1999 Lok Sabha Elections

1999 Lok Sabha Elections


The election results brought Vajpayee's National Democratic Alliance a majority in India's 545-seat Lok Sabha, with 299 of the 537 seats contested and 41% of the vote. (Voting in another 6 constituencies had been postponed; 2 seats--for Anglo-Indians--are by appointment.)  BJP won 182 seats, only marginally better than the 179 it won in 1998, but  allies bagged another 117 seats. The Telugu Desam Party of Andhra Pradesh came back with 29 seats; the Shiv Sena won 15; the DMK of Tamil Nadu won 12.


The BJP secured 23.8 percent of the vote against its 25.5 percent in 1998--but  the BJP contested   in 340 seats, down from 384 in the previous election. But  BJP suffered a major setback in India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, with the BJP winning  only 29 of the state's 85 parliamentary seats--down from the 57 seats it won in 1998.


 In the 12th Lok Sabha, the NDA had 265 seats based on 42.3 per cent of the popular vote. In the new Lok Sabha  the alliance got 296 seats based on 40.8 per cent of the popular vote. They have gained 34 seats but have lost 1.5 percentage points of the popular vote.

 In terms of vote share, the BJP  lost almost two percentage points, from 25.6 per cent last time to 23.7 per cent this time. But the BJP contested 50 seats fewer than last time. It has for the first time made inroads into new territories, like Goa, Assam and the Andaman Islands.  

Some of the NDA members such as the TDP, the Biju Janata Dal(BJD) and the Trinamul Congress,  have added to their votes and seats. The TDP won 29 seats.



After successively losing its vote share in every round of elections since 1984, the Congress(I) seems to have staged a recovery. Its national vote share now stands at 28.5 per cent, an improvement of 2.7 percentage points over the last elections. Including its allies, the gain is nearly five percentage points.

The Congress(I)'s  tally of 112  in the 13th Lok Sabha is the smallest ever.