[Well, the exit polls got the winner right, but were wrong about the projected narrow margin. See my own comment below, at "propagation."]
In an election in one of India’s biggest states with major implications for the possibility of a snap federal election, exit polls point to the BJP holding on to the Gujarat assembly. The projection is for 105 seats for the BJP and around 70 for the Congress party. (As reported in the Economist.)
Real votes won’t be known till Sunday.
In the last election, in 2002, the BJP won 127 of 182 seats (almost 70%) on just under half the votes. Congress in 2002 won 51 seats on 39.3% of the vote. In addition to being one of the larger states, Gujarat is a bellwether because both major national parties are competitive there. This large a gain for Congress, if it holds in the official results, might make early election very tempting. All the more so given that the BJP win may have been just big enough to infuse new life into the bid by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, a highly divisive figure (to put it mildly), to challenge LK Advani for the BJP’s national party leadership.
Congress, which leads a minority pre-election coalition at the center, would like to rid itself of the problems it faces with its support parties in the Left Front, mainly over the latter’s refusal to back the US-India nuclear deal.
The BJP indeed won, but the exit polls were wrong about how narrow the win would be. Results from the Election Commission of India show that the BJP won 117 seats, the Indian National Congress 59. The Nationalist Congress Party won 3, and independents won 2.
In addition to the BJP and INC, the only other party that contested most districts was the Bahujan Samaj Party, which won in none of the 166 districts in which it had a candidate.* The BJP had candidates in all 182 districts, the INC in 173. No other party contested even 40. In other words, most districts had three-party competition (and the BSP was presumably not much of a factor, though I have not looked at district-level results), though some districts may have had significant competitors not affiliated with any party. Statewide, there were 480 independents.
The Congress-led minority at the center can be expected to be a bit less confrontational with the Left Front (whose support in parliament it needs to ensure surviving any vote on a matter of confidence). Presumably the Congress does not want to risk an election now that it failed to trim the BJP lead much in Gujarat.
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* The BSP has pretensions of becoming a leader of a “Third Front “alternative to the BJP and Congress nationally, but results like this one do not exactly help one build a convincing case.
Seed planted by MSS — 23 December 2007 @ 23:18
The funny thing about countries that used FPTP is that whenever they do polling. They always show the popular vote of the parties, and not the vote in each district. They act as if election is a National or State wide List PR election.
Seed planted by Suaprazzodi — 28 December 2007 @ 05:06