How can Modi be beaten in 2019? Following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s byelection reverses last week, the consensus in the commentariat clearly leans towards a grand alliance (or mahagathbandhan) of opposition parties of the sort that humbled BJP in Bihar in 2015 and in three recent Uttar Pradesh parliamentary byelections. The subtext is that an …
Continue reading Watch out BJP, you’re trailing behind the UPA in your bypoll performance
There’s nothing like the word Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) to make even the most boosterish Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporter sweat a little. And it’s not just because of what happened in Bihar in 2015, when an alliance of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Janata Dal (United) and Indian National Congress (INC) inflicted a defeat on the …
Continue reading The compelling logic of a Grand Alliance in UP
As counting day on 11 March approaches, it seems as difficult as ever to gauge which way the political wind in Uttar Pradesh (UP) is blowing. Even before the campaign began, pre-election opinion polls offered little help, showing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Congress alliance neck and neck, with the Bahujan …
Continue reading Uttar Pradesh is the BJP’s to lose. Or is it?
With candidates declared for six of the nine rounds of voting in this never-ending general election, a partial analysis can now be done of how many stand accused of criminal activity and in what proportion parties are awarding tickets to such folks (data from National Election Watch, also see preliminary analysis here). The chart below …
It seems clear that Uttar Pradesh (UP) with its 80 Lok Sabha seats is the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) biggest bet in this election and that Narendra Modi is standing from Varanasi in order to boost the BJP's prospects across eastern UP. The BJP's man in UP Amit Shah certainly seems gung-ho: https://twitter.com/AmitShahOffice/status/445149004595097600 With a couple of …
Continue reading Why Modi may have a fight on his hands in Varanasi
With political parties beginning to name their candidates, media attention once again turns to the topic of criminals in parliament. Here we look at which parties are guiltiest of facilitating their entry into politics (data from National Election Watch). On the face of it, the Indian National Congress (INC) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have …
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Indian public opinion polls are much better at predicting party vote shares than they are at extrapolating to seats won in parliament or state assemblies. That’s because vote shares translate into seats in an unpredictable way under India’s multiparty “first-past-the-post” electoral system. For example, the Indian National Congress …
Continue reading Why you should ignore opinion poll seat projections
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