Last updated:November 22, 2024, 10:12 PM IST

Exit polls indicate that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies may have the edge in both Maharashtra and Jharkhand. In the 288-member Maharashtra Assembly, 145 is the majority mark, while it is 41 in the 81-member Jharkhand Assembly.

Election Results 2024 Maharashtra and Jharkhand: Counting of votes will begin at 8 am on Saturday. (Representative image/PTI)

The Maharashtra and Jharkhand assembly results will be announced on Saturday, bringing down the curtains on the shock-a-block election year 2024. The results of polls held in 46 assembly constituencies and two parliamentary seats in 13 states will also be of interest.

End polls indicates that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies may have the advantage in both Maharashtra and Jharkhand.

In the 288-member Maharashtra Assembly, 145 is the majority mark, while it is 41 in the 81-member Jharkhand Assembly.

The results are likely to affect Parliament’s winter session starting on Monday, with the Narendra Modi government looking to push 16 bills, including a contentious bill to amend the Waqf Act, and the opposition set to raise a host of issues such as Manipur unrest, price hikes and castoro .

After a hard-fought victory in the April-June Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party regained momentum in October when it won elections in Haryana, where pollsters had predicted an easy victory for the opposition Congress.

The Congress won a consolation victory in alliance with the National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir where elections were held after a gap of ten years.

The polls in Jharkhand were held in two phases, on November 13 and then on November 20 along with Maharashtra, which voted in a single round.

Maharashtra

The elections in Maharashtra are a tussle for both the ruling Mahayuti alliance and the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi bloc, with the past five years witnessing significant political changes in the state as regional giants Shiv Sena and NCP saw splits.

The Eknath Shinde government’s Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana, which aims to create a women constituency to strengthen the ruling alliance’s electoral prospects, is expected to be a key factor besides issues such as Maratha reservations, price hikes, jobs and the BJP’s Hindutva push.

In the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly polls, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the (then undivided) Shiv Sena dominated, winning 161 out of 288 seats. However, the alliance fell apart over power-sharing, and the Sena joined forces with the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress to form the government.

But in 2023, rebellions by Sena’s Eknath Shinde, now the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, and NCP’s Ajit Pawar, now his deputy, forced then CM Uddhav Thackeray to resign and his Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition government to collapse.

While the April-June general elections this year saw Narendra Modi become a three-time prime minister, the ruling Mahayuti alliance in Maharashtra won only 17 of the 48 parliamentary seats, trailing the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi, comprising the Shiv Sena Congress (UBT) and NCP (SP).

Jharkhand

The BJP and its allies are trying to wrest power from the JMM-Congress-RJD combine in tribal-dominated Jharkhand.

In the 2019 assembly elections, Chief Minister Hemant Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, part of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, won 47 of the state’s 82 seats.

Earlier this year, Hemant Sören resigned as CM before being arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on corruption charges. He was briefly replaced by Champai Soren, a veteran politician and close aide of party patriarch Shibu Soren. But after Hemant returned to the CM’s chair after being released on bail, Champai rebelled and later quit to join the BJP.

The JMM tried to stoke the anger of Adivasis by pointing to the “unjust arrest” of Hemant Soren. The BJP, on the other hand, launched a campaign in which the JMM-led government allowed “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh to settle in the state’s Santhal Pargana, a tribal-dominated region.

In the April-June Lok Sabha polls, the BJP won eight seats in the state with 44.6% vote share, and its ally AJSU won one seat with 2.62% vote share. The INDIA bloc collectively won just five seats – three by the JMM and two by the Congress, with vote shares of 14.6% and 19.19% respectively.