Two recent opinion polls (ABC-CVoter Survey and India Today-Karvy Survey) on the 2019 general elections to Indian Parliament – Lok Sabha and results of recent state elections suggest that the BJP led by Narendra Modi will find it harder to repeat its phenomenal victory of 2014 and the ruling NDA coalition may need a different path to 272+ seats compared to the 2014 elections. Both the opinion polls forecast about 200 seats for the BJP and about 235 seats for the ruling NDA coalition.
Our hypothetical exercise based on extrapolating the votes of BJP and INC in the assembly seats of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the 2018 state assembly elections into their corresponding Lok Sabha constituencies shows that the BJP will likely win around 15 seats in Madhya Pradesh and around 10 seats in Rajasthan in the 2019 general elections, thereby notching 25 seats less than its cache in the 2014 general elections in these two states alone.
The two opinion polls suggest the INC winning about 110 seats and the UPA coalition 166-167 seats. We find it implausible for the INC to cross 140-150 seats, which we believe would be necessary for an INC-led UPA-III government. The INC has 48 seats in the current Lok Sabha. Even if it were to gain 10-15 seats each in MP, Maharashtra and Rajasthan at the cost of the BJP and 20-30 seats elsewhere, it will likely not cross 120 seats without a major improvement in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and UP. It does not have much of a presence in Bihar and UP (with four seats in these two states), which together account for 120 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha.