Insights into Indian Elections 2019 — the representatives

A look at the newly elected Members of Parliament of India

India voted over a period of 6 weeks to elect its new parliament. With over 900 million eligible voters, one can imagine the scale of the election operations. It is highly commendable that the Indian Election Commission has ensured a mostly smooth process at that scale. Given India is one of the few countries that uses Electronic Voting Machine at scale, a new system to audit the votes was piloted to maintain the integrity of the election outcome.

I followed the elections and the results mostly through the opinions on Twitter and News. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the election outcome from publicly available data and derive my own insights.

Please reach out if you have any questions/thoughts/criticisms about any of the things that follow. I would encourage you to do your own analysis. Download the dataset of the candidates here. Details on how I constructed the dataset coming soon.

Basics

• Across 541 constituencies, an astounding 613,133,300 votes were counted in all.
• Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won with a simple majority of 303 out of 541 constituencies, and Indian National Congress (INC) has 52 MPs — 3 short of being recognised as an opposition party in the parliament.
• The winning BJP MPs alone amassed an impressive 192,151,673 votes in all (31% of all votes counted in the entire country).
• Only 1% of all the votes (6,514,558) were for None of the above option (NOTA)

Decisiveness

In all, 341 of 541 MPs won with more than half of all votes cast for them in their constituencies. i.e. 60% won without the problems in first past the post system.

Darshana Vikram Jardosh of BJP from Surat, Gujarat won with the highest percentage of votes (74.47%), whereas Mohammad Akbar Lone of Jammu & Kashmir National Conference party won with the least votes percentage (29.29%)

There were 26 constituencies with a close call i.e. MPs who won with less than 1% vote difference to the runner up. In Machhlishahr of Uttar Pradesh, the candidate Bholanath of BJP won with a mere 181 vote difference (0.02%).

On the big winning margins, 92 candidates won with more than 30% vote difference to the runner up. The highest winning margin goes to C. R. Patil of BJP from Navsari, Gujarat who won with 52.7% difference.

The absolute number of votes doesn’t hold much significance as it is dependant on the constituency’s population size. But as a vanity metric, Shankar Lalwani of Indore, Madhya Pradesh won with 1.06M votes and Mohammed Faizal from Lakshadweep won with just 22.8K votes.

Let’s take a dive into the attributes of the MPs.

Age

The median age of the MPs is 55 years — 3 decades more than 25, the median age of the country. Only 2.5% of the elected MPs fall around the median age. While people may not have voted with age in mind, and age can be argued for experience, however, purely from the representation point of view 2.5% looks skewed — especially in India where half of its population is below the age of 25.

The youngest MP is Chandrani Murmu, an engineering graduate from Keonjhar constituency in the state of Odisha. She is 25, which is the minimum age to contest in the elections.

60 Years of age is the age of retirement for Indian government officials. 177 of 541 MPs (1 in 3) are above the retirement age.

The oldest MP is Dr. Shafiqur Rehman Barq (88 years) from Sambhal constituency of Uttar Pradesh. 55% of all votes cast in his constituency were for him.

Declared assets

The assets declared show that MPs are a lot richer than and far removed from the rest of the country. The median asset value of MPs is around USD688,000. Median wealth (closest I could find to assets) of Indian adults is USD1,289. 90% of India’s adult population holds wealth below USD10,500 individually. Only 1.5% of MPs hold wealth below USD10,000.

There are 225 millionaires (USD) in the Indian parliament, and a stunning 475 are crorepatis (INR). With 40% of MPs being millionaires, I wonder how they could connect with or represent an average Indian’s interest.

The richest MP is Nakul Kamal Nath from Chhindwar, Madya Pradesh, with assets over USD90M. The MP with the lowest declared asset is Goddeti Madhavi from Aruku, Andhra Pradesh — inline with an average Indian.

There are 4 MPs in financial debt i.e. liabilities greater than assets. Surprisingly, all of them are in debt of more than USD1M.

Education

Educational qualification beyond basics may not be a necessary factor for representation. On the whole, the MPs are fairly educated. 72% of MPs have at least an undergrad degree.

Profession

About 150 of the current MPs have declared themselves as full time politicians. Their profiles are skewed towards agriculture (though highly likely they don’t farm or oversee any farm themselves), owning a business or being a social worker.

Declaring yourself as a farmer or a social worker acts just as an appeal factor, perhaps. E.g. Amit Shah who is the president of BJP and is a prominent figure in the national scene has declared his profession as “Social Worker & Agriculture”.

Amusingly Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur from Bhopal, Madya Pradesh has declared her profession as ‘beggar’ (Hindu significance here).

Criminal cases

40% of MPs (214) have criminal cases registered against them. While most of the cases are pending and a lot of them do not have charges framed against them or convicted, it would be interesting to see nature of cases against them.

| IPC  | Count |              IPC Description              |
|------|-------|-------------------------------------------|
| 188  |    99 | Disobedience to order duly                |
|      |       | promulgated by public servant.            |
| 147  |    87 | Punishment for rioting.                   |
| 149  |    80 | Every member of unlawful assembly         |
|      |       | guilty of offence committed in            |
|      |       | prosecution of common object.             |
| 143  |    73 | Punishment.                               |
| 506  |    68 | Punishment for criminal intimidation.     |
| 353  |    64 | Assault or criminal force to deter        |
|      |       | public servant from discharge of his duty.|
| 341  |    57 | Punishment for wrongful restraint.        |
| 120B |    56 | Punishment of criminal conspiracy.        |
| 427  |    54 | Mischief causing damage to the            |
|      |       | amount of fifty rupees.                   |
| 34   |    52 | Acts done by several persons in           |
|      |       | furtherance of common intention.          |

Most of the cases are related to public assembly, rioting, resisting arrest — which I guess is a good thing. Unlawful intimidation being high on the list is concerning. On the serious side of crimes, 3 of them have sexual offence cases against them and 7 are charged with kidnapping for murder or ransom.

Party affiliation

As mentioned earlier, BJP blows out the chart in the number of MPs they’ve secured.

Removing the BJP to take a closer look..

After INC, the next chunk is all regional parties in their own states. e.g. Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, All India Trinamool Congress in West Bengal.

Only 4 MPs out of 541 are independents, though 3 of them are soft-backed by BJP or INC . If you want to be a representative of any constituency, there is no choice but to be associated with a political party.

Coming up next

Thank you for reading. Upcoming posts will be the analysis on all the candidates, how each political party fared, and how the dataset was derived.

Please comment or reach out if you have any questions/thoughts/criticisms about any of the things above. I would also encourage you to do your own analysis. Download the dataset of the candidates here.

Thanks to Suman Hiremath for helping me proof read this, Nishanth Sudharsanam for catching the error in India’s median age.