The Candidate: Will BJP do a number on the Congress?

The latest opinion poll gives Narendra Modi 195 seats, more than the BJP got even under Atal Behari Vajpayee, which is an incredible achievement. The poll reverses the Bharatiya Janata Party-Congress positions in the current Lok Sabha, which has 200-odd Congress members and 110-odd from the BJP, a difference of 90 seats. The NDTV poll says the Congress will get 100-odd seats, making the gap 100 seats with Mr Modi.

Mr Modi’s gains are coming from a consolidation in the western and central states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and also from Karnataka. These are states where the BJP is dominant and therefore not that unexpected.

And then there is a prediction of 40 (out of 80) seats in Uttar Pradesh and 23 (out of 40) seats in Bihar. This is where Mr Modi is making a difference individually.

To some extent Uttar Pradesh doesn’t surprise me because the Muzaffarnagar riots had inclined a large part of the Uttar Pradesh peasantry back towards the BJP. The surprise is Bihar. In that state, the BJP, led by people like Sushil Modi and Mangal Pandey, was dominated by upper caste legislators. Its partnership with the Janata Dal (United), which brought in the peasant Kurmi and other middle castes to the alliance, made great electoral sense. It was always clear that the dominant partner in that relationship was the JD(U). The new BJP alliance is with Ram Vilas Paswan, a much weaker partner.

If Mr Modi is able to overturn that and beat not just his old partner but also the other established contender, Lalu Prasad Yadav, it will be his finest achievement of any state. Bihar is seen as a place that is relatively well governed by Nitish Kumar and accepted as being so by the voters. If they ditch him now for Mr Modi, it shows that there is something truly special about the appeal of the strongman from Gujarat. My previous reading of Bihar was that it would be similar to Orissa. Here another Janata Dal faction, led by Naveen Patnaik, had a similar, successful middle caste-upper caste alliance with the BJP. When it was dissolved, the BJP was wiped out because its own base was too small. The NDTV poll says this will continue and that Mr Patnaik will get 17 of the state’s 21 seats. The Congress will get three and Mr Modi, despite packed rallies, only one. There is very little good news for Sonia Gandhi in the poll.

The few bright spots are Punjab, which will return eight Congress MPs to the five from the BJP-Akali Dal. The only other states it is winning are the ones where it is not fighting Mr Modi. This includes Kerala, where the Congress-led United Democratic Front, with 13 Lok Sabha seats, will still be ahead of the Left, but it will take a hit of three seats and Assam.

The big loss will come in Andhra Pradesh, where Seemandhra is set to be backing Jagan Mohan Reddy, while also rewarding the expected BJP-Telugu Desam alliance with nine seats.

The Telangana gambit of the Congress is going to be punished in Seemandhra and is not expected to be particularly rewarding in Telangana either. After a revival of the party under Mrs Gandhi, when it increased its tally in three elections, the party has slid back to the despair of the late 1990s. Like the National Democratic Alliance of the last decade, the United Progressive Alliance is going to become an alliance only on paper as the regional partners figure out their strategy in the era of Mr Modi.

Lastly, though Mr Modi is short of a majority by three or four dozen seats, these will not be difficult to pick up. There are 185 seats that are neutral or likely to be neutral after May. Among them are Tamil Nadu’s J. Jayalalithaa and West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee, both likely to post big wins in their states. This should easily see Mr Modi through making a government that looks pretty much the same in terms of numbers as today’s Manmohan Singh Cabinet?