Friday, December 26, 2014

Jammu & Kashmir's near polarised verdict, explained in maps.

The assembly elections in Jammu & Kashmir came up with very interesting results. The results could be summarised as having reflected the name of the state - representing Jammu AND Kashmir. In other words, it was as if the different regions of J&K had completely different political choices in mind and in essentially in effect.

I try to show that through three maps here.

The first one is a map of which party won which constituency (click on the individual constituencies to find out the winner/ runner up /and their respective voteshares). Obviously this is a constituency map prepared from Election Commission Data. (Shoutout to Datameet for helping source this from eci.nic.in)

Map 1: Who Won Where?




The second map is simply a map that represents the proportion of people adhering to the dominant religions in the state (saffron represents Hinduism, green represents Islam and mild blue - mostly Buddhism among others), across various tehsils in the state. Data for this map is sourced from Census 2001. (To my knowledge, religion wise breakup of the census 2011 for the state is as yet unavailable online. I assume that the proportions haven't really changed much since 2001 even if the actual numbers have risen as is to be expected).

Map 2: Composition of Jammu & Kashmir by Religion (Hindu/Muslim/Others)



A eyeball comparison of the two maps shows how polarised the election was. The BJP simply won heavily in all the constituencies that were Hindu majority by a large margin (in the Jammu region), whereas the parties based in the valley won most of the seats with a Muslim majority. The Congress party did quite well in Ladakh and Kargil, where the chunk of "other religions"- Buddhism in particular- were concentrated.

There is of course Kishtwar, Doda (and to some extent Bhaderwah) with most of its Tehsils having a higher proportion of Muslims among the population, which has been won by the BJP.

A more detailed map that shows how each party performed in each constituency (intensity map showing vote percentages of the four main parties across all constituencies) will elaborate how there is a clear regional divide in the political choices in the state. (Use dropdown at the bottom of the map to choose the respective parties)

Map 3: Vote Percentages of Respective Parties across Constituencies