Elections for the Madhya Pradesh Assembly in 2023 will take place on November 17 in a single phase, with voting in Rajasthan taking place on November 23 and in Telangana on November 30.
Beginning on November 7, Mizoram will host the first round of voting in this year’s election.
In this round of elections, only Chhattisgarh will hold two phases of voting; the first will take place on November 7 and will be followed by the voting in Madhya Pradesh on November 17.
On December 3, all results will be made public.
This round of elections, which is commonly regarded as the “semi-finals” because it occurs just months before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, will see the participation of roughly 16.1 crore voters.
In 2018, the Congress won three states—Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh—but was unable to keep the latter as ex-leader Jyotiraditya Scindia and almost two dozen other members defected to the BJP, causing Kamal Nath’s administration to fall.
The Congress won 68 seats in Chhattisgarh while the BJP only took home 15, with the former receiving 43% of the vote. The majority threshold in the Assembly, which has 90 representatives, is set at 46.
The BJP and Congress finished virtually neck-and-neck in Madhya Pradesh; the saffron party got 109 seats and the Congress 114. The majority number among the state’s 230 Assembly districts is 116.
Even more evenly, the BJP and the Congress each received 41% of the vote.
In the most recent election, the Congress won 100 seats and the BJP 73 of the 200 seats in the Rajasthan Assembly (majority threshold = 101). After backing from the Bahujan Samaj Party, which won six seats, the Congress eventually formed the government and appointed Ashok Gehlot as chief minister.
With 119 seats, Telangana is the only southern state represented in this round of voting. The threshold for majority is set at 60. The Bharat Rashtra Samithi, led by Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao, won an overwhelming majority in 2018 with 88 seats. With 19, the Congress was well behind, and Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM stood in third place with seven. Only one Assembly seat was won by the BJP; T Raja Singh took the Goshamahal seat.
Last but not least, the Mizo National Front won all 27 of the state’s 40 seats in the 2018 elections in Mizoram. The BJP won one and the Congress only four. Independent candidates prevailed in the remaining contests.
The terms of the assemblies in Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh come to an end in January of the following year, while those in Mizoram expire in December.
