India general election 2019: What happened?

Pedro_P

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▼  Results for India's general election released on 23 May saw a landslide victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which increased its huge parliamentary majority.
The margins of victory
Narendra Modi and his ruling BJP have swept back to power. The party won 303 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's parliament, bettering the 282 seats they won in 2014 - a performance that not many thought was possible.
A party needs to win 272 seats for a majority in parliament. The BJP's victory in 2014 was the first time in three decades that a party had been able to win that number of seats on its own.
Rahul Gandhi's opposition Indian National Congress (INC) and its allies, who only won 54 seats the last time, put up a stronger fight this time but were unable to make any meaningful gains.
Women voters made their voices heard
Nearly half of India's 900 million registered voters are women.
Since independence, female voters have increasingly turned out to vote in greater numbers.
But 2019 marked the first time that female voter turnout equalled male voter turnout.
This was the best year for female candidates
This election saw not only the largest number of female candidates stand for election, the number of women who actually won was also the highest ever.
But men still dominate national politics
Women have historically comprised a mere fraction of the candidates in India's general election, and 2019 was no different.
Only 723 of the 8,000 candidates were female. That's less than one in 10.
The seven national parties actually fielded about the same number of candidates in 2019 as they did in 2014, which was not offset by a concerted BJP effort to improve gender parity.

► This article was originally published here: Source

Jack Sparrow

Good analysis.

ssangra

Sad actually because of the few women that won most are just front end dollies and r hardly allowed to voice an opinion leave alone a dissenting one when they r in parliament. For that matter Smruti Irani is also put on back burner whatever greatness she sees in herself and her victory.

All I wonder about is
- Why was the fig of 300 spoken by Modi (ab ki baar 300 paar)
- Why did EC not listen to opposition req on EVMs
- Why did EC figs for some parties show larger counts which were trimmed to a fraction of that later in the day (after the website was crashed (possibly deliberately))
- Despite videos of reserve EVms floating abt why did election commission , home ministry, defence min or anyone else  not do a thing ?
- Why does Govt and EC keep harping on fact that evm is a standalone machine ...and then say each is rfid tracked ? same tracking mechanism opens a world of opportunity to hack or change pgms and scripts if so designed.
- Why CCTVs malfunctioned in many booths- Why some booths which had celebrities voting went crazy taking selfies etc instead of focussing on their jobs.
- Why some booth level workers went and pressed buttons for voters before they voted thereby casting a proxy vote as after they did it the next press of button by voter is useless as it does not even get registered.
- Why some people faced vanishing ink allowing them to technically b eligible to vote again
- Why many names were missing from the election voter lists
- Why elections were held when children had exams or parents and children were away for summer holidays (if exams got over) or where it was too hot to go out to just vote or where ramzan was on and a muslim would be faint with hunger to muster the energy in the hot sun to vote....same exercise could well be organized in spring or autumn or better still in winter to get more equitable voting from the population
- Why did EC not match VVPAT with casted votes first ....matching afterwards can b easily manipulated to show concurrence to skew and hide errors
- Why SC did not insist on a 100% count and check of all votes where disputes were suspected or arose.
- Why SC did not demand a 100% chk of all VVPATS and votes cast AT LEAST AFTER THE ELECTION where more time is available to do this.
- Why was all the above allowed when EC clearly said that there can be discrepancies due to technical defects where say u vote for party A and VVPAT shows A but paper does not get deposited in the box below the printer. In such a case the vote is not registered in the control machine till the paper drops. Hence as paper did not drop vote for A is not registered at all ....when the next voter comes and say votes for B...the slip of both B and A fall into the box. So u have a case where there is a vote for only B in the control box and a VVPAT slip of A and B.....one can always pgm machines so that when opposition is voted for the VVPAT does not drop the slip and only when one votes for BJP the slip falls in.....is not rocket science.

Am really not impressed at all. All I feel is that no party must be allowed near any voting booth at all and this must be done with both paper and evm and tallies checked ....a VVPAT could b manipulated easily.

In fact the elections in the future must be done under the aegis of the armed forces only.

ssangra

Further a shocking pattern is emerging. Party that wins projects many of it's low level grassroot workers r getting killed. Trouble is it is doing absolutely nothing about it except projecting it in media and social media. Grassroot workers help the party succeed at grassroots often for a price. Low level workers are expendible for parties specially for ones where the senior workers are also expendible....now a dead worker who wont demand payment is more advantageous than one who is alive more so when the opposition can be blamed for the kills. 40 armed forces personnel were dispatched to a certain area in Kashmir , denied helicopters, stuffed like sardines into vans (something rarely done) and forced to take a land route only to b blown up) just in time for elections. Most politicians had wrong body language after this happened. Surgical strikes are made just in time before elections...a captured officer returns while other captives rot across the border in jails.....a lot of milage of the revenge taken and related drama is used for elections.....very mysterious arising of an artificial intelligence in politics...one that is comfortable committing the cardinal sin just to survive.

warlikeprince

I think this election results doesn't show incompetence of Congress but failure to project right points to voters...