Grim prospects for UPA

The BJP looks set to emerge as the single largest party in 2014 with 162 seats, far ahead of the Congress tally of 102. But even with its allies, the BJP looks likely to be well short of a majority, leaving several regional players holding the key to power in New Delhi.The NDA is projected to get 186 and the UPA just 117, which leaves 240 seats with others. Some of the biggest among them are mutually incompatible like the Trinamool and the Left Front or SP and BSP. That could make government formation an extremely complicated exercise come May next year.These are the major findings of the latest Times Now-CVoter survey , which suggests that the majority mark of 272 in the 543-member Lok Sabha will be a far cry for any pre-election formation.Among the “other” parties, Left Front is projected to get the largest number, 32 seats, followed by BSP with 31 and AIADMK with 28 seats. SP and Trinamool are expected to bag 25 and 23 seats respectively. The split with BJP seems to have hurt the JD(U), which is predicted to see its tally crash from 20 in 2009 to just nine.It could be a well and truly hung Parliament in 2014 with nobody really in a clear position to form a government if current voter preferences, as measured by the Times Now-CVoter poll, are anything to go by. Between themselves, the two major parties could barely cross the halfway mark in the Lok Sabha.The Congress is likely to suffer crippling blows in most of the major states that helped propel the UPA to power in 2009, and the gain in Karnataka will be too little to compensate for the damage elsewhere, a Times Now-CVoter opinion poll has projected.On the other hand, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seems well placed to make significant gains in Rajasthan and relatively smaller gains in several other states, this is unlikely to be enough to put it in prime position for power. According to the survey, the seats bagged by the top ten “other” parties would add up to 200.The major gainers in this lot, however, include many with severe differences among them, making the prospect of a third front look bleak.The poll showed Congress suffering the worst setback in Andhra Pradesh, going from 33 seats to just seven, while Jagan Reddy’s YSR Congress and Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) are predicted to get 13 seats each. The other states where Congress is expected to suffer severe losses are Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Kerala. In Rajasthan, the survey showed the Congress set to win just five seats, a loss of 15 seats, all of them picked up by the BJP.Similarly, in UP too, the poll showed the Congress losing 16 seats, mostly to Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), from its 2009 tally of 21 seats. The BJP is shown to pick up just seven more seats taking its total to 17 seats in UP. That would be a worrying projection for the Narendra Modi-led party hoping to make a comeback in New Delhi driven by resurgence in the Hindi heartland. In Kerala, the poll showed the Congress tally come down by nine seats, all going to the Left Front.Karnataka is the only state where the Congress was shown to make a major gain of 11 seats, all wrested from the BJP.The survey also indicated that Delhi would go to the BJP which would bag six of the seven seats. In Maharashtra, the findings showed the Congress losing six from its 2009 tally of 17 seats and NCP losing two, while BJP and the Shiv Sena are expected to pick up four and three seats each over their 2009 tally, bringing their tally to 13 and 14 seats respectively of the state’s 48 seats.According to the poll, Trinamool will gain four seats in 2014 taking its tally to 23 and the Left will just pick up one more totalling 16 seats. Yet again, the Congress would be the loser, shedding three of its six seats in West Bengal.In Tamil Nadu, the DMK is expected to be cut down to just five seats from 18 in 2009, while AIADMK jumps from nine to 28 seats. The poll showed the Congress tally dropping from eight seats to just one in Tamil Nadu. In terms of vote shares, the survey projects the NDA to get 35%, compared to 27% for UPA, and 38% for others. In effect, that means the ruling coalition will lose nine percentage points from its 2009 vote share and the NDA will gain exactly the same amount.