Patterns from Gujarat’s 2026 local body elections

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Rajkot: Polling officials collect electoral material from a distribution centre, ahead of the local body elections, in Rajkot, Gujarat, Saturday, April 25, 2026. | Photo Credit: -

In April 2026, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept Gujarat’s local body elections across 9,986 seats spanning four administrative tiers: Municipal Corporations (MCs), Nagarpalikas (NPs), District Panchayats (DPs), and Taluka Panchayats (TPs), winning 75.03% of all seats. The BJP’s seat share falls in a near-perfect gradient from 89.75% in MCs to 70.29% in DPs, indicating that while its dominance is real, the terrain becomes more contested as governance gets closer to the village level. The chart below shows the seat share of the BJP across different reservation categories and administrative tiers

This urban-rural gradient holds across both seat shares and vote shares. In 2015, the Congress led the BJP in both DPs and TPs. Rural Gujarat has since been systematically realigned, but the realignment is incomplete. The residual resistance at the Taluka tier is Congress’s most viable terrain for recovery.

The chart below shows the seat shares and vote shares of the major parties across administrative tiers

The three-cycle trend is useful evidence of structural, not cyclical, consolidation. The chart below shows the party-wise change in vote shares over the past three local body elections (in %).

The BJP improved its overall vote share across all administrative tiers by 7.6 percentage points, from 46.69% in 2015 to 54.28% in 2026.

The Congress, meanwhile, shed 14 percentage points in its overall vote share, from 44.77% in 2015 to 30.76% in 2026. Importantly, it secured fewer absolute votes in 2026 (1.8 crore) than in 2015 (2.3 crore) despite a substantially larger electorate, a clear sign of the party losing ground. The vote share of the Others category, including independents and minor parties, has more than halved from 8.55% to 3.98%, as the political space has consolidated into a three-party frame