With the sweeping victory by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Tripura, the party has now increased its presence to 20 states, independently and through alliances.
Polling for the Tripura Assembly election took place on Tuesday, 27 February.
As reported by The Indian Express, about 70 percent of the Indian population resides within these states. The Congress, in turn, is in power in only four states – Punjab, Karnataka, Mizoram, and Puducherry.
According to The Indian Express report, 67 percent of MPs, who had made their entry into the Lok Sabha in 2014, when the BJP had first come to power, belong to the states where the BJP now holds a dominating presence.
In contrast, the BJP, when it had first come to power in 2014, had held only seven states – Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Nagaland, and Maharashtra. At that time, the Congress still had influence over 13 states.
The Indian Express report mentions that according to 2011 Census, 10 of these states are the most populous in the country, and of them, seven are NDA-ruled. These include Uttar Pradesh (199 million), Maharashtra (112 million), Bihar (104 million), Andhra Pradesh (84 million), Madhya Pradesh (72 million), Rajasthan (68 million), and Gujarat (60 million).
The report further states that the cumulative population of NDA-ruled states is 849,825,030 (70.18 percent of India’s population), which is about nine times of the states – 91,183,794 (7.53 percent of India’s population) – that the Congress and its allies still possess.
Out of these, the report adds, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand and Andhra Pradesh, all currently ruled by the BJP, are considered to be the budding hubs of industrial activity, which again works in the favour of the ruling party, especially in light of the upcoming Lok Sabha polls of 2019.
The BJP’s presence in these states, keeping in mind that the verdict on Nagaland could be in their favour, is significant.
This is because the last time any political party had managed to retain a considerable number of states was the Congress, back in 1994, when they had power in 18 Indian states.
While we wait for the verdict on Meghalaya and Nagaland, one cannot ignore the increasing saffronisation of the country, even in the northeast, which the party has been eyeing for sometime now.
(With inputs from The Indian Express)
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