The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is on a roll. A smattering of opinion polls has forecast a mammoth win for it in the ongoing Lok Sabha election. In the BJP's case, that data doesn't inspire much confidence in the 121 seats that voted on April 17 in the largest of the nine phases of the Lok Sabha elections.

By Ajit Sahi

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is on a roll. A smattering of opinion polls has forecast a mammoth win for it in the ongoing Lok Sabha election. If that happens, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) would return to power in New Delhi next month after a gap of ten years.

It is claimed that the BJP's prime ministerial nominee, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, has so electrified the hundreds of millions with his promise of great governance that the incumbent Congress party-led government at the Centre would be ground to dust and blown off. The prophecy may well turn out correct, for who knows what lies in the future?

But to make their living, middlebrow analysts such as this writer, who are endowed with neither clairvoyance nor the telepathic vision that can spot metaphorical waves, must stick to the humdrum of past electoral records. In the BJP's case, that data doesn't inspire much confidence in the 121 seats that voted on April 17 in the largest of the nine phases of the Lok Sabha elections.

The NDA must win in Karnataka, where all 28 Lok Sabha seats voted on 17 April, as well as in Rajasthan, where 20 of 25 seats polled that day, Maharashtra (19 of 48 seats), Uttar Pradesh (11 of 80 seats), Odisha (11 of 21), Madhya Pradesh (10 of 29), Bihar (seven of 40), Jharkhand (six of 14), West Bengal (four of 42), and Chhattisgarh (three of 11). But vote shares in past elections suggest the NDA is on weak ground in the 17 April seats of at least UP, Karnataka and Bihar.

Karnataka

Routed in the 2013 assembly elections after ruling it for five years, the BJP believes former chief minister-turned-rebel BS Yeddyurappa's return to it has put it back in the reckoning for the Lok Sabha. Much before scams in mine sales led to his downfall, BSY had scripted the BJP's maiden assembly win in 2008 and also its triumph in 19 of the state's 28 Lok Sabha seats a year later.

Such had been his grip over Karnataka in 2009 that the Congress won only six Lok Sabha seats there, down two from the previous election of 2004. This was no small feat for the BJP, for the Congress had vastly improved its national tally in 2009 and done relatively better in the other BJP strongholds of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh.

BJP now hopes that BSY's return will bring back the votes he took away last year when he fought the assembly polls as a separate political party. Will that help much? It is doubtful. The BJP and BSY are not half the entities in the state they were in 2009. Until then, the BJP had had a clean slate. Now, it carries the baggage of its five-year misrule that saw it install three chief ministers.

More significantly, the Congress's big seat losses in the 2008 assembly and the 2009 Lok Sabha election hide the closeness of the battles. In 2009, the Congress won less than a third of the BJP's 19 seats but its vote shares was only 3.98 percent less than the BJP's 41.63 percent. (The BJP won two seats by a whisker: Davanagere by 0.22 percent and Bellary by 0.26 percent.)

Similarly, the BJP won 110 seats to the Congress's 80 in the 2008 assembly election but got 33.93 percent votes to the Congress's 35.13. How could the BJP win more seats with fewer votes? By forfeiting its deposit on 31 seats, three times more than the 11 where the Congress forfeited, and by logging far fewer votes on the seats it had lost than the leads it got on the seats it had won.

The results of the 2013 assembly election reveal the BJP's dire state. Last year, the Congress won a comeback 122 seats, up from 80 in 2008, by adding just 1.6 percentage points to its 2008 vote share. On the other hand, the BJP crashed both in seats (40 from 110 in 2008) and vote share (20.07 from 33.93 percent in 2008). The BJP lost its deposit on 110 seats; the Congress on 23.

As for BSY's Karnataka Jantha Paksha (KJP), the claim that it wrecked the BJP is a myth. Analysts cite its average vote share of 10.82 percent on the 204 of the state's 224 seats it contested to back that claim. But that figure was skewed by shares of 50.76, 49.89, 44.89, 43.21, 39.57 and 32.11 percents that the KJP notched up on the six seats it won. The KJP placed second on 33 assembly seats. But even there BSY's return won't help. Those assembly seats are spread over 13 Lok Sabha seats, of which the BJP had won 10 in 2009. At best it can retain them with BSY's return but even that would be hard given the BJP's overall declining fortunes.

Of these, on the three Lok Sabha seats that the Congress won — Bidar, Gulbarga and Chamarajnagar — the vote shares of the BJP and the KJP at the 2013 assembly election do not add up to threaten the Congress in the Lok Sabha contests there. And what of the Lok Sabha seats in whose assembly segments the KJP was placed third or lower last year? The Congress performed well on most of them so there, too, BJP plus KJP would find the going hard.

In fact, the Congress began taking advantage of anti-incumbency against the BJP well before the 2013 assembly election. In 2012, it won the by-election to Udupi-Chikmagalur Lok Sabha seat that the BJP's DV Sadananda Gowda had won in 2009. Gowda had quit it after becoming chief minister three years later. Last year, the Congress won two Lok Sabha by-elections that former prime minister HD Deve Gowda's Janata Dal (Secular), the third player in the state, had won in 2009.

Uttar Pradesh

The BJP knows Modi must sweep UP to become PM. So it has been claiming that it would win 40 or more of its 80 Lok Sabha seats. But electoral records paint a bleaker picture in the 11 seats in northwest UP that voted on April 17. The BJP's best results, when it won all but two of the 11, came in 1991 at the peak of the Ayodhya controversy when it consolidated Hindu votes by backing the bid to replace the 16th-century Babri mosque with a Ram temple. At the 2009 Lok Sabha election, the BJP lost all but the two that mother and son, Maneka and Varun Gandhi, had won.

Winning 50.09 percent vote share, the highest among all BJP candidates in UP, Varun had benefited from a sectarian polarization after threatening to slaughter "anti-Hindus" which led to his arrest. Without such polarization, however, the mother scraped through by merely 1.09 percent. Not surprisingly, she has now ditched that seat, Aonla, and moved to Pilibhit that the son had won.

As a loser in 2009, the BJP was runner up on only two of northwest UP's 11 seats: Moradabad, which former Indian cricket captain Mohammad Azharuddin had won for the Congress; and Bareilly, which the BJP's six-term MP and former union minister Santosh Gangwar had surprisingly lost to the Congress by less than 2 percent votes. The BJP stood third in Shahjahanpur and Kheri, and fourth in Sambhal and Rampur (where it had put up its Muslim poster boy, party spokesman Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, who got 10.15 percent votes and lost his deposit by a wide margin).

BJP allies Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and Janata Dal (United) had fought on two other seats, Nagina and Badaun, and stood third and fourth, respectively. Neither are with the BJP now. Not that it matters. The JD(U) is irrelevant in UP. And the RLD is said to face a rout in west UP since last year's Hindu-Muslim violence in Muzaffarnagar has possibly moved the dominant Hindu Jats, for long the RLD's bulwark, towards the BJP. Yet, the BJP hardly has a shot at Amroha, the only seat the RLD won here. That because the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) had together taken over 50 percent votes there despite placing second and third.

Moreover, the Congress does not directly have a game here as it has left all the 11 Lok Sabha seats in west and northwest UP for its allies. One of these, the little known Mahan Dal, could give a tough fight to the BJP on two seats due to its hold over most backward castes like Shakyas, Mauryas and Kushwahas, basically the "non-Yadavs" and "non-Lodh" voters. The Mahan Dal will challenge BJP's former hindutva icon, Kalyan Singh's son, Rajveer Singh, a Lodh, at Etah, which polls on 24 April.

Bihar

The BJP's optimism is most confounding in Bihar, where numbers suggest the hardest roll of dice for it in these elections. A total of 13 of Bihar's 40 Lok Sabha seats have yet polled since the beginning of the nine-phase polling. Six seats that form the state's southernmost horizontal strip voted on April 10. Seven other seats that lie atop that strip went to the ballot on April 17.

Historically, the BJP has failed to convert its Hindutva appeal into votes and, therefore, seats in Bihar. In the 1991 Lok Sabha election that was the most influenced by the mosque-temple issue thanks to the death of scores of BJP volunteers in police firing at Ayodhya, the BJP drew a blank in the 40 seats. (Bihar then had 14 other seats that later went to Jharkhand. Here we concern ourselves with the 40.) In places like Chhapra, Vaishali, Muzaffarpur, Hajipur, Sitamarhi, Barh, Saharsa, Begusarai, Arrah and Jahanabad the BJP had then received between 1-5 percent votes.

Before the 1996 Lok Sabha election the BJP tied up with the Samata Party, which had had been formed by a breakaway faction of the erstwhile Janata Dal that had defeated the Congress party in the 1989 Lok Sabha election. Led by George Fernandes, who would later become NDA Convener, and including backward leaders such as now Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, the Samata Party, promised to bring substantial backward caste votes who are about 50 percent of the electorate.

And yet, in the 1996 Lok Sabha election, the BJP could manage only six Lok Sabha seats of Bihar's 40 even though it virtually swept the part that would later be come Jharkhand. Two years later, in the 1998 Lok Sabha election, the BJP's tally fell to five. The best that the BJP has ever won in Bihar is 12 seats in 1999 (as well at the last election of 2009), thanks to a shift of backward caste votes from the Rashtriya Janata Dal of (RJD) former chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav towards the BJP-Samata alliance. (By 2004, the Samata had morphed into the JD(U)).

In the intervening 2004 Lok Sabha election the BJP-JD(U) alliance had fared rather poorly, no doubt due to the anti-incumbency sentiment against the outgoing NDA government of then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The BJP had mustered only five seats and the JD(U) six.

The ongoing Lok Sabha election is the first time in 17 years that the BJP is walking solo in Bihar. Historically, the BJP is backed by Bihar's upward castes of Brahmins, Bhumihars, Rajputs and Kayasthas as well as the Baniyas, who are counted among the backwards castes in the state. In all, these castes are less than 25 percent of the electorate. Few of them in the cities tend to vote. A sizable chunk of them are said to have migrated away from the state and hence don't vote.

The BJP has always abided by Bihar's caste matrix by fielding seat-wise dominant castes candidates. It has tried to sell Modi as a backward leader. It gleefully admitted Ram Kirpal Yadav, a former key aide of Lalu's, into its ranks last month and nominated him to take on Lalu's daughter, Misa, from Pataliputra. After ending its 17-year partnership with the JD(U) in June, the BJP pitch-forked Nand Kishore Yadav, who started as a child volunteer of the BJP's ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as the Leader of the Opposition in Bihar Assembly.

And yet, it faces an uphill climb on the seven Lok Sabha seats that polled on April 17 (and the six that did on April 10). In 2009, the BJP had won three, the JD(U) eight, and the Congress and the RJD one each. The combined vote shares of the RJD and the Congress, who fought the 2009 election separately but are allied now, exceeds the vote shares the BJP-JD(U) alliance had won in four seats. And since the BJP and the JD(U) are fighting separately, they are bound to split the vote they jointly received five years ago. That jeopardizes two seats the BJP had won: Gaya and Nawada. It might retain only Patna Sahib that film star-politician Shatrughan Sinha is defending.

The RJD's stock could further rise by the return of those Muslims who had moved away from it in supporting Nitish Kumar for his promise of good governance. It is believed that at least 20 percent Muslims in the state may have voted for the JD(U)-BJP combine in the 2009 Lok Sabha election. Additionally, the backward castes that had once flocked to Kumar (and, by association, to the BJP), too, may return to the RJD and benefit the Congress, too, which is only a bit player in Bihar.

Never Before

Of course, as noted earlier, it is possible that a so-called Modi wave allegedly sweeping India may yet lead swathes of the electorate to propel him into the prime minister's residence in New Delhi's leafy Race Course Road. But if that was indeed about to happen, two observations are in order.

One, it would be the first time in Indian elections that caste and fraternal ties would be overcome on such a scale. And two, for all their chest-thumping, the prophets offer no ground evidence to back their claim that the pied piper from Gujarat is set to be India's first presidential prime minister.