Puducherry is swinging back in NDA's favour

The voters seem to have swung in favour of the National Democratic Alliance in Puducherry, the union territory in the south of India that shares its borders with Tamil Nadu. In the former French, All India NR Congress (AINRC) and its ally, the Bharatiya Janata Party are ahead in 15 out of 30 seats. The winner has been declared in 26 out of the 12 seats, as of 10:45 pm on April 2.

The mid-way for a clear winner would be 16. However, the main opposition, the coalition between the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Indian National Congress aside from other regional parties, is trailing with leads in just nine seats.

The election in Puducherry took place on April 6 after the local government in the union territory was expelled in February this year. The NDA vote share in Puducherry has gone up to over 30% this time compared to 2016, when the Congress had won the election 15 out of the 30 assembly seats with a 30% vote share.

The decision by the then Lieutenant Governor (LG) Kiran Bedi was the culmination of a long-standing power tussle between the government led by the Indian National Congress' V Narayanaswamy and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the centre.

Soon after the elections were announced, in fact a few days before Rahul Gandhi's rally in the region, BJP installed Tamilisai Soundararajan as the LG. Puducherry was affected by a severe cyclonic storm and the response of both local government and the centre had fallen short of the people's expectations.

Coalition	Seats won in 2016	Seats won in 2021	Gain/Loss
NDA	8	15 won, leading in another 1	7
Congress	15	9 won, leading in another 1	-6

Fighting the election on behalf of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), is the All India N.R. Congress, a faction that broke away from the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in 2011 and won the election to form the government. The streak continued for AINRC in 2014 Parliamentary election where it won more one in every three votes.

However, in 2016 the Congress government came back, and repeated its winning performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha (lower house of the Indian Parliament) election too. Today's result will show if the voters' verdict will swing back in favour of the NDA.

Party	Vote share in 2016	Vote share in 2019	Vote share in 2021
UPA	30.6%	56.27%	About 37%
NDA	28.1%	31.36%	Over 42%
Others	41.3%	12.3%	-

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