ranjeet
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Money does play a role in the elections and the way Kejriwal is whining non stop it appears this move has hurt AAP the most.
Indian Political Corner | All Updates & Discussions.
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AAP is not winning Punjab. Right now it's a distant 3rd.
http://5forty3.in/is-punjab-heading-for-a-direct-two-horse-race/
“We are suffering and the government is simply deaf to our woes” averred Surjeet Singh, a midsize farmer near the Bhagtawala grain market in Amritsar. He along with some 50 other farmers was sitting on an impromptu protest against the state government. A protest which had more than a 100 AAP activists and scores of journalists along with a few ward level Congress leaders. All these activists, onlookers, journalists etc. outnumbered the ‘protesting’ farmers by a ratio of 4:1. The main problem of these handful of farmers was that the local Arthiyas (agriculture commission agents) were paying only “1350 to 1400 rupees while the govt. MSP was fixed at 1510 rupees per quintal for paddy”.
At the outset, it appeared as if the government was suffering from the proverbial political disease of hubris which would hurt it horribly in an election year. Especially the noise that some of the activists and media people were creating was quite disconcerting. Just a few meters away, the scene was completely in contrast. Literally hundreds of farmers were passing through the grain market selling their paddy at 1700 rupees per quintal – almost 200 rupees more than the MSP!
That scene near Amritsar in early October is what defines the politics of today, especially the rent-a-morcha type of crowd politics that AAP has pioneered. The truth of paddy farmer unrest in Punjab was in reality quite a cynical game played by the opposition during the election season. The numbers told the true story (as is always the case in the noise filled Indian discourse).
Arthiyas were paying 1700 rupees to 1509 variety of fully ripe paddy which constituted 87% of all paddy that had arrived in the grain market till then! In clear numbers, 56690 out of 64954 metric tonnes of paddy that had arrived in the grain market was that of 1509 variety. In fact, FCI (Food Corporation of India) had clearly advised farmers to arrive with fully ripe and dry paddy to get full price for their produce, but a few anxious farmers (less than 13% of the total) had harvested their produce before the paddy had fully ripened and became fodder for opposition political protests.
In many ways this is the political scene in Punjab today, where every aspect of day-to-day life can metamorphose into a political protest because 3 to 4 different political entities are fiercely vying for power. These protestations are then getting amplified in the chaotic din of media and social media noise leveraged on large scale presence of NRI Punjabis. This is the reason why most outsiders believe that Punjab is a heavily drug addicted land of virtually no-governance or rule of law today. In fact, many ‘right-leaning’ voices and segments of BJP supportive ecosystem – who may have not even visited Punjab – keep harping on their perceived idea that the state needs “big change”.
In the middle of last month, the state government opened the ‘Dhanoa Pattan’ bridge built on the Beas river at a mere cost of 65 Crore rupees within a record time of 5 years. This is a bridge that not only connects two districts – Gurdaspur and Hoshiarpur – but also connects two different sub-regions of the state, namely, Majha and Doab. Virtually thousands of farmers of the region are ecstatic about this new overpass road connectivity because it facilitates movement of sugarcane from the waterlogged region to the Mukerian sugar factory. “This is the greatest boon that the government has bestowed upon us”, emphasized a sugarcane farmer in Gudaspur, “we had been crying for this since many decades as the Paniyar mill (small local sugar mill) is too small, now we can directly take our produce to Mukeriyan mill”. But for most of the outside world, that bridge on river Beas is a bridge too far and Punjab as a drug addicted land of lawlessness makes far more sense.
That Dhanoa Patan bridge story is merely symbolic of how political noise can drain real governance issues in these times of hyper political activism. Of course, there is anti-incumbency of a decade long government in the state. Sure there are disaffected masses in many parts of Punjab, but the attempt to paint the state as a total disaster does not resonate on the smooth highways that connect almost all major cities to the nearby towns and villages (on an average our team had found the state to have the best road connectivity in all of north India) or in precise and effective functioning of the state’s grain markets or even in the newly refurbished heritage city complex built around the Golden Temple of Amritsar which is a breathtakingly beautiful sight to behold.
The truth of Punjab’s anti-incumbency is somewhere in between the ruling government’s propaganda, the opposition’s noisy campaign and the Lutyen’s media’s make-believe doomsday narrative. For pollsters, it is important to find the right metrics to define the state of anti-incumbency, for that data eventually determines electoral trend. This is why we had prepared our team to discover the signal from layers and layers of noise about issues that matter to Punjabis today.
[Keep independent polling activity alive by clicking here]
Employment & Jobs
As was the case in our 1st survey, the single biggest issue for the state’s voters is employment. In fact, this is the one issue that is hurting the SAD-BJP government the most. It is not as if the government hasn’t done enough in terms of providing “safe” government jobs, the problem really is that the state has failed in nurturing private sector jobs. As per estimates, 40% of Punjab’s total revenue receipts are spent on paying salaries and wages of the government employees and this is in addition to some 7767 Crore rupees spent on various retirement benefits!
Just before the 2012 election, the state government had regularized 45000 state employees which was probably one of the most underrated reasons for SAD-BJP bucking the anti-incumbency trend. This time around once again the government has adopted the same strategy. Just 2 weeks ago, the state cabinet decided to regularize 27000 contractual daily wage and temporary workers along with 15000 employees working on jobs outsourced to private companies. That is a whopping 42000 families and their dependents now potentially drafted into supporting the ruling party but at a debilitating cost of nearly 2000 Crore per annum to the state exchequer.
Will these last moment government largesse be enough? Consider this: for the last few months, ‘Contractual Employees Union’ of the state has been demanding regularization of some 1 lakh 30 thousand workers, whereas the government has only partially met that demand by regularizing only a 4th of those. Now, the remaining disaffected workers are considering other “political options”.
In fact, this is where BJP as the smaller partner in the state government has failed because it has not been able to impart an economic philosophy for the Akali led government. This is why among all the relatively developed and prosperous states like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra, Punjab is the least industrialized and also the state with the least exposure to IT and allied services industries. Thus, even today, despite high levels of urbanization, the state has made only rudimentary transformation from an agrarian economy to government-job economy which has left large swaths of the state economically dismembered.
The signs are quite ominous for the Badals as new voter registration data shows. Muktsar, the home district of the Chief Minister and Bhatinda represented by Harsimrat Kaur have seen the lowest new voter registrations in the state. As of now, 4.75 lakh new voters have been registered in Punjab and 2.25 lakh of those are first time voters belonging to the 18-19 age group. There are also 2.5 lakh voters belonging to the 20-29 bracket. It is these young voters who are possibly going through a sense of hopelessness and may end up becoming an albatross around the ruling party’s neck.
Agrarian problems & drug addiction
From our first survey of July to our present survey in October, the primacy of agrarian problems has almost halved (from 15% to 8%). On the other hand, the issue of drug addiction which had not found any significant mention in our first survey (less than 6%), is now finding traction with nearly 13% respondents. This is indeed a fascinating exercise of understanding voter behaviour. It shows us how people’s distress changes relatively.
Most farmers in July were anxious about their paddy and there was a general sense of apprehension among the rural populace, but after the harvest season in October even as the grain markets and the state government handled the selling of the winter produce adequately, the same farmers & rural population, with cash in hand, now tend to believe that the agrarian problems stand mitigated.
In clear contrast is the issue of drug menace which is now finding greater resonance among voters and it could be because of 2 factors;
- The issue of drug menace is mostly construed as a “luxury” problem by the Punjabi society. Thus, for instance, once their agrarian issues are solved they tend to identify with the next level of problems like the drug menace
- The constant media narrative and the opposition campaign could be having its effect into force-believing that there is a supposedly ‘massive drug addiction’ problem in the state
This is indeed a complex item among the voter woes that is hardly understood by most demographers. Since the post terrorism phase of 1980’s, Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) has been the pivot that has maintained the crucial balance of Punjabi identity without pandering to excessive separatist philosophy. That tenuous balance has been under stress for the last couple of years. For instance, the Sarbat Khalsa of last year called by some former Khalistani sympathizers has tried to create a parallel Panthic representative body which is further augmented by AAP kind of politics that has pandered to pro-Khalistan entities both here in Punjab and among non-resident Punjabis abroad.
Most Hindu and Sikh voters do underscore the importance of the Akali-Sant Samaj alliance to maintain SGPC (Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee) as the sole representative body of Panthic Sikhs and are averse to any tinkering of that balance. Once again another attempt to organize a Sarbat Khalsa in Talwandi Sabo by some former Khalistanis like Baljit Singh Dadhuwal and Bhai Mokam Singh (incidentally both have had brief flirtations with AAP since 2014) has been thwarted by the state government for now. If many ‘separatist’ and ‘self-rule’ voices are heard once again this year in and around the Sarbat Khalsa, then many ordinary Sikhs and Hindus of the state would be left with little choice but to support SAD-BJP alliance in order to maintain the sanctity of the Punjab state.
In this milieu of Punjabi identity crisis has emerged the AAP phenomenon which for long has flirted with Khalistanis and then lost its way with Panthic Sikhs by a series of missteps starting from the AAP manifesto controversy to ending up with the sacking of the party’s big Panthic Punjabi face in the form of Sucha Singh Chotepur. Even AAP’s own volunteer groups strongly believe that Arvind Kejriwal will be the Chief Minister if the party comes to power which has created a strong divide with the Punjabi versus non-Punjabi debate taking the center stage. Indeed, this hugely emotional debate over Punjabi v/s Haryanvi has taken a big toll on Arvind Kejriwal’s own popularity in the state as is clearly evident in our poll finding.
Captain Amrinder Singh is by far the most popular leader in Punjab today as he has a solid 13-point advantage over Prakash Singh Badal. Clearly, the 10 year anti-incumbency seems to be hurting the senior Badal as surprisingly even 63% of BJP voters too are not choosing him as their primary face of leadership. In fact, today, Amrinder Singh’s popularity surpasses that of his party and yet the Congress high command has not announced him as their official CM candidate which also underlines the problems of a heavily Gandhi-pariwar dominated party that cannot tolerate any other leader of stature.
Interestingly, the approval rating of central govt. has not only increased but also has gained in terms of enthusiasm from the voters after the surgical strikes whereas the state government’s approval rating has remained more or less stagnant in 3 months – it was at 51% in July and it is hovering around 53% today. Our past studies have shown that usually a below 50% rating is indicative of high anti-incumbency whereas pro-incumbency generally becomes electorally significant when the approval ratings cross the 60th percentile. To that extent, the ruling government seems to be stuck in a “twilight zone” of voter approval.
Arvind Kejriwal has lost a lot of fizz in just the last 3 months. Since our last survey in July, almost a third his support as the CM candidate has been wiped out. That is a huge number considering the precarious dynamics of the state’s election scenario, for now he no longer represents the angst of Punjab or the protest vote that was tired of both the mainstream parties. What is more, many even among AAP voters no longer support him as the CM candidate as they did so overwhelmingly just a few months ago. There are possibly 4 big reasons for the decline of Kejriwal’s popularity in Punjab;
- The Punjabi versus non-Punjabi divide is very much existential in state politics today which has also deeply affected AAP as a party because there have been largescale rebellions against Delhi observers, so much so that AAP was forced to remove all its Delhi inducted zonal chiefs and instead make space for local leaders. In fact, this whole “outsider” politics is getting further accentuated in the case of Kejriwal because of his Haryanvi-Bania origins which is playing directly into the SYL dispute and the accession of Chandigarh debate.
- The way AAP’s Delhi heavy leadership has handled the Punjabi sentiments both in terms of religion (the AAP manifesto fiasco) and in terms of local leadership (Sucha Singh Chotepur incident was just the tip of the iceberg) has deeply dented the state’s faith in this former anti-corruption activist. This falling graph is also visible in the lack of enthusiasm from the NRI crowd in recent weeks.
- Kejriwal’s horribly ill-timed questioning of surgical strikes has left a deep-rooted angst among ordinary Punjabis where every second family has some sort of army connection or the other
- In this heavily connected world where news travels faster than political campaigns, the series of mal-governance issues of Delhi government have created many doubts about Kejriwal’s own competence which has hit hard at the very viability of his brand of politics
In the 2012 assembly elections, ruling SAD-BJP alliance had surprised all political observers, pundits & pollsters by bucking the anti-incumbency trend for the first time and retaining the state with a mere 2 percentage point advantage over Congress which had given the saffron alliance a clear majority. Almost 5 years down the line, it appears as if the needle hasn’t moved at all. Both the main contenders for power seem to be shadowing each other in terms of vote-shares as the trend line clearly shows. Both Congress and NDA (SAD-BJP alliance) have lost a bit of their base to AAP and other parties, but are essentially tied in a gridlock.
Of course, since our last survey in July, Congress seems to be breaking out into a clear lead which now stands at 3% – we must remember that such a lead could well be enough for a simple majority as was evident in the last election. Yet, 3% is also the standard expected margin of error that our poll comes with (i.e.) Congress, although has a slight advantage, may still end up being tied with SAD-BJP due to statistical margin of errors if the elections are held right now.
For an almost dying Congress party this could be an absolute lifeline purely because of the charisma of Captain Amrinder Singh. The problem though is that the high command may hesitate to declare him as the CM candidate which could potentially create a lot of confusion among the rank and file as was the case in all the hara-kiri of 2012.
On the other hand, decline of AAP seems to be following a set pattern as we had projected in our July survey. Soon after distribution of tickets, large number of small local political leaders who had joined the party began to drift away along with their set of followers and this exodus also took away the “protest vote” which was accruing to the party until then. The removal of Sucha Singh Chotepur which essentially meant largescale desertions by many zonal chiefs of the party further accentuated AAP’s decline. As things stand today, AAP is no longer a contender for power and it is slowly emerging as a 3rd party spoiler.
For instance, in the highly urbanized Chandigarh neighbourhood of Mohali (SAS Nagar) and Kharar assembly seats, AAP has announced advocate Himmat Singh Shergill and Kanwar Sandhu as the respective candidates. Both these seats are represented by the Congress party in the current assembly and both the sitting MLA’s are quite popular with their constituents. In fact, Balbir Singh Sidhu had won the Mohali seat by a big margin of nearly 17k votes in the 2012 election. Today both these seats are witnessing a triangular contest which may actually help the ruling party because of division of anti-incumbency vote!
This is a familiar pattern for Sukhbir Singh Badal who is working overtime to eke out an impossible victory from the jaws of defeat as he so successfully did in 2012 through another 3rd party spoiler in the form of PPP of Manpreet Badal. In the last few days, for instance, Badal has systematically targeted Ravidassiyas who form an important Dalit subsect in the state. Two powerful Congress Dalit leaders belonging to the Ravidassiya sect – Kabir Das and Seth Satpal Mall – were inducted into SAD last week. Both the leaders are known as “right hand men” of chief of Dera Sachkhand Ballan who control nearly 80% of Ravidassiyas in the state. Dera Ballan’s support essentially means some 8 to 10 lakh fixed votes in districts like Kapurthala, Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar and Nawanshahar.
Realizing that his party may face some losses in Malwa region, the junior Badal is wooing Dalits and other non-Panthic Deras, especially in the Doab region. His efforts seem to be yielding some results too, as our poll shows a reasonable performance by the saffron alliance in this Congress stronghold region known for high percentage of Dalit votes and NRIs. In fact, even in the 2012 election, this strategy had yielded spectacular results as the SAD-BJP alliance had managed to win 24 of the 34 SC reserved seats of the state by selectively targeting Dalit-backward vote as addendum to their core base of Panthic Sikhs & upper castes. Yet, for SAD-BJP to have a definite chance they need 6 factors to work in their favour;
- The saffron alliance must aggressively and creatively woo the Deras, especially the Dera Sacha Sauda and the Radha Soami Satsang who between them cover a massive vote-base of at least 3 million unwavering voters. Here BJP’s role also could be crucial (over the last month, many BJP ruled states like Rajasthan have given 100% tax rebate to Messenger of God movie series of Gurmeet Singh Ram Rahim which has endeared him and his followers to saffron brigade)
- Navjot Singh Sidhu could potentially emerge as the key to 2017. If Sidhu forms an alliance with the Congress party, the latter in all likelihood will sweep the state. But if Sidhu joins a 4th front like outfit along with many former AAP groups, the resultant 4th pole may well further divide opposition votes and give the ruling alliance a golden opportunity to create a historic hatrick
- Akalis must sacrifice some of their urban seats and give a larger pool of tickets to BJP in order to cash in on the latter’s new found popularity due to surgical strikes and hyper nationalism
- Prakash Singh Badal must be marketed as the last standing patriarch of the Sikh society. A clear emotional campaign by the senior Badal with associate cross platform narrative is needed to refurbish the saffron alliance in the state
- BJP still needs to wake up and counter the massive online & media propaganda by the opposition. It has to leverage its vast network of supporters and create an alternate narrative before time runs out
- Ticket distribution is now a very crucial exercise for the ruling alliance, especially because of 4-cornered contests in most of the seats
[We have undertaken a risky large sample size survey which has resulted in a debt of over 3.6 lakh rupees. You can support us by being an angel to mitigate our risks]
A note on the 5Forty3 Punjab poll survey
This Punjab poll survey was conducted between October 15th and October 24th spread across 91 polling station areas (including swing polling booths) covering 27 specially chosen assembly segments of all the different electoral zones of the state. Our survey covered 114 geographic locations of 13 districts and had a target sample size of 3410, giving adequately weighted representation to various castes and socio-economic groups of both the rural and urban populace (see the below tables).
This 5Forty3 survey has a statistical error margin of 3.1% and a historic error margin of 2.7% (based on our past record). Our polls are especially accurate because of our path-breaking swing polling booth surveys based on indigenously developed tool RSSI (Randomized Social Swing Impact) which gave us near 100% accurate results during the Bihar elections where every other pollster failed. Based on our long experience we can say that there are three main error zones for political poll surveys in India;
- Selection bias: Our methodology has possibly a near perfect selection probability, therefore this poll survey has produced one of the most robust results.
- Random Sampling Error: Since we have used a controlled random sampling methodology this problem has been almost completely negated; for instance, most pollsters simply use a randomized sample across the geography to arrive at findings, but our system has extensively used electoral rolls in conjecture with our own ethnic (caste) database as the sampling frame.
- Non-Response evaluation error: Most poll surveys completely ignore “no responses” and simply concentrate on the positive responses, which artificially inflates findings. Our system actually treats “no responses” as positive findings and assigns value to them, which adds a whole new dimension to understanding people’s choices.
P.S: Vote-share to seat-share conversion in India is at best a guesswork based on multiple variables. There are no statistical models to project seats from votes, but since most election analysis would be incomplete without seat allocation, we place the seat-share chart at the end as an addendum. The margin of error does not hold true for seat-shares as it is not a mathematical exercise of probability in itself.
http://5forty3.in/a-surgical-saffron-surge-in-hindi-heartland/
Ukraura Mela is one of the many events of the Hindu festive calendar in eastern Uttar Pradesh during the Dussehra-Diwali season and is often seen as the platform to showcase the political power of various Bahubalis of Azamgarh. This year, during that Mela, there was a massive gun battle that resulted in at least a dozen people being injured. It was a mini-war between two huge Bhandaras organized by cousins Vijay Yadav and Pramod Yadav.
Local eyewitnesses spoke of how the shooting incident virtually resembled a gangster Bollywood movie and everybody believes it was a miracle that the casualties were not very high considering the sheer size of crowd present in the Mela. “It was a Yadav battle for Azamgarh between cousins turned enemies”, described a local shopkeeper, further adding, “the next few months will be quite tense here”.
Azamgarh is Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Karma-Bhoomi in eastern Uttar Pradesh for it represents that cleavage of Muslim-Yadav demographic coalition which has defined his politics for 3 decades. Consequently, Mulayam’s protégé, the state’s Forest Minister and local Bahubali, Durga Prasad Yadav has almost never lost Azamgarh since 1985 (except for 1993 when he was outside the SP-BSP coalition) winning it for a record 7 terms.
It is widely believed in Azamgarh that a big reason for Durga Prasad Yadav’s success has been his large family base mostly managed by his nephew Pramod Yadav who along with his other Bahubali brother, Runnu Yadav have both been Block Pramukhs. It is also widely believed here that ever since Durga Prasad’s son, Vijay Yadav blocked Pramod Yadav’s election to ZP (Zilla Panchayat) Chairman’s position there has been a war brewing within the family which culminated in the Ukraura shootout of October 22nd.
Just 2 days later, some 300 kilo-meters away at the Samajwadi headquarters in the state’s capital of Lucknow, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav and his uncle, party president Shivpal Yadav, virtually came to fisticuffs on the stage in the full view of hundreds of party leaders and workers who in turn started a street battle amongst themselves!
From Azamgarh to Lucknow to every other district in between, the Yadav clans are fighting pitched political battles among themselves. This is perhaps that stage of evolution of political empowerment of a caste where power becomes mutually exclusive within a family to the extent that mutual destruction becomes the sole survival option. The impact of this Yadav clash is potentially going to be very high on the upcoming assembly elections.
In about 3 months, the approval ratings of the state government have gone down by a huge 9 points and it is now in that deeply anti-incumbent territory of the sub 40% range which historically produces a complete opposition sweep in the ensuing elections – for instance, in the recently concluded Assam elections, the state government’s approval ratings never fell below 48% and yet it lost the election pretty badly.
Akhilesh Yadav must be a worried man, for the voter perception which was already negative due to the law & order situation has further spiralled out of control due to apparent lack of governance over the last 2 months. “First they all (Mulayam family) fought among themselves like wolves and dogs over meat, now he (the CM) has embarked on election campaign in a Mercedes van” says 24-year-old unemployed Mahesh Yadav with doles of sarcasm. His mother was suffering from a bout of Dengue-like fever throughout this festive season and there were not enough beds in the civil hospital, so his anger sums up the frustration of a state that is in a constant self-imposed turmoil.
A section of the media, including some big English language newspapers are heavily promoting Akhilesh as the young face of Uttar Pradesh and are even portraying that he has huge mass support, but most of these are exercises in futility, for the anger is quite palpable everywhere. Yes, there is a vocal section of the Samajwadi youth brigade that is creating a lot of noise in favour of the CM, but that can hardly hide the anti-incumbency anger of ordinary people, nor can it gloss over the inherent divisions at every level of the party. In every district, there are at the bare minimum, at least 2 different groups of Samajwadi leaders nurtured by CM Akhilesh Yadav and party president Shivpal Yadav respectively.
Akhilesh may be popular among the youth brigade of the party as many young leaders have benefited from his largesse in various contracts and Theka-permits, but Shivpal has also nurtured those long-time party workers who haven’t got much power or money in the last 5 years of SP rule. In fact, Mulayam wasn’t very wrong when he admonished his son openly in that party meet on October 24th, “What have you done? You have just nurtured Juwaris (gamblers) and Sharabis (drunkards) in your regime!” This is indeed the common refrain of many old Samajwadi warhorses in various districts where they see the young brigade as brazenly indulging in their vices after achieving power and making money. Such a vertical division in the party has left many leaders wondering how they would face the electorate this time.
Take the case of Azamgarh assembly seat as an example. Pramod Yadav, the nephew, has now been vying for a BSP ticket to challenge his uncle and Forest Minister, Durga Prasad Yadav who was otherwise seen as virtually undefeatable there. Now it has all the portends of turning into a battle royal with guns and gangsters thrown into the mix. If BJP nominates the right candidate, there is every chance that the saffron party may end up as a straight beneficiary in this uncle-nephew Yadav battle.
Our polling also shows that both the sitting MPs and MLAs are also facing a big bout of anti-incumbency, but the latter were significantly more unpopular. Riding on the surgical strikes success, the central government seems to be enjoying a massively high positive rating of 86% which is a historically significant number that suggests a tsunami of support building in favour of Modi. The contrast of how the voters see the state govt. vis-à-vis the central govt. could not have been starker – it is also testimonial to the intelligence of the average voter in the state who makes a clear distinction no matter how much the media narrative tries to show a state of false equivalence.
How is Akhilesh dealing with all these dangerous prospects for the ruling party? He seems to believe that elections can be won purely by hiring good political consultants. In fact, he has gone ahead and hired Harvard University’s Kennedy School professor and leading Democratic party consultant, Steve Jarding to manage his re-election campaign. One of the first things that Jarding has created is Akhilesh as the ‘family man’, so we see the CM playing cricket with his kids and sitting with his (photogenic) wife all over the adverts and images. This is the cornerstone of American political campaigns where candidates have to be seen as “doting on their families” to win the hearts of ordinary voters. In India, where Bhai-Bhatijawad (especially in parties like SP) is rampant in the political sphere how will voters react to such messaging is anybody’s guess. Imagine the pain and anger of ordinary people suffering from Dengue & Chikangunya waiting for a hospital bed when they see the CM fighting with his uncle one moment and then playing cricket with his kids the next moment!
Hubris has been the political currency all over the left-liberal world recently and Steve Jarding and his ilk of Democratic political consultants have been at the forefront of Hillary Clinton’s “shocking” defeat in the US, but here in India he is using those same mantras of training 4000 volunteers to spread brand Akhilesh across the state and terming “Uttar Pradesh is my family” etc. If only these political consultants understood even 10% of the angst of today’s world, they would probably not make such blatant mistakes.
In a straightforward swap election, Mayawati’s BSP should have been the direct beneficiary of all the anti-incumbency. Indeed, she is still the most popular face for leadership choice in the state, while Akhilesh has remained static at around 14% (just a 1 point drop from our previous survey). Elections are heavily personality centric these days and Maya has every chance of creating a campaign built around her as the most viable alternative. Yet, there seems to be one obstacle in Maya’s path and that obstacle is named as Narendra Bhai Damodardas Modi.
The recent Bihar defeat of BJP and the Assam victory in contrast have created a clear political narrative about the need to anoint a state-level leadership face to represent the saffron vote surge. Most BJP local leaders too agree that the party needs a mascot to create a successful campaign in this most populous state. Yet, data suggests a somewhat convoluted path.
Throughout the 2014 election cycle, Modi’s popularity & approval ratings across India and in specific election bound states like Maharashtra and Haryana remained above the 60th percentile in general when BJP also managed to win a host of elections. In the 2015 Bihar election, however, the Prime Minister’s popularity rating had just fallen below 50% which also correlated with BJP’s defeat along with various other reasons. Today, after the surgical strikes against Pakistan (this poll was done before demonetization of 1000 & 500 Rupee notes), the Prime Minister’s popularity rating is once again hitting its peak which may override any local political vagaries to create a favourable atmosphere for the national ruling party. In fact, there are 5 distinct reasons why BJP may benefit from this move of not declaring a CM candidate;
Although employment still remains the single biggest concern of people in UP, agrarian crisis seems to have relatively eased due to a better monsoon as compared to July. Interestingly, law & order problems have gained further mind-space among the voters, possibly due to the constant bickering and fights among the Yadav clans which is really hurting the state government much more than anything else. For the first time, we conducted a new case study on the impact of various central govt. schemes like PMJDY and the Ujjwala Yojana to assess the tangible changes to voter behaviour which has provided us with some very curious numbers.
A whopping 34 lakh BPL families of UP have benefited from the PM Ujjwala Yojana which provides for free LPG cooking gas with the savings made from voluntary surrendering of government subsidized cooking gas cylinders. This one single measure by the central govt. has the potential to upturn the UP election as it can directly influence a voter base of nearly 1.2-1.8 crore people by February next year!
To put things in perspective; BJP received totally 3.43 crore votes in 2014 while SP and BSP received 1.79 and 1.59 crore votes respectively and just this 1 scheme of providing cooking gas to families that heavily depended on unclean cooking fuels (like wood, kerosene, animal dung etc. which resulted in over 5 lakh death every year as per WHO statistics) can empower anywhere between 1.2-1.8 crore voters to think beyond caste silos and vote for real change. Our poll shows that 63% of rural housewives believe that this Yojana will make an impact on their voting decision. Going further, this single govt. measure may have a much bigger impact on voting decision than the surgical strike against Pakistan. In fact, in a decentralized trajectory, if this yojana manages to accrue even a basic average of 12-18k votes to BJP in each assembly seat (with a cumulative of 6 million votes), that could potentially impact the results in 70 to 90 seats of the state. Comparatively, the impact of PMJDY seems to be far lesser until now.
This is where BJP gets a big starting advantage while designing an election campaign. Voters tend to associate development agenda far better with tangible results when assessing the promises of a political party. This was one of the problem areas for BJP during the Bihar campaign last year where the voters simply had nothing substantial or realistic to relate to (despite the special package announcement which only sounded hollow) while opposition created a storm about reservations. Now, BJP and PM Modi can easily build a substantial campaign in UP about the party’s plans to generate employment and maintain law & order and solve health care problems. Voters would also have a greater degree of belief in the saffron campaign because of the success of Ujjwala Yojana & PMJDY etc.
Ruling Samajwadi Party is seeing a declining trend in both of its core voters of Yadavs and Muslims. As of today, the Muslim vote is facing the greatest uncertainty which is reflecting in our poll where almost 1 out of 4 Muslim voters in the state is still in the ‘undecided’ category. Essentially, Muslim voter is likely to break out late into the election and we need to constantly keep track of them.
“Jab voter jeetata hai tho kissi pe ehsaan nahin karta aur jab haraata hai tho kissi ka lihaaz nahin karta” was the cryptic one-liner by Bachchan Miyan, a 65 year old fruit vendor near Allahabad who in his own words “has seen it all” in his life in the state. That underlying Muslim frustration with the state government in particular and the state of politics in general is a whole new phenomenon in UP. The UP Muslim voter has never felt so powerless, not even after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, for their votes always made the difference in the end as even in the 1993 election they were able to prevent a saffron victory at the peak of Kalyan Singh’s popularity.
Mayawati is trying her best to woo the Muslim vote of Uttar Pradesh. She is actually quite desperate which is showing in her speeches where she is putting up a direct appeal to Muslims not to split their votes and lead to a BJP victory. Her party, BSP is also openly communalizing the election by reciting the verses of Quran in their election gatherings. And yet, despite all these efforts, Muslims at least till now are not showing any signs of changing their historic pattern as about 22% are voting for BSP as of today. Just why is this Muslim-Dalit coalition so difficult to pull off?
[This high quality poll of UP would not be possible without your support]
This exercise gave us a very interesting insight into voters’ minds based on their own definition of political power. In India, elections always operate on the ‘winner-takes-it-all’ phenomenon which essentially works on the invisible collectivism hypothesis wherein many seemingly disparate demographic subsets join hands to create an ‘unexpected’ majority for a political party. It is almost as if majority of the voters suddenly come together by design to produce a mandate. This happens because mostly average Indians do not want to waste their votes and decide to exercise their franchise towards the leading party in a state. Our model suggests that Muslims (with large undecided segments), Yadavs and non-Jatav Dalits of UP are in that special zone today wherein they are likely to go with the leading party to create a mandate.
On the whole BJP enjoys a clear 9% lead in UP as of early November (before the demonetization drive of the central government) which should potentially lead to a massive saffron sweep in the state. In fact, this is consistent with not only the shift in electorate of Uttar Pradesh but also the electoral data of the last 2 years across India.
Ruling Samajwadi party is stuck around the 20% mark and is steadily losing support at about 1% every 3 odd months. Of course, it may gain a few more points once the undecided voters breakout, but it looks highly unlikely that it will come any closer to the 30th percentile on its own because of A] sheer anti-incumbency, B] internal clan wars which have percolated down to the last common denominator and C] uncertain core vote-base of both Muslims and Yadavs
BSP has gained about 5 points in terms of vote-share which amounts to 20% extra gain as compared to 2014, but is struggling to go beyond that. BSP’s main obstacles are that it is unable to attract votes beyond the core base of Jatavs as even other, non-Jatav, Dalits are not fully sure about backing the party as it is suffering large scale desertions and lacklustre Muslim support. Yet, as of today, BSP remains the biggest challenger to a saffron surge in the state.
Since the peak of 2014 LS elections, BJP’s vote-share has remained adamant for most parts. Even when the party lost Bihar last year, it only dropped about 5 percentage points. Throughout the last 2 years the party has lost anywhere between 0 to 9 percentage points in state elections against the 2014 benchmark. Our model suggests that even in UP the floor for party’s vote-share could not be lower. Indeed, our poll projection is at the lower end of the spectrum as BJP has lost about 10% votes from 2014 with 12% undecided (and others) voters.
Although a sub-regional vote analysis would be futile at this point when candidates haven’t yet been announced, it gives us a peek into the demographic behavioural patterns. BJP’s sub-regional hegemony of 2014 has been more-or-less sustained. The party’s best performance comes from the east which also has the largest share of assembly seats and is home to 29 districts out of 75. Even in West UP, the polarization of 2014 is still active even though at a reduced pitch, which is giving BJP enough traction to gain a lead. The only region where BJP is not leading as of today is in Awadh which is much smaller in terms of overall impact. Looking at the trajectory, it is clear that BJP has gained relative to its opposition in the west while it has remained static in the east as compared to our own poll in July. The upside potential for BJP is quite high in all regions, so ticket distribution could be a crucial exercise for the party.
As of today, the only way that a saffron surge can be challenged, let alone be stopped, is by an opposition alliance. Unlike Bihar where all the opposition parties came together to fight under a united umbrella, here such a possibility is next to nil simply because neither Maya nor Akhilesh would be willing to give up on the CMs post (also neither of them face any legal limitations like Lalu Yadav who could afford to accept Nitish Kumar’s leadership). Among other possibilities, the coming together of all the erstwhile Janata parties like RLD and SP in alliance with Congress is the most realistic one. The problem with such an arrangement is that their votes may not really add up in a neat structural form creating greater fissures for BJP to exploit. Consequently, there are 5 problem areas for such an alliance;
[We have taken a massive risk by conducting these big polls in UP and Punjab. Without your support we may not be in a position to sustain these polling activities, so your support is paramount to keep 5Forty3 alive. For these polls we have already accrued a debt of over 3 lakh rupees which you can mitigate by contributing here]
Our job as a pollster and a psephologist comes to an end here, but Indian election analysis would not be complete without projecting seat-shares which itself is nothing but a dark art due to non-availability of any statistical or mathematical model to convert votes to seats. Therefore, the error margins of our polls do not hold true for our seat projections.
A Note on 5Forty3 Uttar Pradesh Poll survey of October
This UP poll survey was conducted between October 15th and October 28th spread across 190 polling station areas (including swing polling booths) covering 63 specially chosen assembly segments of all the different electoral zones of the state. Our survey covered 281 geographic locations of 26 districts and had a target sample size of 5800, giving adequately weighted representation to various castes and socio-economic groups of both the rural and urban populace (see the below tables)
Ukraura Mela is one of the many events of the Hindu festive calendar in eastern Uttar Pradesh during the Dussehra-Diwali season and is often seen as the platform to showcase the political power of various Bahubalis of Azamgarh. This year, during that Mela, there was a massive gun battle that resulted in at least a dozen people being injured. It was a mini-war between two huge Bhandaras organized by cousins Vijay Yadav and Pramod Yadav.
Local eyewitnesses spoke of how the shooting incident virtually resembled a gangster Bollywood movie and everybody believes it was a miracle that the casualties were not very high considering the sheer size of crowd present in the Mela. “It was a Yadav battle for Azamgarh between cousins turned enemies”, described a local shopkeeper, further adding, “the next few months will be quite tense here”.
Azamgarh is Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Karma-Bhoomi in eastern Uttar Pradesh for it represents that cleavage of Muslim-Yadav demographic coalition which has defined his politics for 3 decades. Consequently, Mulayam’s protégé, the state’s Forest Minister and local Bahubali, Durga Prasad Yadav has almost never lost Azamgarh since 1985 (except for 1993 when he was outside the SP-BSP coalition) winning it for a record 7 terms.
It is widely believed in Azamgarh that a big reason for Durga Prasad Yadav’s success has been his large family base mostly managed by his nephew Pramod Yadav who along with his other Bahubali brother, Runnu Yadav have both been Block Pramukhs. It is also widely believed here that ever since Durga Prasad’s son, Vijay Yadav blocked Pramod Yadav’s election to ZP (Zilla Panchayat) Chairman’s position there has been a war brewing within the family which culminated in the Ukraura shootout of October 22nd.
Just 2 days later, some 300 kilo-meters away at the Samajwadi headquarters in the state’s capital of Lucknow, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav and his uncle, party president Shivpal Yadav, virtually came to fisticuffs on the stage in the full view of hundreds of party leaders and workers who in turn started a street battle amongst themselves!
From Azamgarh to Lucknow to every other district in between, the Yadav clans are fighting pitched political battles among themselves. This is perhaps that stage of evolution of political empowerment of a caste where power becomes mutually exclusive within a family to the extent that mutual destruction becomes the sole survival option. The impact of this Yadav clash is potentially going to be very high on the upcoming assembly elections.
In about 3 months, the approval ratings of the state government have gone down by a huge 9 points and it is now in that deeply anti-incumbent territory of the sub 40% range which historically produces a complete opposition sweep in the ensuing elections – for instance, in the recently concluded Assam elections, the state government’s approval ratings never fell below 48% and yet it lost the election pretty badly.
Akhilesh Yadav must be a worried man, for the voter perception which was already negative due to the law & order situation has further spiralled out of control due to apparent lack of governance over the last 2 months. “First they all (Mulayam family) fought among themselves like wolves and dogs over meat, now he (the CM) has embarked on election campaign in a Mercedes van” says 24-year-old unemployed Mahesh Yadav with doles of sarcasm. His mother was suffering from a bout of Dengue-like fever throughout this festive season and there were not enough beds in the civil hospital, so his anger sums up the frustration of a state that is in a constant self-imposed turmoil.
A section of the media, including some big English language newspapers are heavily promoting Akhilesh as the young face of Uttar Pradesh and are even portraying that he has huge mass support, but most of these are exercises in futility, for the anger is quite palpable everywhere. Yes, there is a vocal section of the Samajwadi youth brigade that is creating a lot of noise in favour of the CM, but that can hardly hide the anti-incumbency anger of ordinary people, nor can it gloss over the inherent divisions at every level of the party. In every district, there are at the bare minimum, at least 2 different groups of Samajwadi leaders nurtured by CM Akhilesh Yadav and party president Shivpal Yadav respectively.
Akhilesh may be popular among the youth brigade of the party as many young leaders have benefited from his largesse in various contracts and Theka-permits, but Shivpal has also nurtured those long-time party workers who haven’t got much power or money in the last 5 years of SP rule. In fact, Mulayam wasn’t very wrong when he admonished his son openly in that party meet on October 24th, “What have you done? You have just nurtured Juwaris (gamblers) and Sharabis (drunkards) in your regime!” This is indeed the common refrain of many old Samajwadi warhorses in various districts where they see the young brigade as brazenly indulging in their vices after achieving power and making money. Such a vertical division in the party has left many leaders wondering how they would face the electorate this time.
Take the case of Azamgarh assembly seat as an example. Pramod Yadav, the nephew, has now been vying for a BSP ticket to challenge his uncle and Forest Minister, Durga Prasad Yadav who was otherwise seen as virtually undefeatable there. Now it has all the portends of turning into a battle royal with guns and gangsters thrown into the mix. If BJP nominates the right candidate, there is every chance that the saffron party may end up as a straight beneficiary in this uncle-nephew Yadav battle.
Our polling also shows that both the sitting MPs and MLAs are also facing a big bout of anti-incumbency, but the latter were significantly more unpopular. Riding on the surgical strikes success, the central government seems to be enjoying a massively high positive rating of 86% which is a historically significant number that suggests a tsunami of support building in favour of Modi. The contrast of how the voters see the state govt. vis-à-vis the central govt. could not have been starker – it is also testimonial to the intelligence of the average voter in the state who makes a clear distinction no matter how much the media narrative tries to show a state of false equivalence.
How is Akhilesh dealing with all these dangerous prospects for the ruling party? He seems to believe that elections can be won purely by hiring good political consultants. In fact, he has gone ahead and hired Harvard University’s Kennedy School professor and leading Democratic party consultant, Steve Jarding to manage his re-election campaign. One of the first things that Jarding has created is Akhilesh as the ‘family man’, so we see the CM playing cricket with his kids and sitting with his (photogenic) wife all over the adverts and images. This is the cornerstone of American political campaigns where candidates have to be seen as “doting on their families” to win the hearts of ordinary voters. In India, where Bhai-Bhatijawad (especially in parties like SP) is rampant in the political sphere how will voters react to such messaging is anybody’s guess. Imagine the pain and anger of ordinary people suffering from Dengue & Chikangunya waiting for a hospital bed when they see the CM fighting with his uncle one moment and then playing cricket with his kids the next moment!
Hubris has been the political currency all over the left-liberal world recently and Steve Jarding and his ilk of Democratic political consultants have been at the forefront of Hillary Clinton’s “shocking” defeat in the US, but here in India he is using those same mantras of training 4000 volunteers to spread brand Akhilesh across the state and terming “Uttar Pradesh is my family” etc. If only these political consultants understood even 10% of the angst of today’s world, they would probably not make such blatant mistakes.
In a straightforward swap election, Mayawati’s BSP should have been the direct beneficiary of all the anti-incumbency. Indeed, she is still the most popular face for leadership choice in the state, while Akhilesh has remained static at around 14% (just a 1 point drop from our previous survey). Elections are heavily personality centric these days and Maya has every chance of creating a campaign built around her as the most viable alternative. Yet, there seems to be one obstacle in Maya’s path and that obstacle is named as Narendra Bhai Damodardas Modi.
The recent Bihar defeat of BJP and the Assam victory in contrast have created a clear political narrative about the need to anoint a state-level leadership face to represent the saffron vote surge. Most BJP local leaders too agree that the party needs a mascot to create a successful campaign in this most populous state. Yet, data suggests a somewhat convoluted path.
Throughout the 2014 election cycle, Modi’s popularity & approval ratings across India and in specific election bound states like Maharashtra and Haryana remained above the 60th percentile in general when BJP also managed to win a host of elections. In the 2015 Bihar election, however, the Prime Minister’s popularity rating had just fallen below 50% which also correlated with BJP’s defeat along with various other reasons. Today, after the surgical strikes against Pakistan (this poll was done before demonetization of 1000 & 500 Rupee notes), the Prime Minister’s popularity rating is once again hitting its peak which may override any local political vagaries to create a favourable atmosphere for the national ruling party. In fact, there are 5 distinct reasons why BJP may benefit from this move of not declaring a CM candidate;
- Unlike Bihar, Prime Minister Modi represents Uttar Pradesh in parliament and is virtually seen as a mascot of the state cutting across caste lines which augurs well for the USHV base of BJP
- BJP has to adapt a three-layered demographic progression model in UP as it did in 2014 – A] create a subtle Hindu polarization, B] enable all caste groups, especially non-Yadav OBCs, to enthusiastically participate in the elections and C] articulate a clear development agenda for the party based on anti-corruption and good economics modules. As of today, no BJP leader can symbolize this triple layered model as best as Modi can
- Among all the states of India, Uttar Pradesh demographic is the most inclined to weigh their votes with a ‘national political perspective’ by foregoing regional considerations. Essentially what this means is that UP voters want to be indulged by underlying their importance to national politics which they have rediscovered fully in 2014. (This national political obsession of UP voters is because of 2 reasons – 1] the state itself is not a homogenous entity like a Bihar or a Gujarat or a Karnataka to have a high degree of regional identity appeal and 2] its closeness to the power of Delhi both geographically & culturally as well as due its inherent weightage of 80 parliamentarians)
- PM Modi is best placed to exploit the two big national issues of India’s aggressive response to Pakistan and the central government’s revolutionary new steps at curbing black money which will both find resonance among the UP voters if packaged creatively
- There are no pan-UP leaders with a broad development and nationalist appeal in state BJP today, especially in the post-Kalyan Singh era. For example, Yogi Adityanath was emerging as the consensus choice in July, but since the party did not make any announcement, his popularity seems to be dimming purely on its own weight.
Although employment still remains the single biggest concern of people in UP, agrarian crisis seems to have relatively eased due to a better monsoon as compared to July. Interestingly, law & order problems have gained further mind-space among the voters, possibly due to the constant bickering and fights among the Yadav clans which is really hurting the state government much more than anything else. For the first time, we conducted a new case study on the impact of various central govt. schemes like PMJDY and the Ujjwala Yojana to assess the tangible changes to voter behaviour which has provided us with some very curious numbers.
A whopping 34 lakh BPL families of UP have benefited from the PM Ujjwala Yojana which provides for free LPG cooking gas with the savings made from voluntary surrendering of government subsidized cooking gas cylinders. This one single measure by the central govt. has the potential to upturn the UP election as it can directly influence a voter base of nearly 1.2-1.8 crore people by February next year!
To put things in perspective; BJP received totally 3.43 crore votes in 2014 while SP and BSP received 1.79 and 1.59 crore votes respectively and just this 1 scheme of providing cooking gas to families that heavily depended on unclean cooking fuels (like wood, kerosene, animal dung etc. which resulted in over 5 lakh death every year as per WHO statistics) can empower anywhere between 1.2-1.8 crore voters to think beyond caste silos and vote for real change. Our poll shows that 63% of rural housewives believe that this Yojana will make an impact on their voting decision. Going further, this single govt. measure may have a much bigger impact on voting decision than the surgical strike against Pakistan. In fact, in a decentralized trajectory, if this yojana manages to accrue even a basic average of 12-18k votes to BJP in each assembly seat (with a cumulative of 6 million votes), that could potentially impact the results in 70 to 90 seats of the state. Comparatively, the impact of PMJDY seems to be far lesser until now.
This is where BJP gets a big starting advantage while designing an election campaign. Voters tend to associate development agenda far better with tangible results when assessing the promises of a political party. This was one of the problem areas for BJP during the Bihar campaign last year where the voters simply had nothing substantial or realistic to relate to (despite the special package announcement which only sounded hollow) while opposition created a storm about reservations. Now, BJP and PM Modi can easily build a substantial campaign in UP about the party’s plans to generate employment and maintain law & order and solve health care problems. Voters would also have a greater degree of belief in the saffron campaign because of the success of Ujjwala Yojana & PMJDY etc.
Ruling Samajwadi Party is seeing a declining trend in both of its core voters of Yadavs and Muslims. As of today, the Muslim vote is facing the greatest uncertainty which is reflecting in our poll where almost 1 out of 4 Muslim voters in the state is still in the ‘undecided’ category. Essentially, Muslim voter is likely to break out late into the election and we need to constantly keep track of them.
“Jab voter jeetata hai tho kissi pe ehsaan nahin karta aur jab haraata hai tho kissi ka lihaaz nahin karta” was the cryptic one-liner by Bachchan Miyan, a 65 year old fruit vendor near Allahabad who in his own words “has seen it all” in his life in the state. That underlying Muslim frustration with the state government in particular and the state of politics in general is a whole new phenomenon in UP. The UP Muslim voter has never felt so powerless, not even after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, for their votes always made the difference in the end as even in the 1993 election they were able to prevent a saffron victory at the peak of Kalyan Singh’s popularity.
Mayawati is trying her best to woo the Muslim vote of Uttar Pradesh. She is actually quite desperate which is showing in her speeches where she is putting up a direct appeal to Muslims not to split their votes and lead to a BJP victory. Her party, BSP is also openly communalizing the election by reciting the verses of Quran in their election gatherings. And yet, despite all these efforts, Muslims at least till now are not showing any signs of changing their historic pattern as about 22% are voting for BSP as of today. Just why is this Muslim-Dalit coalition so difficult to pull off?
- Mathematically, historic electoral-demographic data shows an upper resistance level at the 30th percentile which would be a difficult ceiling to break unless there is some path-breaking change. Maya wrongly believes that increasing Muslim candidates by BSP is enough on its own to woo the minority vote, but past data shows a contrarian trend
- Muslims and Dalits vie for similar socio-economic space in the UP society wherein Muslims feel that they are ‘artificially’ repressed due to reservations that the latter are entitled to
- Most ordinary Muslims have never seen the party as their own and there is a widespread notion among them that BSP is essentially a “Chamaron ki party”
- BSP lacks structural midlevel Muslim leadership at the districts and divisions unlike SP where Neta Ji has nurtured a solid ecosystem for decades
- Most Muslim opinion makers like Maulvis and local Urdu press is deeply incorporated into the Samajwadi political system and is unlikely to abandon that even in 2017
- Politically Maya is quite unpredictable and many Muslims still remember that she is not averse to join hands with the BJP which essentially means their own vote might be wasted in the end
- After the 2014 bitter experience where many Muslim voters ‘wasted’ their vote on BSP which won zero seats, many of them believe that Maya simply cannot stop saffron surge despite her Dalit vote-base
[This high quality poll of UP would not be possible without your support]
This exercise gave us a very interesting insight into voters’ minds based on their own definition of political power. In India, elections always operate on the ‘winner-takes-it-all’ phenomenon which essentially works on the invisible collectivism hypothesis wherein many seemingly disparate demographic subsets join hands to create an ‘unexpected’ majority for a political party. It is almost as if majority of the voters suddenly come together by design to produce a mandate. This happens because mostly average Indians do not want to waste their votes and decide to exercise their franchise towards the leading party in a state. Our model suggests that Muslims (with large undecided segments), Yadavs and non-Jatav Dalits of UP are in that special zone today wherein they are likely to go with the leading party to create a mandate.
On the whole BJP enjoys a clear 9% lead in UP as of early November (before the demonetization drive of the central government) which should potentially lead to a massive saffron sweep in the state. In fact, this is consistent with not only the shift in electorate of Uttar Pradesh but also the electoral data of the last 2 years across India.
Ruling Samajwadi party is stuck around the 20% mark and is steadily losing support at about 1% every 3 odd months. Of course, it may gain a few more points once the undecided voters breakout, but it looks highly unlikely that it will come any closer to the 30th percentile on its own because of A] sheer anti-incumbency, B] internal clan wars which have percolated down to the last common denominator and C] uncertain core vote-base of both Muslims and Yadavs
BSP has gained about 5 points in terms of vote-share which amounts to 20% extra gain as compared to 2014, but is struggling to go beyond that. BSP’s main obstacles are that it is unable to attract votes beyond the core base of Jatavs as even other, non-Jatav, Dalits are not fully sure about backing the party as it is suffering large scale desertions and lacklustre Muslim support. Yet, as of today, BSP remains the biggest challenger to a saffron surge in the state.
Since the peak of 2014 LS elections, BJP’s vote-share has remained adamant for most parts. Even when the party lost Bihar last year, it only dropped about 5 percentage points. Throughout the last 2 years the party has lost anywhere between 0 to 9 percentage points in state elections against the 2014 benchmark. Our model suggests that even in UP the floor for party’s vote-share could not be lower. Indeed, our poll projection is at the lower end of the spectrum as BJP has lost about 10% votes from 2014 with 12% undecided (and others) voters.
Although a sub-regional vote analysis would be futile at this point when candidates haven’t yet been announced, it gives us a peek into the demographic behavioural patterns. BJP’s sub-regional hegemony of 2014 has been more-or-less sustained. The party’s best performance comes from the east which also has the largest share of assembly seats and is home to 29 districts out of 75. Even in West UP, the polarization of 2014 is still active even though at a reduced pitch, which is giving BJP enough traction to gain a lead. The only region where BJP is not leading as of today is in Awadh which is much smaller in terms of overall impact. Looking at the trajectory, it is clear that BJP has gained relative to its opposition in the west while it has remained static in the east as compared to our own poll in July. The upside potential for BJP is quite high in all regions, so ticket distribution could be a crucial exercise for the party.
As of today, the only way that a saffron surge can be challenged, let alone be stopped, is by an opposition alliance. Unlike Bihar where all the opposition parties came together to fight under a united umbrella, here such a possibility is next to nil simply because neither Maya nor Akhilesh would be willing to give up on the CMs post (also neither of them face any legal limitations like Lalu Yadav who could afford to accept Nitish Kumar’s leadership). Among other possibilities, the coming together of all the erstwhile Janata parties like RLD and SP in alliance with Congress is the most realistic one. The problem with such an arrangement is that their votes may not really add up in a neat structural form creating greater fissures for BJP to exploit. Consequently, there are 5 problem areas for such an alliance;
- In West-UP, where the Jat-Muslim (and the overall Hindu-Muslim faultline) divide is extremely well demarcated, an alliance between RLD and SP could be a death knell for Ajit Singh’s party which may have recovered some ground otherwise. In such a scenario, polarization could end up being sharper than in 2014 resulting in a virtual sweep by BJP in this region
- Dalits, especially non-Jatav Dalits who have shown a higher degree of uncertainty in our voter-scale index, may then find it more viable to shift to BJP in such a scenario – saffronization of Dalits would then be complete and Modi would go unchallenged for a very long time in Indian elections
- The Akhilesh-Shivpal fault-line and the other internecine Yadav battles could come to the fore leading to many powerful rebel candidates from the ruling party contesting as independents
- BJP can strategically exploit reverse Hindu polarization across the state and Muslim votes may yet get divided, especially if a desperate Maya ties up with smaller Muslim regional parties like MIM and Peace Party
- With the rare exception of Bihar, whenever Congress has allied with other parties, it has only managed to harm them – the 3 latest examples being Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Assam. We tend to overlook the fact that average Indian voters are still not ready to forgive the Congress party even after the punishment of 2014.
[We have taken a massive risk by conducting these big polls in UP and Punjab. Without your support we may not be in a position to sustain these polling activities, so your support is paramount to keep 5Forty3 alive. For these polls we have already accrued a debt of over 3 lakh rupees which you can mitigate by contributing here]
Our job as a pollster and a psephologist comes to an end here, but Indian election analysis would not be complete without projecting seat-shares which itself is nothing but a dark art due to non-availability of any statistical or mathematical model to convert votes to seats. Therefore, the error margins of our polls do not hold true for our seat projections.
A Note on 5Forty3 Uttar Pradesh Poll survey of October
This UP poll survey was conducted between October 15th and October 28th spread across 190 polling station areas (including swing polling booths) covering 63 specially chosen assembly segments of all the different electoral zones of the state. Our survey covered 281 geographic locations of 26 districts and had a target sample size of 5800, giving adequately weighted representation to various castes and socio-economic groups of both the rural and urban populace (see the below tables)
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Ohde te adat a!
He's mad because he lost his savings not that he lost the party fund.
Clearly,the guy knows Punjab just like he predicted DelhiAAP is not winning Punjab. Right now it's a distant 3rd.
http://5forty3.in/is-punjab-heading-for-a-direct-two-horse-race/
“We are suffering and the government is simply deaf to our woes” averred Surjeet Singh, a midsize farmer near the Bhagtawala grain market in Amritsar. He along with some 50 other farmers was sitting on an impromptu protest against the state government. A protest which had more than a 100 AAP activists and scores of journalists along with a few ward level Congress leaders. All these activists, onlookers, journalists etc. outnumbered the ‘protesting’ farmers by a ratio of 4:1. The main problem of these handful of farmers was that the local Arthiyas (agriculture commission agents) were paying only “1350 to 1400 rupees while the govt. MSP was fixed at 1510 rupees per quintal for paddy”.
At the outset, it appeared as if the government was suffering from the proverbial political disease of hubris which would hurt it horribly in an election year. Especially the noise that some of the activists and media people were creating was quite disconcerting. Just a few meters away, the scene was completely in contrast. Literally hundreds of farmers were passing through the grain market selling their paddy at 1700 rupees per quintal – almost 200 rupees more than the MSP!
That scene near Amritsar in early October is what defines the politics of today, especially the rent-a-morcha type of crowd politics that AAP has pioneered. The truth of paddy farmer unrest in Punjab was in reality quite a cynical game played by the opposition during the election season. The numbers told the true story (as is always the case in the noise filled Indian discourse).
Arthiyas were paying 1700 rupees to 1509 variety of fully ripe paddy which constituted 87% of all paddy that had arrived in the grain market till then! In clear numbers, 56690 out of 64954 metric tonnes of paddy that had arrived in the grain market was that of 1509 variety. In fact, FCI (Food Corporation of India) had clearly advised farmers to arrive with fully ripe and dry paddy to get full price for their produce, but a few anxious farmers (less than 13% of the total) had harvested their produce before the paddy had fully ripened and became fodder for opposition political protests.
In many ways this is the political scene in Punjab today, where every aspect of day-to-day life can metamorphose into a political protest because 3 to 4 different political entities are fiercely vying for power. These protestations are then getting amplified in the chaotic din of media and social media noise leveraged on large scale presence of NRI Punjabis. This is the reason why most outsiders believe that Punjab is a heavily drug addicted land of virtually no-governance or rule of law today. In fact, many ‘right-leaning’ voices and segments of BJP supportive ecosystem – who may have not even visited Punjab – keep harping on their perceived idea that the state needs “big change”.
In the middle of last month, the state government opened the ‘Dhanoa Pattan’ bridge built on the Beas river at a mere cost of 65 Crore rupees within a record time of 5 years. This is a bridge that not only connects two districts – Gurdaspur and Hoshiarpur – but also connects two different sub-regions of the state, namely, Majha and Doab. Virtually thousands of farmers of the region are ecstatic about this new overpass road connectivity because it facilitates movement of sugarcane from the waterlogged region to the Mukerian sugar factory. “This is the greatest boon that the government has bestowed upon us”, emphasized a sugarcane farmer in Gudaspur, “we had been crying for this since many decades as the Paniyar mill (small local sugar mill) is too small, now we can directly take our produce to Mukeriyan mill”. But for most of the outside world, that bridge on river Beas is a bridge too far and Punjab as a drug addicted land of lawlessness makes far more sense.
That Dhanoa Patan bridge story is merely symbolic of how political noise can drain real governance issues in these times of hyper political activism. Of course, there is anti-incumbency of a decade long government in the state. Sure there are disaffected masses in many parts of Punjab, but the attempt to paint the state as a total disaster does not resonate on the smooth highways that connect almost all major cities to the nearby towns and villages (on an average our team had found the state to have the best road connectivity in all of north India) or in precise and effective functioning of the state’s grain markets or even in the newly refurbished heritage city complex built around the Golden Temple of Amritsar which is a breathtakingly beautiful sight to behold.
The truth of Punjab’s anti-incumbency is somewhere in between the ruling government’s propaganda, the opposition’s noisy campaign and the Lutyen’s media’s make-believe doomsday narrative. For pollsters, it is important to find the right metrics to define the state of anti-incumbency, for that data eventually determines electoral trend. This is why we had prepared our team to discover the signal from layers and layers of noise about issues that matter to Punjabis today.
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Employment & Jobs
As was the case in our 1st survey, the single biggest issue for the state’s voters is employment. In fact, this is the one issue that is hurting the SAD-BJP government the most. It is not as if the government hasn’t done enough in terms of providing “safe” government jobs, the problem really is that the state has failed in nurturing private sector jobs. As per estimates, 40% of Punjab’s total revenue receipts are spent on paying salaries and wages of the government employees and this is in addition to some 7767 Crore rupees spent on various retirement benefits!
Just before the 2012 election, the state government had regularized 45000 state employees which was probably one of the most underrated reasons for SAD-BJP bucking the anti-incumbency trend. This time around once again the government has adopted the same strategy. Just 2 weeks ago, the state cabinet decided to regularize 27000 contractual daily wage and temporary workers along with 15000 employees working on jobs outsourced to private companies. That is a whopping 42000 families and their dependents now potentially drafted into supporting the ruling party but at a debilitating cost of nearly 2000 Crore per annum to the state exchequer.
Will these last moment government largesse be enough? Consider this: for the last few months, ‘Contractual Employees Union’ of the state has been demanding regularization of some 1 lakh 30 thousand workers, whereas the government has only partially met that demand by regularizing only a 4th of those. Now, the remaining disaffected workers are considering other “political options”.
In fact, this is where BJP as the smaller partner in the state government has failed because it has not been able to impart an economic philosophy for the Akali led government. This is why among all the relatively developed and prosperous states like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra, Punjab is the least industrialized and also the state with the least exposure to IT and allied services industries. Thus, even today, despite high levels of urbanization, the state has made only rudimentary transformation from an agrarian economy to government-job economy which has left large swaths of the state economically dismembered.
The signs are quite ominous for the Badals as new voter registration data shows. Muktsar, the home district of the Chief Minister and Bhatinda represented by Harsimrat Kaur have seen the lowest new voter registrations in the state. As of now, 4.75 lakh new voters have been registered in Punjab and 2.25 lakh of those are first time voters belonging to the 18-19 age group. There are also 2.5 lakh voters belonging to the 20-29 bracket. It is these young voters who are possibly going through a sense of hopelessness and may end up becoming an albatross around the ruling party’s neck.
Agrarian problems & drug addiction
From our first survey of July to our present survey in October, the primacy of agrarian problems has almost halved (from 15% to 8%). On the other hand, the issue of drug addiction which had not found any significant mention in our first survey (less than 6%), is now finding traction with nearly 13% respondents. This is indeed a fascinating exercise of understanding voter behaviour. It shows us how people’s distress changes relatively.
Most farmers in July were anxious about their paddy and there was a general sense of apprehension among the rural populace, but after the harvest season in October even as the grain markets and the state government handled the selling of the winter produce adequately, the same farmers & rural population, with cash in hand, now tend to believe that the agrarian problems stand mitigated.
In clear contrast is the issue of drug menace which is now finding greater resonance among voters and it could be because of 2 factors;
Punjabi identity
- The issue of drug menace is mostly construed as a “luxury” problem by the Punjabi society. Thus, for instance, once their agrarian issues are solved they tend to identify with the next level of problems like the drug menace
- The constant media narrative and the opposition campaign could be having its effect into force-believing that there is a supposedly ‘massive drug addiction’ problem in the state
This is indeed a complex item among the voter woes that is hardly understood by most demographers. Since the post terrorism phase of 1980’s, Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) has been the pivot that has maintained the crucial balance of Punjabi identity without pandering to excessive separatist philosophy. That tenuous balance has been under stress for the last couple of years. For instance, the Sarbat Khalsa of last year called by some former Khalistani sympathizers has tried to create a parallel Panthic representative body which is further augmented by AAP kind of politics that has pandered to pro-Khalistan entities both here in Punjab and among non-resident Punjabis abroad.
Most Hindu and Sikh voters do underscore the importance of the Akali-Sant Samaj alliance to maintain SGPC (Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee) as the sole representative body of Panthic Sikhs and are averse to any tinkering of that balance. Once again another attempt to organize a Sarbat Khalsa in Talwandi Sabo by some former Khalistanis like Baljit Singh Dadhuwal and Bhai Mokam Singh (incidentally both have had brief flirtations with AAP since 2014) has been thwarted by the state government for now. If many ‘separatist’ and ‘self-rule’ voices are heard once again this year in and around the Sarbat Khalsa, then many ordinary Sikhs and Hindus of the state would be left with little choice but to support SAD-BJP alliance in order to maintain the sanctity of the Punjab state.
In this milieu of Punjabi identity crisis has emerged the AAP phenomenon which for long has flirted with Khalistanis and then lost its way with Panthic Sikhs by a series of missteps starting from the AAP manifesto controversy to ending up with the sacking of the party’s big Panthic Punjabi face in the form of Sucha Singh Chotepur. Even AAP’s own volunteer groups strongly believe that Arvind Kejriwal will be the Chief Minister if the party comes to power which has created a strong divide with the Punjabi versus non-Punjabi debate taking the center stage. Indeed, this hugely emotional debate over Punjabi v/s Haryanvi has taken a big toll on Arvind Kejriwal’s own popularity in the state as is clearly evident in our poll finding.
Captain Amrinder Singh is by far the most popular leader in Punjab today as he has a solid 13-point advantage over Prakash Singh Badal. Clearly, the 10 year anti-incumbency seems to be hurting the senior Badal as surprisingly even 63% of BJP voters too are not choosing him as their primary face of leadership. In fact, today, Amrinder Singh’s popularity surpasses that of his party and yet the Congress high command has not announced him as their official CM candidate which also underlines the problems of a heavily Gandhi-pariwar dominated party that cannot tolerate any other leader of stature.
Interestingly, the approval rating of central govt. has not only increased but also has gained in terms of enthusiasm from the voters after the surgical strikes whereas the state government’s approval rating has remained more or less stagnant in 3 months – it was at 51% in July and it is hovering around 53% today. Our past studies have shown that usually a below 50% rating is indicative of high anti-incumbency whereas pro-incumbency generally becomes electorally significant when the approval ratings cross the 60th percentile. To that extent, the ruling government seems to be stuck in a “twilight zone” of voter approval.
Arvind Kejriwal has lost a lot of fizz in just the last 3 months. Since our last survey in July, almost a third his support as the CM candidate has been wiped out. That is a huge number considering the precarious dynamics of the state’s election scenario, for now he no longer represents the angst of Punjab or the protest vote that was tired of both the mainstream parties. What is more, many even among AAP voters no longer support him as the CM candidate as they did so overwhelmingly just a few months ago. There are possibly 4 big reasons for the decline of Kejriwal’s popularity in Punjab;
Where does Punjab stand today?
- The Punjabi versus non-Punjabi divide is very much existential in state politics today which has also deeply affected AAP as a party because there have been largescale rebellions against Delhi observers, so much so that AAP was forced to remove all its Delhi inducted zonal chiefs and instead make space for local leaders. In fact, this whole “outsider” politics is getting further accentuated in the case of Kejriwal because of his Haryanvi-Bania origins which is playing directly into the SYL dispute and the accession of Chandigarh debate.
- The way AAP’s Delhi heavy leadership has handled the Punjabi sentiments both in terms of religion (the AAP manifesto fiasco) and in terms of local leadership (Sucha Singh Chotepur incident was just the tip of the iceberg) has deeply dented the state’s faith in this former anti-corruption activist. This falling graph is also visible in the lack of enthusiasm from the NRI crowd in recent weeks.
- Kejriwal’s horribly ill-timed questioning of surgical strikes has left a deep-rooted angst among ordinary Punjabis where every second family has some sort of army connection or the other
- In this heavily connected world where news travels faster than political campaigns, the series of mal-governance issues of Delhi government have created many doubts about Kejriwal’s own competence which has hit hard at the very viability of his brand of politics
In the 2012 assembly elections, ruling SAD-BJP alliance had surprised all political observers, pundits & pollsters by bucking the anti-incumbency trend for the first time and retaining the state with a mere 2 percentage point advantage over Congress which had given the saffron alliance a clear majority. Almost 5 years down the line, it appears as if the needle hasn’t moved at all. Both the main contenders for power seem to be shadowing each other in terms of vote-shares as the trend line clearly shows. Both Congress and NDA (SAD-BJP alliance) have lost a bit of their base to AAP and other parties, but are essentially tied in a gridlock.
Of course, since our last survey in July, Congress seems to be breaking out into a clear lead which now stands at 3% – we must remember that such a lead could well be enough for a simple majority as was evident in the last election. Yet, 3% is also the standard expected margin of error that our poll comes with (i.e.) Congress, although has a slight advantage, may still end up being tied with SAD-BJP due to statistical margin of errors if the elections are held right now.
For an almost dying Congress party this could be an absolute lifeline purely because of the charisma of Captain Amrinder Singh. The problem though is that the high command may hesitate to declare him as the CM candidate which could potentially create a lot of confusion among the rank and file as was the case in all the hara-kiri of 2012.
On the other hand, decline of AAP seems to be following a set pattern as we had projected in our July survey. Soon after distribution of tickets, large number of small local political leaders who had joined the party began to drift away along with their set of followers and this exodus also took away the “protest vote” which was accruing to the party until then. The removal of Sucha Singh Chotepur which essentially meant largescale desertions by many zonal chiefs of the party further accentuated AAP’s decline. As things stand today, AAP is no longer a contender for power and it is slowly emerging as a 3rd party spoiler.
For instance, in the highly urbanized Chandigarh neighbourhood of Mohali (SAS Nagar) and Kharar assembly seats, AAP has announced advocate Himmat Singh Shergill and Kanwar Sandhu as the respective candidates. Both these seats are represented by the Congress party in the current assembly and both the sitting MLA’s are quite popular with their constituents. In fact, Balbir Singh Sidhu had won the Mohali seat by a big margin of nearly 17k votes in the 2012 election. Today both these seats are witnessing a triangular contest which may actually help the ruling party because of division of anti-incumbency vote!
This is a familiar pattern for Sukhbir Singh Badal who is working overtime to eke out an impossible victory from the jaws of defeat as he so successfully did in 2012 through another 3rd party spoiler in the form of PPP of Manpreet Badal. In the last few days, for instance, Badal has systematically targeted Ravidassiyas who form an important Dalit subsect in the state. Two powerful Congress Dalit leaders belonging to the Ravidassiya sect – Kabir Das and Seth Satpal Mall – were inducted into SAD last week. Both the leaders are known as “right hand men” of chief of Dera Sachkhand Ballan who control nearly 80% of Ravidassiyas in the state. Dera Ballan’s support essentially means some 8 to 10 lakh fixed votes in districts like Kapurthala, Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar and Nawanshahar.
Realizing that his party may face some losses in Malwa region, the junior Badal is wooing Dalits and other non-Panthic Deras, especially in the Doab region. His efforts seem to be yielding some results too, as our poll shows a reasonable performance by the saffron alliance in this Congress stronghold region known for high percentage of Dalit votes and NRIs. In fact, even in the 2012 election, this strategy had yielded spectacular results as the SAD-BJP alliance had managed to win 24 of the 34 SC reserved seats of the state by selectively targeting Dalit-backward vote as addendum to their core base of Panthic Sikhs & upper castes. Yet, for SAD-BJP to have a definite chance they need 6 factors to work in their favour;
- The saffron alliance must aggressively and creatively woo the Deras, especially the Dera Sacha Sauda and the Radha Soami Satsang who between them cover a massive vote-base of at least 3 million unwavering voters. Here BJP’s role also could be crucial (over the last month, many BJP ruled states like Rajasthan have given 100% tax rebate to Messenger of God movie series of Gurmeet Singh Ram Rahim which has endeared him and his followers to saffron brigade)
- Navjot Singh Sidhu could potentially emerge as the key to 2017. If Sidhu forms an alliance with the Congress party, the latter in all likelihood will sweep the state. But if Sidhu joins a 4th front like outfit along with many former AAP groups, the resultant 4th pole may well further divide opposition votes and give the ruling alliance a golden opportunity to create a historic hatrick
- Akalis must sacrifice some of their urban seats and give a larger pool of tickets to BJP in order to cash in on the latter’s new found popularity due to surgical strikes and hyper nationalism
- Prakash Singh Badal must be marketed as the last standing patriarch of the Sikh society. A clear emotional campaign by the senior Badal with associate cross platform narrative is needed to refurbish the saffron alliance in the state
- BJP still needs to wake up and counter the massive online & media propaganda by the opposition. It has to leverage its vast network of supporters and create an alternate narrative before time runs out
- Ticket distribution is now a very crucial exercise for the ruling alliance, especially because of 4-cornered contests in most of the seats
[We have undertaken a risky large sample size survey which has resulted in a debt of over 3.6 lakh rupees. You can support us by being an angel to mitigate our risks]
A note on the 5Forty3 Punjab poll survey
This Punjab poll survey was conducted between October 15th and October 24th spread across 91 polling station areas (including swing polling booths) covering 27 specially chosen assembly segments of all the different electoral zones of the state. Our survey covered 114 geographic locations of 13 districts and had a target sample size of 3410, giving adequately weighted representation to various castes and socio-economic groups of both the rural and urban populace (see the below tables).
This 5Forty3 survey has a statistical error margin of 3.1% and a historic error margin of 2.7% (based on our past record). Our polls are especially accurate because of our path-breaking swing polling booth surveys based on indigenously developed tool RSSI (Randomized Social Swing Impact) which gave us near 100% accurate results during the Bihar elections where every other pollster failed. Based on our long experience we can say that there are three main error zones for political poll surveys in India;
- Selection bias: Our methodology has possibly a near perfect selection probability, therefore this poll survey has produced one of the most robust results.
- Random Sampling Error: Since we have used a controlled random sampling methodology this problem has been almost completely negated; for instance, most pollsters simply use a randomized sample across the geography to arrive at findings, but our system has extensively used electoral rolls in conjecture with our own ethnic (caste) database as the sampling frame.
Clear and precise questionnaires containing 61 different questions based on 3 criteria – preferences, opinions and factual information – were prepared in Hindi/English/Punjabi which were used to elicit the opinion of the respondents by carefully trained fieldworkers. The entire survey was conducted by direct face-to-face interviews without employing any CATI surveys or phone surveys. We achieved an extremely frugal hit-rate of 125 rupees per response which is much lower even for the historically cost effective team 5Forty3 (industry standard rates in India are roughly 200 to 270 rupees per response).
- Non-Response evaluation error: Most poll surveys completely ignore “no responses” and simply concentrate on the positive responses, which artificially inflates findings. Our system actually treats “no responses” as positive findings and assigns value to them, which adds a whole new dimension to understanding people’s choices.
P.S: Vote-share to seat-share conversion in India is at best a guesswork based on multiple variables. There are no statistical models to project seats from votes, but since most election analysis would be incomplete without seat allocation, we place the seat-share chart at the end as an addendum. The margin of error does not hold true for seat-shares as it is not a mathematical exercise of probability in itself.
In fact he was the only who predicted Delhi and Bihar correctly...
Check his Bihar analysis..he was spot on.
cloud_9
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Sure weren't BJP supposed to get 40+ in Delhi!In fact he was the only who predicted Delhi and Bihar correctly...
Check his Bihar analysis..he was spot on.
Sure weren't BJP supposed to get 40+ in Delhi!
As per BJP guys yes...In fact we BJP guys thought we would win Bihar as well
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True.
--------
. 100% nautanki.
JanjaWeed
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Star Wars
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Sure weren't BJP supposed to get 40+ in Delhi!
They were, but then the entire congie support base voted AAP...
5forty3 guys called Delhi and Bihar elections correctly..
They have been pretty accurate with their analysis for past 3 years give or take..
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http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pm-m...8055?type=news&id=1628055&category=india-news
NIku ki GHar Vapsi....
NIku ki GHar Vapsi....
Nitish has fully realized how accommodating BJP was to this guy.
He has no one to blame but himself for his present condition. Had he played his cards right, Nitish would have gotten one of top 3 ministries...
NOW...he is being abused by Lallu's uneducated sons and he can't even complain.
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He was given a free hand when he was a NDA CM! Now.. Lalu pulls the string from behind. BJP should accommodate him & bring him to the fold once again & go back to same arrangements they had prior to the split!
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No. They should bring Nitish to center and develop a BJP CM in Bihar. That would give a long term advantage to them.
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