400 par: Modi fails to break Rajib Gandhi's record
In India's electoral history, a party has crossed that number only once, when the Congress, led by Rajib Gandhi, won 404 seats in 1984.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the target for his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led alliance of crossing the 400-seat mark in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's parliament.
"Abki baar 400 paar," Modi declared during his early stage campaign for the election.
Early poll results, however, showed that BJP is unlikely to cross the 350-seat mark let alone the 400-seat mark.
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During an event in March, BJP's Uttar Kannada MP Anantkumar Hegde said the BJP's 400-plus seats target in the Lok Sabha elections would pave the way for the merging of Pakistan occupied Kashmir with India, and that the numbers were required to implement the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) across the country.
He said NDA winning more than 400 seats in would eventually help in mustering a similar majority in the Rajya Sabha, and coming to power in two-thirds of the states.
In India's electoral history, a party has crossed that number only once, when the Congress, led by Rajib Gandhi, won 404 seats (of the 541 that voted) in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination.
Even in the initial years following Independence, when the Congress was the predominant party, its numbers were more modest – between 1951-52 and until 1977, the party's highest seat tally was 371 in 1957, while it won more than 300 seats in 1951-52, 1957, 1962 and 1971. In the post-Emergency election of 1977 though, the Congress won just 154 seats. By 1980, it had recovered to 353 seats.
Not only did the Congress win a record-high number of seats in the general elections that year, it also got the highest ever vote share for a single party, at 48.12%. The last time a party had come close to this before it was when the Congress got 47.78% of the votes in the second general elections after Independence, in 1957.
Since 1984, no party has crossed the 40% mark, with the Congress coming closest in 1989 at 39.53%, followed by the Narendra Modi-led BJP in 2019 at 37.7%.
