NEW DELHI, 3 December 2003 — Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee can expect to face pressure for an early national election from his rank and file if counting tomorrow shows his party has made expected gains in state polls.

But the veteran leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is by no means certain to bring forward the poll from its scheduled date next October.

Vajpayee, who is in the middle of a new, personalised but slow push for peace with Pakistan, has said repeatedly he intends to see out his full five-year term before seeking another.

Political analysts predicted yesterday his party would press him to go to the polls in February or March if, as exit polls indicate, it wrests power from rival Congress in three of four heartland states which voted on Monday. “If they take three of the four states, they will give it a spin, present it as a big mandate and ask for an early election,” said psephologist and political analyst Yogendra Yadav.

“Why should they wait for October? Why should they risk another monsoon?”

Opinion polls before the elections tipped the BJP, the main party in the national ruling coalition, to win only one of the four Congress-held states.

All exit polls forecast a clear win for the BJP in the giant state of Madhya Pradesh and some have given it an edge in the second most important state of Rajasthan and the smaller state of Chhattisgarh. The polls predicted a crushing defeat for the BJP in the race for the Delhi state assembly.

Exit polls in a country of more than a billion disparate people have sometimes been off the mark, and many of the latest have large numbers of seats unaccounted for.

But analysts say Vajpayee, who ultimately will decide the timing of the national election, remains a stumbling block for any campaign to go early.

“There will be pressure on Vajpayee from within to call an early election, but I am not sure he is convinced, given that it is such a close verdict,” said Neerja Chowdhury, a political columnist for The Indian Express.

She said the polls had shown that while the BJP would take Madhya Pradesh easily, it was either locked in a close fight with the Congress or had a slight edge in two other states.

Meanwhile, Parliament, which met yesterday at the start of a short winter session, adjourned as a mark of respect to MPs who died recently, an official said.

Lower-house speaker Manohar Joshi paid tribute to former Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran, who died on Nov. 23 after a long period of ill health, the official said.

Members also paid tribute to a number of sitting and former MPs who have recently died, and then left as Joshi adjourned the house for the day.

The upper house was also adjourned minutes after it met as a mark of respect to sitting members who had died since the previous session.

The winter session of Parliament, which ends on Dec. 23, was set back about two weeks due to the polls on Monday.

Campaigning for the polls, a straight fight between India’s ruling Hindu nationalists and main opposition Congress party, was acrimonious with Congress trying to make the most of a bribery scam involving a junior federal minister.

Prime Minister Vajpayee, who won the 1998 national polls on an anti-corruption ticket, sacked junior Environment Minister Dilip Singh Judeo after television channels last month aired footage of him allegedly accepting bribes hoping to limit the damage prior to the polls.

While the Congress raised the issue in its campaigns across the four states, the subject would also be raised in Parliament, senior Congress leaders told reporters Monday.

BJP members were hoping that good results to Monday’s polls would take the sting out of the Congress attack.

Amid the certainty of sparks flying between the Congress and Vajpayee’s BJP party, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj was hoping to get seven ordinances passed into law in the session, officials said.

— Additional input from agencies