As some 700 million voters head later this week for the first of four voting days, spread out over the next four weeks, the opinion polls conducted by different media houses make a clearly discernible pattern. Virtually every poll puts the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) ahead of the Bhartiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the difference in seats won being quite small in all cases. The polls also put the Congress itself slightly ahead of the BJP. No poll gives the UPA more than 205 seats, well short of the 273 required for a majority. Now, opinion polls are unreliable, and the difference in seat count for the two main alliances is small—and therefore easily reversed. Still, the convergence of numbers is unusual, so it is worth understanding what they say.
First, it will be the Congress that is invited by the President to form a government, once counting is over on May 16. Second, the Congress and its allies in the UPA will not be able to demonstrate a majority on their own. Even if the newly-formed “fourth front” (consisting of the parties led by Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan) were to win (say) 50 of the 120 seats in UP and Bihar and support the UPA or join its ranks, a majority will prove elusive. And if the Congress is unable to draw on support from some principal constituents of the “third front”, like the All-India Anna DMK, the Telugu Desam and the Bahujan Samaj Party (chiefly because rival parties from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are already with the UPA), the Congress-led alliance is likely to find itself short by 20-30 seats. Winning over the Biju Janata Dal is a possibility, especially if some carrots can be held out for Orissa, but even that may not close the gap.
Admittedly, you could run a minority government if you command some 250 MPs in a House of 543. It has been done before (by Indira Gandhi after the Congress split of 1969 and by Narasimha Rao after the 1991 elections), but it would be a chancy and messy business, with every fringe party asking for (and getting) its pound of flesh. Still, it could work if the Congress calculates that the Left, even as it sits in the opposition benches, will not pull down a UPA government, for fear of bringing the BJP into power. The more convenient arrangement, though, would be for the Congress and the Left to come together again. This is probably the context in which to view the Prime Minister’s soft comments recently about Left leaders. There is only one scenario in which the UPA will not need Left support: if the Congress-Trinamool combine wipes out the Marxists in West Bengal, causing a rout because of a shift in the state’s Muslim vote. But that is not what the polls say. In other words, the next five years could be like the last five, with a weakened Left having less of a voice than before.
Viewed from the BJP/NDA perspective, LK Advani can lead the next government only if the non-Left constituents of the “third front” and also necessarily the “fourth front” join hands in support of the NDA. This last being a long shot, what the opinion polls are telling Mr Advani is that he will have to sit in the opposition benches once again. But he can always hope that the polls are wrong.
