Assembly polls will be held simultaneously with Lok Sabha Elections in Andhra Pradesh, the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Sunday at a press conference in New Delhi. Elections for the 175 Assembly seats and the 25 Lok Sabha seats, which will see a single-phase election, will be held on April 11.
The forthcoming election will be the first to be held after the bifurcation of the state.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief Chandrababu Naidu has been making a strong pitch for his second term. Naidu, a former BJP ally, walked out of the tie-up last year saying the Narendra Modi government had failed to keep its promise of granting special category status to the state.
Naidu, a key player in the opposition alliance on the national front, has made it clear that he would step into the elections battle without any pre-poll deal. His main Opposition in the state is YSR Congress Party chief YS Jagan Mohan Reddy.
Here’s a look at how the state voted at the Centre and State levels in the last three elections.
In 2014
In the Lok Sabha elections, an undivided Andhra Pradesh went to polls where about 4.84 crore voters chose their representatives from across 42 constituencies. Naidu’s TDP won 16 seats, KCR-led TRS managed to get 11 seats, the BJP won three, the Congress won two and the Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIN fetched one seat.
Reddy’s YSRCP, which is now set to bag a majority of votes in Andhra Pradesh, won nine seats in the 2014 elections.
In the Assembly elections held simultaneously with the 2014 general elections, the state voted separately from a divided Andhra Pradesh and a newly-formed Telangana.
The TDP won a 117-seat majority out of 175 seats in Andhra and formed the government while TRS won 63 seats in Telangana and went on to form the state’s first government.
In 2009
In the general elections, the Congress won 33 out of the 42 seats in the state and AIMIM, its ally, won just one seat.
The Third Front, the other major contender in the race, managed to win a total of eight seats, with the TDP winning six and the TRS winning two.
The BJP did not win any seat but the NDA, as a whole, managed to wriggle two seats owing to TRS’s KCR—the current CM of the state of Telangana—and Vijayashanti Srinivas, an Indian film actress who had initially joined the BJP, before forming her own party and then merging it with the TRS.
In the assembly elections, which were again held concurrently with the Lok Sabha polls, the then-ruling Congress managed to retain power, winning 36.6 per cent of the votes that translated to 156 out of a total of 294 seats.
This election marked the second term of Y S Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), Jagammohan Reddy’s father, as the chief minister of the state before his death on September 2, 2009.
The Third Front, a major contender at the state-level, too, managed to win 34.5 per cent votes but the vote share only translated to 107 seats.
The BJP won only two seats despite having contested 271.
In 2004
The Congress won 29 seats in the general elections while the UPA as a whole, along with the strength of the TRS, won 34 out of the 42 seats. The NDA with the backing of TDP won only five seats.
The Congress swept the state in the assembly elections, winning 185 out of the 294 seats and this led to YSR’s two-term chief ministership. Here too, the TDP struggled, winning only 47 seats as opposed to both Congress’ big share of 185 and TDP’s own record of 180 in the previous legislative assembly.
This analysis points to an interesting trend: each time the elections have been held simultaneously at the Centre and the State in Andhra, the party that won majority of seats at the Centre won the majority at the state as well.
This also stands true for the immediate previous election year — in 1999, TDP won 29 out of the 42 Lok Sabha seats and in the assembly elections held simultaneously, they won 180 out of 294 seats.
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