When the second phase of the Lok Sabha polls ends tomorrow, Gujarat will enter the shrill campaign pitch for the third round. But one constituency will be unusually quiet: Surat. Its Bharatiya Janata Party candidate has already made it unopposed, with all others disqualified or dropping out (the Opposition alleges foul play).
The BJP candidate’s unopposed win may be a rare feat, but certainly not a first, as there have been 13 such instances when a candidate got elected unopposed in the 15 general elections held since 1962, a Mint analysis of data compiled by the Trivedi Centre for Political Data shows. Three such candidates were elected in 1962, while the most in a single election—five—came in 1967. After that, such instances got rarer, with no such case since 1989, until Surat in 2024.
This analysis excludes by-elections. If by-elections are included, the last such instance was Dimple Yadav’s unopposed victory in Kannauj in 2012.
On the flip side, there are also instances when the battleground gets crowded, with the 1996 poll for Nalgonda in Andhra Pradesh being the biggest election ever, with 480 candidates. Most were independents, and nearly all lost their deposits—both common features of such packed contests. Watch out for more titbits of election data in the coming days.
The BJP’s win might have upset the Opposition, leading to allegations of foul play, but past data shows that the Indian National Congress clinched most of these uncontested victories— 10 times out of 13 since 1962. The Jammu and Kashmir National Conference and the Nagaland Nationalist Organisation won in the other three instances.
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On the flip side, what was the highest number of candidates who contested the election for a constituency? It was 480, in Nalgonda, Andhra Pradesh, in the 1996 elections. While they were mostly independent candidates (98.5% of them), around 13% of them were female candidates. This was followed by 456 candidates vying to win Belgaum in Karnataka, again in 1996, and 185 candidates in Nizamabad (Telangana) in the last election in 2019.
In the last Lok Sabha election of 2019, out of 543 constituencies, 324 had between 11 and 20 candidates, while another 108 had between six and 10 candidates. Only two constituencies had more than 50 candidates.
For most candidates in big contests, all their efforts (and money) go in vain, as nearly all tend to lose their deposits. In most cases, barring three or four major candidates, all others forfeit their deposits: there has been no instance since 1962 when five or more candidates succeeded in retaining their deposits in a constituency.
It must also be noted that in such crowded elections, most are independent candidates. If they are excluded, the election year 1996 saw the maximum number of non-independent candidates (28) contesting from the East Delhi seat—that means 28 political parties had thrown their hats in the ring. The same constituency saw the second highest number (24) of non-independent candidates during the 1991 elections.
In 2019, 23 candidates had contested from Chandigarh, the third biggest congregation of political parties in an electoral battle.
Meanwhile, Chandigarh had the highest average number of candidates (36) contesting in the 2019 general elections, closely followed by Telangana (26) and Delhi (23). The lowest was Nagaland, with an average of four candidates contesting per constituency.