Voters' dilemma: BJP? No. Modi? Yes.

So regardless of who leads the next government, we are going to have a weak or a very weak government after five years of a very strong one

Two weeks ago, a very senior member of the Congress publicly said the BJP would lose 135 seats in the 2019 general election. I thought this was a very precise number, based possibly on some internal estimates of the party. He did not, however, say how many the Congress would win.

Should this happen — and that huge a fall seems unlikely — the BJP will come down to 147 seats from the 282 it won in 2014, and 133 from its current position of 268 in the Lok Sabha. This is very close to the 138 seats it had won