Four reasons why the BJP's win in Karnataka is along the same lines as one of its most famous past performances

With the BJP looking all set to record a stunning victory in the critical Karnataka Assembly elections by overcoming not only the Rahul Gandhi-led Congress but also the predictions of a hung assembly, one cannot help but notice certain similarities with the party's 2014 Lok Sabha elections performance in the all-important state of Uttar Pradesh.

Here are four similarities:

1. The BJP's wins/leads total at the time of writing is 112, which is more than the entire opposition in Karnataka combined. In the 2014 UP Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 71 seats while the Samajwadi Party won 5 and the Congress, just 2. The other large Uttar Pradesh-based party, Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), failed to win a single seat.

2. The BJP's vote-share in UP in 2014 increased from 17.5% in 2012 to 44% in 2014. In Karnataka, the BJP is set to go from 19.9% to a vote-share of about 40%.

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3. In 2014, the BJP won all 16 seats in UP where the Muslim electorate was between 21% and 50%. Far from stopping there, Amit Shah, four years later, has got his party winning in 14 seats in Old Mysore versus just 2 earlier.

4. The jump between 2013 and 2018 in Karnataka is similar to the jump between 2009 and 2014 in UP. The BJP got just 10 seats in the 2009 election but leapt to 71 in 2014. The Congress, meanwhile, went from 21 seats in 2009 to just 2. 

A question that arises based on this is whether there's any denying the consistency in terms of slumps of the Congress under Rahul Gandhi versus the big leaps of the BJP after the coming of Narendra Modi?

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