Just before the final round to go for voting in the Lok Sabha elections, the opposition has created a hype spreading the message that it would be the UPA in some form to make the government at the Centre and the NDA led by the BJP to lose miserably. Some so called Exit polls were also discussed in Lutyen's Delhi. Numerous public statements from the Congress and its allies have been flooded the media to give an impression that Congress led opposition to rule the country next terms.
However, there is a sense of suspense building up before we get to know the final outcome on May 23. But with team Modi having lowered the expectation from a ‘bigger majority than 2014' to a slightly reduced majority of 271 seats for the ruling party, there is speculation that the BJP may end up losing many more seats than what Ram Madhav has projected. Congress president Rahul Gandhi has also claimed that ‘Modi is going to lose' Lok Sabha elections. His claim that ‘BJP is losing' is based on the Congress party's internal ‘assessment' of polling so far.
There are several independent insights-cum-assessments floating around in the media. But nobody really knows for sure what the final outcome would be. However, one does get a sense of what could be the probabilities of a BJP win, Congress resurgence and the fate of others, which include the non-NDA and non-UPA regional parties. One thing there is lot of unanimity on, is that the BJP is unlikely to get majority on its own, though it will be the single largest party. In such a case, the NDA will fall short of a majority by 40 to 50 seats.
Even after taking into account Prime Minister Narendra Modi's personal popularity in the North and West, most pre-election opinion polls had predicted that NDA could fall short of majority, though, according to one poll, it will be the largest pre-poll alliance with a ‘comfortable' margin. However, since voting began on April 11, some polling agencies have scaled down their predictions, based on ground reality and voter turnout. This indicates that most polling agencies may have ended up overestimating the BJP in their pre-poll surveys. Called the ‘playing safe' factor, this is a fairly common occurrence in all Indian elections.
