for the Congress, its 19.3% votes only translated into 44 seats while BJP's 18.5% had fetched it 116 seats.
With the combined vote share of the BJP and Congress - the two major national parties - adding up to just over 50%, almost half of all those who voted in these elections voted for some other party. Even if we add up the vote tallies of the allies of these two parties, it still leaves a very large chunk out. The NDA's combined vote share was 38.5% and the UPA's was just under 23%. That leaves out nearly 39% — or a chunk roughly equal to the NDA's — for all others.

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