1 Gujarat has not had a ‘third player’ since 1990

An HT analysis of past election results using the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) database shows that Gujarat saw greater political fragmentation before 1990 than in the period after that. In the 2017 assembly elections, the top two parties in the state, the BJP and the Congress had a combined vote share of 90%. This number has not been lower than 80% in all assembly elections since 1998. Things were very different in the 1990 assembly election when the Janata Dal finished as the largest party, and the BJP and the Congress finished in second and third position. An analysis of pre-1990 assembly elections in Gujarat (the earliest numbers are for 1962) also shows that the combined vote share of the top two parties was lower than 80% in all elections except 1967. A comparison of median Effective Number of Parties (ENOP) – it is the reciprocal of the sum of the squares of vote shares of all candidates in a given constituency, and higher values indicate a multipolar contest – for past assembly elections in Gujarat also supports this argument.