By Faisal Fareed, TwoCircles.net
Elections are truly a festival in India. More so, if they are conducted in India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh. With each elections, the figures are rising in Hindi belt and the trend is again expected in 2017.
The last assembly elections in 2012 witnessed participation of 6,839 candidates contesting over 403 assembly seats, even though 5,760 candidates lost their deposits.
But what is equally interesting is that despite over 7.5 crore people casting their vote, the turnout was only 59.4%. The total electorate comprised of over 12 crore voters. It includes about 7 core males and over 5 crore females. Another 3,975 voters are listed as others.
A total of 222 political parties had fielded their candidates, but candidates from only 10 parties managed a win. Besides this, there were 1,691 independent candidates, but only six won.
Political parties hardly care about their vote share barring the few national and state parties who have high stakes. Surprisingly, most of the remaining parties polled less than one percent votes. Only 19 political parties could cross the barrier of one percent of polled votes on the seats they contested. If we extend it to total seats, most of the political parties did not poll even 0.05 percent votes.
A rather worrying trend is that while female participation was high, their representation was not at par. There were a total of 6,839 candidates, but only 420 females. Besides this there were 1,054 candidates from Scheduled Caste category while 163 females from SC community contested the polls.
For the 403 seats, 318 were from general while 85 were reserved for SC category. Uttar Pradesh has no seats reserved for Scheduled Tribe.
The 2012 assembly polls also reflects several important realities. For example, the communist movement is now dead and redundant in Uttar Pradesh. Both CPI and CPM, which are national level parties, failed to secure any positives from the elections. CPI fielded 51 candidates and all lost their deposits, while CPM fielded 17 candidates and 16 of them lost their deposits.
The grand old party Congress too had a bad misfortune in the assembly polls. It contested on 355, seats but its candidates lost deposits in 240 seats and the party won only 28 seats.
BJP, the party which is in power and claims to have highest number of members, too fared badly. It contested on 398 seats and won 47 but surprisingly its 229 candidates lost their deposits.
Even ruling Samajwadi Party which won 224 seats and contested on 401 seats too had forfeited its deposit on 53 seats.
BSP was the only one which contested on all 403 seats, won 80 and forfeited deposits on 51 seats.
Most of the constituencies 227 had more than 15 candidates. Another 161 seats to be precise had between 11-15 candidates while only 15 seats had 6-10 contestants. The maximum number of candidates for one seat was 34, while the minimum was seven on one seat.