With the Jharkhand Assembly elections next month expected to be a close contest, nine seats where the victory margin was less than 5,000 votes in 2019 may play a key role for both the NDA and INDIA alliances. Given that the halfway mark in the 81-member Jharkhand Assembly is only 41 seats and no party has ever got an outright majority in the state’s history, these nine seats become crucial. The nine are Deoghar, Godda, Kodarma, Mandhu, Baghmara, Jarmundi, Simdega, Nala, and Jama. Of these, the BJP won five and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and Congress won two each five years ago. However, in the recent Lok Sabha elections, the BJP and its ally All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU) led in eight of these Assembly segments and the Congress in one. In 2019, the average victory margin in these nine constituencies was 2,349 votes, with the lowest margin of 285 in Simdega, where the Congress defeated the BJP. In Baghmera, the BJP defeated the Congress by a narrow 824 votes. The BJP also stood second in the four of the constituencies it did not win, while the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), an ally of the JMM and the Congress, was runner-up in three constituencies. The Congress and the AJSU stood second in a seat each. The 2019 Assembly elections saw a flip in 14 of the 19 Assembly seats where the winning margin was less than 5,000 votes in 2014. The average winning margin in these 19 seats in 2014 was 2,100 votes. The BJP had won seven of these 14 seats in 2014, while the All Jharkhand Students Party (AJSUP) won two. The JMM, the Congress, the Marxist Co-ordination (MCO), the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (JVM), and the Navjawan Sangharash Morcha (NSAM) all won a seat each in 2014. Of the 14 seats that flipped in 2019, the JMM won five and the Congress three. The two parties subsequently went on to form the government. The BJP won five of these 14 flipped seats. In another trend, the runners-up in the low-margin seats of 2014 ended up largely winning the seats, again with low margins. The JMM was a runner-up in 2014 in the five low-margin seats that it managed to clinch in 2019. Among the low-margin flipped seats that the BJP won in 2019, it was a runner-up in three seats five years earlier. This also included Torpa where the party lost the seat to JMM by a mere 43 votes. The CPI (ML) Liberation that lost Bagodar to the BJP by 4,339 votes in 2014 won the seat in 2019. After 2014, low-margin seats declined from 19 to nine in 2019, and further to just four Assembly segments in the recent Lok Sabha elections. These four Assembly segments are Mahagama in the Godda parliamentary constituency, where the Congress led by 121 votes; Ghatsila in Jamshedpur, where the BJP led by 795 votes; and Tundi in Giridih and Rajmahal in the Lok Sabha seat of the same name where the JMM led by 933 and 3,597 votes, respectively.
