Seminal shift in politics?

Decoding polls that indicate a BJP wave

Opinion polls conducted on behalf of television news channels and newspapers make it clear that, as the country approaches the general elections scheduled for the summer, the wind is in the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) sails. The shift of mood in favour of the party, and the growth in dissatisfaction with the ruling United Progressive Alliance, over the past few months has been dramatic. The critical swing factor seems to have been the naming of Narendra Modi as the party's prime ministerial candidate in September. With the qualifier that the spoiler role could be played by the Aam Aadmi Party, which is so new and so volatile that nothing can be predicted about it from one week to the next, it seems clear that, barring accidents, there will be a change of government in New Delhi after the elections, and that the new government will be formed by a BJP-led alliance, with Mr Modi as prime minister. Of course, opinion polls have been wrong before; and with four months still to go, who is to tell that the winds will not change direction? Still, on the evidence so far (including the results of four recent Assembly elections in the north), it is hard to see the Congress repeating its surprise victories of the past.

The shift that this implies in the national political balance could well be seminal. For the first time, the BJP is likely to get more votes than the Congress (it came close to doing that in 1999), and possibly by a wide margin. It is also possible that it will exceed the 70-seat margin over the Congress that has been its best performance so far. Even more significantly, the party seems to have made inroads into some southern and eastern states where it has so far had little or no presence - states like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. The vote percentages that it has chalked up in the opinion polls are below the threshold required to win seats in these states, but the party is becoming more truly national than before.

It is useful at this point to recall the punditry of the past several months. First it was said that the BJP's tally would not cross 180 seats (a third of the total of 543); now the polls say that it could get 200 seats or more. If it is lucky, it could chalk up the highest seat tally of any party since 1984, though well short of majority. Second, it was said that the BJP would lose allies and potential allies if Mr Modi were projected as the party's leader, and that this might prevent it from leading the next government. While it is true that Nitish Kumar walked his talk, it turns out that the loser might be the Bihar chief minister. Third, the caste-based parties (like Nitish Kumar's), which were supposed to be bulwarks against Mr Modi's consolidation of the Hindu vote across the Hindi heartland, are the ones likely to get squeezed as the BJP seems set to up its tally in the heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. All of these can be game-changers in terms of the directions in which national politics evolves.