Mr Modi was made the party's prime ministerial candidate in September. A poll in August-October showed a seat split of NDA-186 and UPA-117, the gap having widened now to a more definitive 69 seats. By December, the story had changed further. Eight polls done between then and March gave the NDA seats in the range of 211 to 246, while the UPA's putative tally was 92-139. The gap between the two had widened to more than 100 in all polls barring one, where it was 93. A final poll in April gave the NDA a clear majority for the first time, at 275 seats, while the UPA wallowed in the shallows at 111.
If the opinion polls turn out right, this is going to be one man's victory. It is Narendra Modi who has swung a probably dissatisfied but perhaps undecided electorate his way. Equally, this is an election that Rahul Gandhi has lost. He was made the party vice-president in January 2013, and has manifestly muffed it. The Manmohan Singh government was, of course, unpopular well before 2013, but in the contest between two newly crowned leaders, Mr Modi seems set to win by a knock-out. A more convincing Mr Gandhi would have been able to limit the margin between the two parties, and hoped thereby to lead a coalition of parties anathema to Mr Modi. Instead, if you believe the polls, Mr Modi is about to claim an absolute majority.
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The real poll results next week will confirm whether this is in fact the case, and one should not be unprepared for surprises. Meanwhile, another issue has cropped up - was Manmohan Singh the architect of the UPA's 2009 victory, but denied credit by his party, as more than one person has claimed in recent weeks? The claim rests essentially on how well the Congress did in cities, compared to rural areas, but the evidence seems thin in 10 of the largest cities, and contradictory in other ways. It is true that the Congress swept Delhi and Mumbai, but it did poorly in Bangalore and got noticeably fewer votes in Hyderabad-Secunderabad than in 2004, while the two seats were split as before. In Kolkata and Chennai, the party was a non-player. Among the smaller cities, Pune voted the Congress as before, Ahmedabad and Vadodara voted the BJP with most of Gujarat, and Jaipur voted the Congress with the rest of Rajasthan.
Of the two cities that the Congress did sweep, Mumbai had the special circumstance of a split in the Shiv Sena, with Raj Thackeray's newly formed Maharashtra Navnirman Sena cutting into the Shiv Sena vote and pushing it into second place in four out of six constituencies. In fact, the Congress share of the vote fell in four Mumbai seats in 2009, compared to 2004. So the only city where the Congress saw an uptick was Delhi, but then it had won six of the seven seats here in 2004. Juxtapose that against the fact that the Congress in poorly urbanised Uttar Pradesh did better than in any election since 1984, and also swept hilly Uttarakhand, and it becomes hard to argue that the party's better showing in 2009 was because of one man and his urban appeal.