BJP’s weakest link in the country is south India: CSDS-Lokniti survey

According to the report, 63% of those surveyed in South India are ‘dissatisfied’ with the Modi government.

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With less than a year before India goes to the polls again for the General Elections in 2019, a Mood of The Nation survey conducted by Lokniti and Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) has found that if the polls were held today, south India would be the region where BJP would fare the worst. And this is notwithstanding the party’s performance and eventual inability to form the government in Karnataka after the recent polls.

“The party is currently securing only about 18% votes in the five southern states put together. This sharp drop of seven percentage points since January is largely on account of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) having moved out of the NDA over the Special Category Status issue. The survey in fact found the TDP to be doing far better in Andhra Pradesh than it was in January,” the survey states.

“Other parties in the region such as the TRS (Telangana), DMK (Tamil Nadu), JDS (Karnataka) and the Left (Kerala) have also seen their support levels rise in the last five months,” the survey adds, indicating how the return of regional parties is impacting the BJP.

According to the report, 63% of those surveyed in South India are ‘dissatisfied’ with the Modi government, while that number varies between 40-43% for the rest of India, as you can see in the table below.

While the dissatisfaction of the government has increased across the country, the numbers in South India stand out. The dissatisfaction is highest in Tamil Nadu, with 75% respondents unhappy with Modi government. In Telangana, 63% of the respondents are dissatisfied with the union government, with 68% in AP and 64% in Kerala. Kerala, however, has seen a slight improvement in its satisfaction numbers for the BJP.

While the numbers in south India stand out, the mood of the rest of the country is not great for the BJP either.

“There are more people in the country today who do not want the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government to return to power after the next election as compared to those who do,” the survey states, adding that this is “among the most striking findings to have emerged” from the survey. The survey found nearly half (47%) of the total respondents to be of the opinion that the Modi government does not merit another opportunity to govern India after the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

The survey also found that dissatisfaction with the overall performance of the Modi government continues to rise across the country. “It has gone up from 27% in May 2017 to 40% in January 2018 to 47% now, indicating a 20-point increase in dissatisfaction levels in just one year. Conversely, overall satisfaction with the government’s performance has come down from 64% last year to 47% now. What should worry the government even more is that the gap between those ‘fully satisfied’ and ‘fully dissatisfied’ has widened further, so much so that for every one person who is completely satisfied with the government’s performance there are now two who are completely dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction levels have increased across all regions of the country and in most of the states, particularly the southern states,” the survey says.

The survey was conducted by Lokniti and CSDS for ABP News between April 28 and May 17, 2018 among 15,859 respondents spread across 19 States of India - Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal. The survey was conducted at 700 locations in 175 Assembly Constituencies. The total sample size targeted was 16,100.