BJP’s Surat victory: From unopposed wins to crowded contests, what data shows

livemint.com:

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. 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.