BJP hopes to improve tally in Rajasthan

The recent assembly elections are telling the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that it can improve its tally in Rajasthan to 18 Lok Sabha seats from the 16 it currently holds.

Correspondingly the tally of the Congress is expected to drop by two, from nine to seven. Rajasthan sends 25 members to the Lok Sabha. In a hung Parliament every seat could be valuable.

The Assembly elections may be a reasonably accurate barometer to judge popular mood but should not be considered a mirror image of the party's performance in the Lok Sabha.

The party rode a wave in the Assembly elections, winning seats it had never won before. However, the Assembly elections indicate that five sitting MPs, including a minister Subhash Maharia, could lose the Lok Sabha election.

The sitting MP from Alwar, Jaswant Singh Yadav, for instance polled a total of 279, 221 votes in the six Assembly constituencies that form the Alwar Lok Sabha constituency.

By contrast, the Congress got 273,694 votes and 62,899 votes went to the BSP. In a sweep situation, managers argue, if the MP was unable to ensure a comfortable victory in the Assembly segments, he is not in a comfortable position. Yadav's wife contested the Assembly elections but lost.

The situation is the same for Ram Singh Kaswan, BJP MP from Churu. In the 1999 Lok Sabha election, his rival, Naresh Budania lost the election by 46,000 votes.

In the Assembly election however, the Congress made up by getting 323,338 votes from the six Assembly constituencies. The BJP got 320,467 votes. In a Lok Sabha election, a margin of 3,000 votes is not hard to make up.

But the Congress is likely to lose a few seats to the BJP, narrowing the gap. The BJP was up by a margin of over 100,000 (aggregated) Assembly segment votes in Udaipur, currently held by Girija Vyas of the Congress.

The BJP lost by a margin of 55,000 votes in the last Lok Sabha polls so it has a good chance of winning this seat.

Similarly in Barmer, where Finance Minister Jaswant Singh's son Manavendra Singh, lost by 33,000 votes in the last Lok Sabha elections, this time, aggregates only 84,000 votes in favour of the Congress. The sitting MP, Sonaram Chaudhary could lose if the BJP made some inroads into the constituency.

The BJP has conducted a similar in-house exercise in relation to all states that went to polls this year. According to back of the envelope estimates, the party is expecting a good showing in Madhya Pradesh.

But in Chhattisgarh, because the vote went overwhelmingly in favour of the BJP in the areas where Dilip Singh Judeo holds sway and Judeo is yet to be rehabilitated after he was caught in the cash-on-camera scam, the estimate is the party's seats might come down.

The overall scenario for the party, however, looks bleak. Given the disruption of alliances and the migration of political parties from the NDA to the Congress-led front, the BJP poll managers' realistic assessment is that the NDA tally - that was 300 in 1999 - could go down to 281 in 2004. The BJP expects a haemorrhage in Jharkhand, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and even Uttar Pradesh.

By contrast, the Congress which had 114 MPs in the 13th Lok Sabha, is expected, as part of the front, to get 156 seats.

This does not include the Left Front's seats and a solid bloc of current "undecideds" like the BSP and the SP, that numbers 101 in the current House.

The informal survey, managers emphasise, is just an early warning about performance and patterns of alliances that hinge on local conditions and the performance of individual MPs.