GHMC results analysis: part 1

Background

Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) was formed in 2007 by amalgamating the erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) and 12 neighboring municipalities. GHMC's geographic extent covers around 626 square km spread over 3 districts, 24 assembly constituencies and 5 Loksabha constituencies.

The first elections to the reconstituted corporation were held in 2009. The next elections should have been conducted when its term expired in 2014. There was a good deal of delay accompanied by litigation, media posturing & soundbytes. The much anticipated elections were notified on January 12, 2016.

Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), the ruling party in Telangana, the main opposition party Congress as well as All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (Majlis or MIM) decided to fight the polls on their own. Telugu Desham Party (TDP), the ruling party in neighboring Andhra Pradesh (AP) state and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the central ruling party continued their alliance forged in 2014 under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) umbrella albeit in a partially successful form. YSR Congress party (YCP), the main opposition in AP, decided to abstain from contesting, probably a wise decision in hindsight.

The ensuing campaign was quite colorful and kept media folks extremely busy. TRS virtually painted the city pink by putting up huge posters listing the achievements claimed by the state government at almost all important intersections. TDP came a somewhat distant second in the war for eyeballs while the other parties "also ran".

Kalvakuntla Chandrashekar Rao (KCR), TRS strongman and Telangana Chief Minister, mostly stayed away restricting himself to a lone public meeting and a long press conference (described as "e-campaign") beamed live in many channels. The campaign mantle fell on his son & cabinet colleague Kalvakuntla Taraka Rama Rao (KTR) who took the lead by hitting the road from dawn to dusk. Several leaders including ministers, members of parliament (MP) & legislators toiled along contributing their mite.

Nara Chandra Babu Naidu, TDP president and AP Chief Minister, played a more active role in the campaign than his Telangana counterpart addressing two public meetings and participating in a few roadshows. The star campaigner for NDA however was Naidu's son Nara Lokesh Babu who gave KTR a run for his money both in terms of working hours and media exposure. Several TDP & BJP leaders including virtually the entire AP cabinet worked hard for their candidates.

Even though the Congress election campaign was comparatively subdued, there was no dearth of optimism in the statements of party leaders. Majlis preferred to stick to its traditional low key style concentrating on corner meetings and door-to-door canvassing.

KTR in his campaign focused heavily on the same government achievements highlighted in the posters. Lokesh preferred to claim his party had done wonders for Hyderabad during its past rule. In a rather interesting but irritating vein he repeated ad nauseum "my grandfather beautified the Tankbund while my father built Hitec city". BJP's refrain centered on the central government's performance and assertions that the TRS government's claimed achievements were funded by the center. Congress chose the TDP path of "we developed Hyderabad during our rule". I wonder if any of these folks or the media realized the elections were for the corporation, not the assembly or Loksabha.

As one would expect in the roadshow map, the speeches were short and more or less repetitions. The media did not appear to mind though. There was near zero coverage of Majlis activities: a fact almost certainly dominated by the viewer profile undeterred by ground realities J

The elections conducted on February 2, 2016 passed off uneventfully but for a handful of minor incidents with a lone ward (ward # 52 Puranapool) needing a repoll. The votes were counted and results declared on February 5, 2016.

Objectives of this analysis

Various opinion polls were conducted in the run-up to the elections followed by several exit polls. As per a practice that looks to be peculiar to the Indian landscape, none of the agencies provided any reasonable information on the methodology including sampling.

The general thrust of most of these polls was that TRS would emerge a clear leader with 75-85 wards followed by Majlis (40-45 wards), NDA (20-25 wards) and Congress (10-15 wards) in that order with other minor parties and/or independents cornering a couple of wards. KTR & several TRS leaders repeatedly claimed during the campaign they would win 100+ wards inviting much debate.

The actual results, while reiterating TRS ascendancy & Majlis turf maintenance, proved the pollsters wrong by a good margin. Let me repeat the final numbers for the record even though all readers know these well:

·         TRS: 99

·         Majlis: 44

·         NDA: 5 (BJP: 4 plus TDP: 1)

·         Congress: 2

I would imagine the results call for certain amount of analysis by the pollsters. If any of these worthies did analyze the results to see where they went wrong, they chose not to share this information.

This apart, there are various reasons why the results needs to be analyzed gainfully given the historical nature of the outcome. For starters, this is the first time in the living memory of all but elderly Hyderabadis that the city conferred an absolute majority on any single party or even an alliance. The sheer sweep of the TRS victory deserves to be understood much better than is conveyed by the cold numbers. Finally for a party that skipped the first GHMC elections in 2009, this is a true a rags-to-riches story.

Some of the questions I will try to answer are as follows:

·         What is the true scope of this victory?

·         What does the future portend for TDP, BJP & Congress in Hyderabad or even Telangana?

·         What is likely to happen if assembly & Loksabha elections are held today?

·         How the inter-party NDA dynamics playing out?

·         How did the Hyderabadi vote swing in the last few years?

·         Finally the reasons behind this verdict to the extent they can be ascertained

I realize any findings that emerge will only have a limited term shelf life, probably a couple of years. A detailed analysis is nevertheless necessary in my opinion given the historic nature of the result.

General overview

A total of 1,333 candidates contested in the 150 wards. Eight wards recorded the lowest contestant count of 4 candidates. Jangammet (ward # 45) topped the list with 28 candidates followed by the 21 aspirants fighting it out at Suraram (ward # 129).

In terms of electorate, Subashnagar (ward # 130) led the way with 89,158 electors while Mehdipatnam (ward # 70) was the baby of the pack with just 29,853 electors. Mehdipatnam also recorded the fewest voters at 10,046 while the 39,010 voters of ward # 59 Mailardevpally recorded the highest vote count. Mehdipatnam had a bad day as it also recorded the lowest turnout of 33.7% followed closely by ward # 73 Vijay Nagar Colony (34.5%). Patancheru (ward # 113) was the champion in turnout with 57.7% of its electors going out to vote with Ramanthapur (ward # 9) doing quite well at 57.6%. The overall turnout was 45.1%, a number that was claimed (wrongly as it turns out) by media & observers as quite creditable.

A total of 20 political parties were in the fray. Independents totaling 643 in all polled around 4.5%. All political parties excluding the five principal contestants failed to breach the 1% mark. TRS was the only party to field candidates from all 150 wards while Congress just behind having missed Chawni (ward # 29). Majlis, in a strategy that appears to have worked well for them, entered the fray in just 60 wards.

As mentioned earlier, the alliance between TDP & BJP did not work out as well as the leaders may have hoped. The two parties indulged in "friendly contests" in as many as 13 wards. Rather strangely both the parties failed to nominate candidates in three wards including Chawni.

Loksatta party (LSP), an unrecognized political party founded and led by ex-bureaucrat Dr. Nagabhairava Jaya Prakash Narayan, formed an alliance with the two communist parties, a strange right-left combination. This alliance contested 68 wards but did not otherwise trouble the statisticians as their combined vote tally stayed under the 1% mark.

Twelve candidates secured single digit votes while 467 others fell short of three digits. Fortunately for me & my fellow analysts no contestant was out for a duck thus saving us from division by zero spreadsheet problems! As many as 1,013 individuals lost their deposit.

All but nine of the 320 aspirants that retained their deposits hailed from the five major parties. Three of these belonged to the Majlis Bachao Tehreek (MBT), a party formed two decades ago by breaking away from the Majlis. Five independents and a lone communist also retained their deposits. It may be possible that some of these so called "independents" were party rebels but I found this difficult to verify.

Overall analysis

The most important statistic (in fact more important than wards won) is obviously vote share. The highly concentrated Majlis performance is a peculiarity associated with Hyderabad that needs to be addressed for a better understanding. I therefore also calculated vote share performances in the 44 wards Majlis won and the 106 it lost separately. The results are tabulated below:

	All (150)	Majlis (44)	Others (106)
TRS	43.7%	22.5%	50.5%
MIM	15.8%	57.1%	2.6%
TDP	13.1%	3.6%	16.1%
BJP	10.3%	6.3%	11.6%
INC	10.4%	5.2%	12.0%
OTH (others)	6.6%	5.2%	7.1%

The implications are clear: TRS not only swept the non-Majlis wards but also put in a creditable performance in the Majlis wards outperforming all other competitors put together. A 50%+ vote share in a three horse (TRS, NDA & Congress) race is as near a landslide as one can imagine.

Let us look at the 2014 elections to put the above in perspective. In what was clearly a three horse race TRS polled 46.1% of the votes in the five North Telangana districts with its best performance at 48.3% in the Karimnagar district. In the virtually direct contest with YCP in AP, NDA polled just around 46.9%. The 50.5% share TRS achieved in the 106 non-Majlis wards is not only its best performance ever but would have fetched dramatic windfall even if the contest was, like the AP situation in 2014, limited to just two parties.

As the usefulness of the OTH category is exhausted, I am dropping these folks going forward. I will also club the two NDA "allies" assuming that the votes cast for either party as the alliance vote. I will return to treating TDP & BJP separately when I analyze the inter-party NDA dynamics.

The number of votes polled in a given ward is clear indication of popularity. The party wise performance across vote bands is given below:

	< 100	< 1k	1-2,000	2-5,000	5-10k	10-15k	> 15k
TRS	0	3	6	19	36	71	15
MIM	0	2	4	4	27	20	3
NDA	1	17	14	49	70	8	1
INC	1	37	36	59	16	0	0

Raziya Begum, the Congress candidate from Erragadda (ward # 101) earned the dubious distinction of polling the least votes among major party nominees. Her 64 votes represented a grand total of 0.3% in the ward! Another 37 of her colleagues failed to cross three digits.

Siraj Sultana, TDP nominee from Talab Chanchalam (ward # 34) ended up being the only other major party nominee to poll two digit votes. Another 17 of her NDA colleagues fell below the century mark. Majlis (2 nominees) and TRS (3 candidates) acquitted themselves reasonably well in the fight for the rock bottom status.

Mehdipatnam hit another record low in this election as the 5,356 votes polled by the Majlis candidate and former Mayor Mohammed Majid Hussain was the lowest winning performance. We can therefore reasonably conclude that any candidate polling less than 5,000 votes stood no chance of making it through while those polling 10,000 votes can consider themselves definitely in the running.

With the above perspective it is evident just 6% of the TRS candidates and 10% of the Majlis nominees can be regarded as no-hopers. A fifth of the NDA aspirants and almost half the Congress folks were doomed to fail.

Around 57% of the TRS candidates and a third of the Majlis nominees, on the other hand, did sufficiently well at the hustling to expect a reasonably good chance of winning. The corresponding number for NDA was under 6% while not a single Congress aspirant came close to the "expectation threshold".

Performance by vote share is another useful indicator. The party wise results showing the number of wards against vote share is shown below.

	<10%	10-20%	20-30%	30-40%	40-50%	50-60%	> 60%
TRS	9	12	10	29	32	50	8
MIM	6	4	4	7	11	11	17
NDA	31	42	53	25	7	2	0
INC	82	52	11	4	0	0	0

The implications are again obvious. TRS failed to cross the 20% threshold in only a seventh of the wards it contested while Majlis at one-sixths did only slightly worse. The corresponding number for NDA was 45.7% (73 out of 160 candidates) while Congress put in a pathetic performance with 89.9% of its candidates falling short of the 20% threshold.

On the other side almost 60% of the TRS candidates breached the 40% mark that can be considered reasonably winnable in a three horse race. Given its strategic selective focus Majlis did even better at 64.9%. The news for NDA was not good as just 9 of its nominees reached this "comfort level" while Congress's tally was a grand duck.

Retaining or losing the security deposit is closely related to the percent of votes polled by candidates running for office. This system was originally designed to keep fringe and/or flippant individuals from contesting although it does not appear to have succeeded in its objective. Let us now check how each party fared in this regard by comparing deposit forfeitures:

·         TRS: 16 (10.7%)

·         Majlis: 10 (16.7%)

·         NDA: 56 (35.0%)

·         Congress: 126 (84.6%)

Turns out more than a third of NDA contestants and all but a eighth of the Congress folks should not even have run given their poor showing J

Looking at a different angle, Majlis outperformed all the other four major parties put together in 30 of the 44 wards it won, nearly a two-thirds credit. TRS did so in as many as 75 wards i.e. three-quarters victory run. In addition, TRS scored more than the combined votes of its three "traditional rivals" in another 38 wards winning 4 and conceding the other 34 to Majlis.

BJP was the only other party that could repeat this feat in just one instance (ward # 50, Begum Bazar). The party also outscored all "traditional rivals" in Ghansi Bazar (ward # 49).

The majority scored by the winner provides an indication of the party strength in its strongholds. The party wise performance across majority bands is given below:

	<100	< 1k	1-5k	5-10k	> 10k
TRS	1	4	31	54	9
MIM	1	5	14	17	7
NDA	0	1	3	1	0
INC	0	1	1	0	0

D. Mohan contesting on Majlis ticket from Jambagh (ward # 77) won with just 9 votes majority over his TRS rival. TRS nominee from Goshamahal (ward # 51, 78 vote majority) was the only one keeping him company in the sub-century majority category. Samala Hema of the TRS contesting from Seetaphalmandi (ward # 55) was the star performer of the day with a majority of 15,180 votes. The fact that her overall count of 19,533 votes was the highest in the election makes her an undisputed champion!

This reinforces the findings so far. Around 64% of the TRS winners and 55% of the Majlis victors crossed the 5,000 vote majority mark while a handful of winners from either party scraped through the barrel.

Did the winners excessively focus on winnable seats to maximize their opportunities? If yes, this would reflect in the rank they scored in the wards they did not win. TRS stood second in a quarter of seats they contested while ranking third in just under 7% wards. The party fell to the forth place in just 3 wards. Majlis did somewhat under perform vis-à-vis TRS with 11 of their 60 contestants placed third or fourth.

NDA acquitted itself reasonably well (fourth place or lower in 25 wards) compared to Congress that bagged the dubious "honor" in as many as 57 wards.

Conclusions

The TRS victory can be termed truly historic from all the investigated angles. The party scored an emphatic victory in all areas except those dominated by Majlis and acquitted itself commendably even in the 44 wards won by Majlis. It is not easy to dismiss the phrase "Tsunami of votes" used by some observers out of hand. Perhaps this is an exaggeration but not really much of it.

Majlis did exceptionally well but this appears to be a habit with them. Predictably well just about sums up their performance!

The much heralded NDA received a drubbing they will not forget so easily. The best its leadership can claim is that they did not perform as pathetically as the Congress. Given that they were virtually claiming to be the front-runner as recently as a couple of months ago, this does not wash so well J

Congress appears to have hit its nadir in the city. Some dressing down, eh folks!

In 50 over cricket terms, TRS led the way in batting, bowling, fielding & running between the wickets. They dominated the match at all stages & all round the ground. The only serious challenge was from a sole star opposition batsman (Majlis) who hit a few boundaries and a sole opposition bowler (Majlis again) who bowled a few maiden overs & took a few wickets. NDA representatives behaved like players with formidable reputations that failed to live up  to the crowd expectations. Congress was somewhere between the twelfth man & a spectator J

Drilling down further and more detailed analysis will not change the above conclusions. I will continue analyzing swing factors, vote changes as well as TDP-BJP dynamics. I will also touch a little on the qualitative and/or political angles about the how & why of the results.

Watch this space!