The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's losses across seven major states negated marginal gains in others, and contributed significantly to it netting over 60 fewer seats compared to 2019.
The BJP has seen an 8 percentage point decline in vote share in Uttar Pradesh. This led to it losing 29 seats in India's most populous state.
It lost 13 seats in Maharashtra with a decline in vote share of 1 percentage point.
In Rajasthan, its vote share is down 9.2 percentage points, with it losing 10 seats.
Karnataka, West Bengal and Bihar also saw the loss of 19 seats. Voting share was down between 1.5 percentage points and 5.4 percentage points.
The analysis considered the top 12 states in terms of Lok Sabha seats. Ten of these had significant vote shares for the BJP and the Congress individually.
Some states such as Tamil Nadu, where allies had more of a role to play, were not considered for the analysis of the two biggest national parties.
Data considered is around 9 pm on the day of the results.
The BJP lost 72 seats across seven of these states. This negated the gain of more than a dozen seats in states, including Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala.
The Indian National Congress saw a 13.6 percentage point gain in vote share in Karnataka. This was the highest across the major states for the party.
It translated into eight additional seats in the state.
The largest number of seats gained was in Maharashtra. It had 12 more seats though the change in vote share was less than 1 percentage point.
Six states contributed to a gain of 36 seats for the Congress.
It lost three seats in Kerala, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh with a seat lost in each of the states (chart 2). It gained five seats in Uttar Pradesh. Most of the other seats were gained by the Samajwadi Party which ended up with 37 seats, or 32 more than the five seats it won in 2019.
The Congress has been giving up a number of seats in favour of its allies to allow for consolidation of votes. It fought the lowest number of seats on record in 2024, at 328.
The maximum number of candidates it had ever contested was 529 in 1996.
It had largely maintained a practice of contesting over 400 seats in every election even during 2014 (464) and 2019 (421).
Congress candidates accounted for less than 5 percentage points of the total candidate pool in 2024.
This came on the back of a decline in their share of winning candidates in recent elections.
At its peak, the Congress had 80.1 percentage points of the winners in 1980. This had declined to 12.4 percentage points in 2019.
It had made room for its allies in the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) in around 101 seats, Business Standard had reported earlier.
Most of the accommodations were made in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Tamil Nadu.
