Excluding rebels, BJP's Lok Sabha tally dips to 272 after Kairana, Bhandara-Gondiya loss

BJP

The Bharatiya Janata Party suffered a setback today after it failed to retain the Kairana (Uttar Pradesh) and Bhandara-Gondiya (Maharashtra) Lok Sabha seats.

The electoral defeat brings down the ruling party's tally in the lower house to 274. Not counting party rebels Shatrughan Sinha and Kirti Azad, the BJP's strength is effectively 272. (This includes the seat of the Lok Sabha speaker, Sumitra Mahajan, whose office is generally considered 'apolitical'.)

In other results from the Lok Sabha bypolls today, the BJP won from the Palghar seat in Maharashtra while the BJP’s ally NDPP won the Nagaland constituency. Elections were necessitated in Nagaland when Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio resigned from the Lok Sabha earlier this year.

A series of defeats in by-elections coupled with a few resignations have led to the saffron party’s numbers coming down in the Lok Sabha. The BJP had won 282 seats in the 2014 general elections. Including support from its allies, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had 336 seats.

The recent dip in BJP’s numbers was caused by the resignation of BS Yeddyurappa and B Sriramulu when both of them became Members of Legislative Assembly in the Karnataka Elections that were concluded last week.

The BJP MP from Darbhanga (Bihar), Kirti Azad, has been suspended from the party in December 2015 for accusing Finance Minister Arun Jaitley of corruption in the DDCA scam. Shatrughan Sinha, a BJP MP from Patna Sahib Constituency (Bihar), is also being seen as a rebel.

Further, in the last four years, the BJP has lost Lok Sabha bypolls in Ratlam (Madhya Pradesh), Gurdaspur (Punjab), Alwar and Ajmer (Rajasthan) and Phulpur and Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh). This takes away six seats from the BJP’s original tally.

The BJP has also faced trouble from allies recently. The Shiv Sena with 18 seats has been very vocal about their disenchantment with the BJP and even contested against their ally from Palghar constituency. Similarly, N Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which has 16 Lok Sabha seats, walked out of the NDA earlier this year.

However, the NDA still is comfortably placed on numbers in the lower house.