<b>A K Bhattacharya:</b> After the victory, avoid pitfalls

The exit polls for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections are out and there is a general consensus among all pollsters that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, is most likely to form the next government. It is, therefore, time to step back and look at the broad messages of what the exit polls portend or imply for governance in the next five years.

First, there is need for a caveat. These are exit polls and they have gone wrong at least in the last two general elections. In both 2004 and 2009, the exit polls could not correctly predict the seat numbers for the Congress and the BJP, including their allies. And they were consistent in the manner in which they got the numbers wrong on both occasions. Thus, even though the polls had indicated a victory for the BJP-led alliance, it was the Congress-led alliance that eventually formed the government in 2004 and 2009.
 

For instance, the average tally of seats predicted for the BJP and its allies in 2004 was 39 per cent higher than what they actually got when the final results were declared. Again, in 2009, the combined average of exit polls predicted a seats tally of 187 for the BJP and its allies, which was 18 per cent higher than the 159 seats they actually won.

In sharp contrast, the exit polls have tended to understate the performance of the Congress and its allies, almost as significantly as they have overstated the actual seats tally of the BJP-led alliance. Thus, the understatement for the Congress and its allies in 2004 exit polls was to the tune of 18 per cent. In 2009, the average of all exit polls gave them 203 seats, a forecast that was 23 per cent less than the 262 Lok Sabha seats they actually won.

So, are the exit polls giving us a misleading picture of the actual outcome of the 2014 elections? The final answer to this question will be available only by the afternoon of May 16. But, meanwhile, it would be wrong to completely dismiss the exit polls of 2014 and ignore their overall message. That is because even after reducing the exit poll estimates for the BJP and its allies by 20 to 40 per cent and correspondingly raising those for the Congress and its allies by around 20 to 25 per cent, the broad pattern of the results would remain unchanged. The BJP-led alliance appears set to emerge the single-largest formation to form the next government, unless the exit polls get the trends wrong by a margin even bigger than those in 2004 and 2009.

Assuming that there are no such large deviations, the exit polls clearly indicate that at least on paper the new government in New Delhi will enjoy a kind of stability that few other coalition governments have enjoyed in the past. It appears that the BJP would be able to secure a clear and convincing lead over other members of the alliance, which would give it more leeway to decide on the manner in which the party would share power - for instance, in the allocation of ministries among the coalition partners. It would be comparable with the way the Communist Party of India (Marxist) dealt with its smaller coalition partners of the Left Front when it ruled West Bengal for over three decades. The BJP's domination of the new coalition is also likely to be strengthened by the fact that once Mr Modi is at the helm, there would be no scope for two centres of power.

So what should the Modi regime focus on to improve governance? One way to address this question would be to list what the new government should avoid doing. There are three clear decisions that it should not contemplate in the current situation. In spite of some provocations from sections within the BJP, it should avoid tinkering with the functioning of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Maintaining the apex bank's functional autonomy should be as important as allowing the current governor to remain focused on the job to manage the supervision of monetary policy and banking regulation. In other words, there is no need to change the RBI governor.

It would be equally important for the new government to avoid rolling back the current policy on allowing foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail. The BJP's political views are well known and they are committed to rolling back the current policy. But if the new government is seen to be taking such a decision, a wrong signal would go out to the international investor community at a time when the Indian economy needs foreign investment in different sectors of the economy. If the safeguards already incorporated in the policy need to be strengthened, the new government could consider such proposals. In any case, however, blindly rolling back the policy would be counterproductive.

Finally, the new government would do well to concentrate on framing its own agenda for action, instead of looking back to review decisions that its predecessor had taken. There would naturally be a lot of pressure on it to review many such decisions. That exercise may be necessary in many cases, but the new government would be ill-advised to concentrate all its energy on such actions. Leadership, after all, is not about changing whatever was done in the past; it is about charting a new path for growth and development.