The numbers are always large when it comes to Uttar Pradesh (UP). However, the real story can often be found in the finer details. And the 2022 UP assembly elections are no different.
Sure, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has seen its seats come down from 312 in 2017 to 255 this year. But one must go deeper to find if the fall in seats is truly a worry even though it has won a majority on its own, comfortably higher than the 202 seats needed to control the 403-seat assembly.
In 2017, 276 of the 312 seats won by the BJP were by a margin of over 10,000 votes. Of the remaining 36 constituencies in which the saffron party had emerged victorious, it scraped home in five with a margin of fewer than a thousand votes. The victory margin was between 1,000 and 5,000 votes in 18 constituencies and 5,000-10,000 in 13.
The numbers are a little different this time around.
Of the 255 seats the BJP has taken home, eight have been won by a margin of less than a thousand votes. Another 19 have seen the ruling party win by 1,000-5,000 votes, while 36 have been won by a margin of 5,000-10,000 votes.
The number of comfortable victories, loosely defined here as those where the victor ended with at least 10,000 more votes, declined to 192 for the BJP this year.
As was to be expected, the BJP was in for a fight in the constituencies it won narrowly in 2017. Of the 13 seats it had won by fewer than 2,500 votes five years ago, it managed to retain just three, losing eight of the remaining 10 to Samajwadi Party.
If it lost 10 seats it had narrowly won in the last elections, the BJP has managed to wrest away six seats its opponents had just about managed to win.
What clearly seems to have helped the BJP cruise to victory in UP has been its stranglehold over the constituencies it crushed its opponents in 2017. Of the 63 seats it had won in 2017 by over 50,000 votes, the BJP retained 55 and lost a mere eight. It also managed to grab two seats away in this high-win bracket – one each from the Congress and the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party.
In what may be an ominous sign for its rivals, some of BJP's biggest winners from 2017 further extended their lead in 2022.
Sunil Kumar Sharma, who had won from Sahibabad by 1.51 lakh votes in 2017, was re-elected to the legislative assembly by a victory margin of 2.15 lakh – the largest margin in these UP elections. Pankaj Singh, Member of Legislative Assembly from Noida, increased his victory margin to 1.82 lakh from 1.04 lakh.
Overall, if the BJP had won only four seats by a margin of over 1 lakh votes in 2017, it nearly tripled this number to 11 this time around.
It is easy to read too much in the numbers. But lest it is forgotten, Yogi Adityanath is set to become the first chief minister of UP to return to power after serving a full five-year term, with the BJP increasing its vote share to 41.3 percent from 39.7 percent in 2017. Given the record of incumbents in India's most populous state, it is a thumping win in what was identified as one of the key litmus tests for the BJP in the run-up to the 2024 general elections.
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