NEW DELHI, 5 May 2004 — As India’s staggered general elections enter the home stretch, the prospect of a hung Parliament looms large, with analysts saying the ruling Hindu nationalists are unlikely to make up lost ground in the final two stages of voting.
Five exit polls after the first three rounds of the ballot which began on April 20 predicted the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), would get between 235 and 279 seats while the opposition Congress was forecast to bag between 160 and 210 seats in India’s 545-member Parliament.
Analyst Neerja Chowdhury said the NDA, led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was unlikely to make up its losses in the last two phases of polling on May 5 and 10, when voting for about half of the parliamentary seats is due.
While 83 seats in seven states are to vote on May 5, polling in 181 constituencies in 12 provinces and three federally administered regions takes place on May 10. “The exit poll predictions ... for the BJP-led government takes into account all phases of polling. The seats where polling is due are mostly in states where the BJP’s performance had peaked in the 1999 polls.”
The only exception was in the politically key northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP won 25 of the state’s 80 seats in 1999. “But here, I don’t think it’s likely to do much better this time, so I can’t quite see where they will make up lost numbers,” Chowdhury said.
There were a number of reasons for the BJP-led government faring poorly, she said. “Some of their allies are expected to do badly. Another reason is that the regional alliances that the Congress has got together seem to be doing better than the BJP’s,” she said.
The BJP has also spun its entire campaign around the 79-year-old Vajpayee, who has been trumpeting his peace initiative with Pakistan and India’s booming economy. While the strategy seems to have worked in urban areas, it has had little impact on rural India, Chowdhury said.
Political analyst Mushirul Hassan attributed the BJP-led government’s worse-than-expected performance in the exit polls so far to, “too much rhetoric and too little delivery of public good in the form of administrative measures.”
“The BJP created a huge hype over ‘India Shining,’ and ‘the feel good factor,’ citing the superficial economic boom,” Hassan said referring to a multi-million dollar advertising campaign showcasing the government’s achievements.
“Farmers are committing suicide in (the northern state of) Punjab and (western state of) Gujarat and these are certainly not examples of India shining,” he said. Repeated references by BJP leaders to the “foreign origins” of Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi and its promises to build a temple on the ruins of a razed mosque — one of India’s oldest and most explosive religious disputes — too had not worked, Hassan said.
