Data · 18th Lok Sabha + Nationwide State Assemblies

Turncoats and Incumbents: Tracking the 18th Lok Sabha's Political Careers

Which sitting MPs already had long careers as incumbents, and which switched parties to get here. Linked to Ashoka University's TCPD Lok Dhaba dataset, which assigns every Indian candidate a trackable Person ID going back to 1962.

Shivam Kumar | TCPD / Lok Dhaba, Ashoka University, data snapshot 2 June 2023
Read this before the numbers below. TCPD's own dataset does not yet include the 2024 general election that seated the 484 MPs of the 18th Lok Sabha. To answer "is my current MP a turncoat or a career incumbent," this page links each of those 484 MPs (already verified on the Lok Sabha crime map) to their most recent TCPD-tracked election, national or state, by matching name and state. A match was only accepted where it was unambiguous: one MP name, one same-state TCPD candidate, or a further constituency match if several same-state candidates shared a name. That worked for 258 of 484 MPs (53%). Everyone else is marked "No linked prior-election record," which is not the same as "first-time MP": it also includes people whose TCPD record exists under a different name spelling that this matching could not resolve. Nothing here was guessed to fill the gap.
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What the linked 258 MPs show

258
of 484 MPs linked to a prior TCPD-tracked election
21
flagged as a turncoat: switched party since their last tracked contest
104
were already an incumbent as of their last tracked contest
226
have no linked prior-election record in TCPD's data

All 484 MPs, with their linked political history

MP Constituency State Party Political History Last Tracked Prior Terms
No MPs match this filter.

Nationwide state assemblies: turncoats and incumbents by decade

TCPD's state assembly (Vidhan Sabha) data covers 1961 through 2023, but stops before several 2023–2025 state elections and cannot be linked to a specific current MLA roster the way the Lok Sabha data above was, since no independently verified nationwide list of sitting MLAs exists on this site yet. Shown here as an aggregate historical trend across every state assembly winner TCPD has recorded, not as a claim about any specific sitting MLA.

Turncoat winners Incumbent winners

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© 2026 Shivam Kumar