THIS is how Congress ascend in Punjab

In Punjab's assembly elections in 2022, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) secured a three-fourth majority. The state's ruling Congress lost its majority of seats, falling to just 23%. The Lok Sabha elections of 2024 have entirely flipped the roles. The Congress has gained seven seats, one shy of its 2019 total, while the AAP has been reduced to only three in the state.

Congress and AAP duo

How did Punjab come back to the Congress? The fact that both the Congress and the AAP have a 26% vote share in the state adds to the intrigue of this topic. To address this query, two charts will suffice.In Punjab's assembly elections in 2022, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) secured a three-fourth majority. The state's ruling Congress lost its majority of seats, falling to just 23%. The Lok Sabha elections of 2024 have entirely flipped the roles. The Congress has gained seven seats, one shy of its 2019 total, while the AAP has been reduced to only three in the state.

The state's significant increase in political fragmentation provides the solution to this query. In Punjab, the Effective Number of Parties (ENOP) has a median value of 4.3 in 2024. This statistic is at its highest point in the state's history. An increased value of ENOP indicates more political fragmentation in the elections. ENOP is the reciprocal of the sum of squares of the vote share of all candidates in a constituency. 

Congressi pull!

The Congress's ability to regain its vote share in particular regions of the state can also be attributed to its performance. Punjab is divided into three sub-regions by the Trivedi Center for Political Data (TCPD): Majha, Doab, and Malwa. There are eight PCs in these three regions, compared to three in the other two. The Malwa area of the state has produced four of the seven seats in Congress. Compared to its vote share in the 2022 assembly elections, Congress's vote share has increased by 4.8 percentage points in Malwa, 4 percentage points in Doaba, and a negligible 0.3 percentage points in the Majha region. Meanwhile, the AAP has lost ground in the Doaba region by 3.7 percentage points, 14.2 percentage points in Majha, and 20 percentage points in Malwa.