A HEAD START IN THE POLL RACE

The world’s largest democratic exercise and one critical question— who’ll win how many seats? The India Today Conclave invited some of the country’s top psephologi sts to answer the million-dollar question and, no surprises, they all veered to the view that the BJP had the upper hand even before a vote was polled.

With that marker in mind, the pollsters had divided the states into three groups extrapolating from the 2019 results—those where the saffron party seats had reached nearsaturation with little to gain, those where they won 60-80 per cent of the seats and seeking more gains, and the 100-odd seats in the south and east where their strike rate was 10 per cent or less.

So, is Election 2024 only about whether the BJP peaks at 300-plus seats? AxisMyIndia’s Pradeep Gupta refused to call the 2024 Lok Sabha polls a “done deal” but in the same breath mentioned that the NDA will be trying to improve their tally to get closer to the 400-seat mark. The BJP’s G.V.L. Narasimha Rao described the coming election as something that has not happened in many decades. He felt the debate had moved on from a hung house or single-party majority to whether the BJP can take their tally to 325 or 350. Rao’s personal prediction was 404 seats for the NDA. CVoter’s Yashwant Deshmukh kept his forecast to a taciturn 335, saying anything above that will depend on the returns from the “mergers and acquisitions”. Again, political strategist Amitabh Tiwari believed the 400 mount was scalable.