Karnataka's first hung house
What happened
No single party won enough seats to form a government on its own in this election.
That left Karnataka with a hung house — a result where no single party wins enough seats to govern alone.
The Janata Party won the most seats, 95 in all.
That fell short of the 113-seat majority mark.
What changed
The party that had been governing fell hard, dropping from the largest party in the assembly to a distant second place.
The Indian National Congress won just 82 seats — a sharp collapse from the government it had led.
Independents added another 22 seats to an already fragmented result.
Notable numbers
A few numbers from that election stand out.
The tightest finish of the election was Baindur, Karnataka, decided by a margin — how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second — of just 24.
At the other extreme, Kanakagiri, Karnataka was won by 62.0% of the vote.
Turnout — the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot — peaked in Kiragaval, Karnataka, reaching 80.5%.
The most crowded contest was Chamarajapet, Karnataka, where 24 candidates stood.
The backdrop
This hung result did not stay unresolved for long — a new government soon took shape.
In the 1983 Karnataka Legislative Assembly election, the Janata Party won 95 of 224 seats in a hung assembly. Ramakrishna Hegde was sworn in as Chief Minister on 10 January 1983 with outside support from the Bharatiya Janata Party and independents, forming Karnataka's first non-Congress state government.