February 27, 2014
NEW DELHI: Two months before the general elections, a new US poll suggests that the ruling party Congress may suffer one of their worst defeats in the country's 67-year history.
There is widespread agreement that the Gandhis, India’s dominant political family for most of its history, will suffer a crushing defeat.
February 27, 2014
NEW DELHI: Two months before the general elections, a new US poll suggests that the ruling party Congress may suffer one of their worst defeats in the country's 67-year history.
There is widespread agreement that the Gandhis, India’s dominant political family for most of its history, will suffer a crushing defeat.
Seventy per cent of Indians say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in India today, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. And 63 per cent of those polled said they would prefer that the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party lead the next government, compared with just 19 per cent who picked the governing Congress party led by Sonia Gandhi.
"This poll affirms what most of us suspected," said Shekhar Gupta, editor in chief of Indian Express. "But what it doesn't tell us is who will lead the next government."
The pollsters interviewed 2,464 randomly selected adults at their homes between December 7 and January 12 in states and territories that are home to roughly 91 per cent of the Indian population. The poll has a margin of sampling error of four percentage points.
Perhaps the most important finding was the popularity of Narendra Modi, the official prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Pew found that 78 per cent of those polled had a favorable view of Modi, with just 16 per cent holding an unfavorable view.
Modi, who is currently the chief minister of Gujarat, is considered by many to be the most controversial national political figure in India's history. He led the state during the 2002 riots which cost the lives of more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. He has been linked with a secret police assassination squad and with surveillance efforts concerning a woman he admired.
But Modi has softened his image in recent months, and the Bharatiya Janata Party has undertaken an outreach to Muslims, who make up about 14 per cent of the India's population. Modi has presided over an economy in Gujarat that is among the strongest in India, and he has promised to bring to the rest of the country his economic expertise and ability to build good roads.
Modi's brand of aspirational nationalism and barbed criticism of the governing coalition has attracted huge crowds to his speeches, but the fact that so few had a negative view of him in Pew's poll, given his controversial past, was somewhat surprising.
Still, Modi's support in a national poll may not translate into his election as prime minister. The elections involve 814 million eligible voters and myriad regional parties. No single party has won a parliamentary majority since 1989, and none is likely to do so this year, political analysts say.
"I think the BJP will do very well," Hartosh Singh Bal, the political editor of Caravan magazine. "That's clear from this poll. But whether Modi becomes the next prime minister will come down to 10 to 20 seats in Parliament."
Indeed, three women from the crucial states of West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu lead political parties that may each earn enough seats to block Modi from his goal. And speculation is rife about how these three — Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati and Jayalalithaa, the last two of whom go by one name — will play their cards.
BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar said the Pew poll was similar to many others that showed his party far ahead of the Congress party.
"All this is because of a lack of vision and leadership in Congress and scam after scam during the last 10 years," he said. "The new aspirational class wants to test alternative politics."
But Pankaj Pachauri, a spokesman for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, dismissed the Pew results. "India is too big and complex a country for pollsters to predict anything by talking to 2,500 people," Pachauri said. "The people have not spoken yet."
There is widespread agreement that the Gandhis, India's dominant political family for most of its history, will suffer a crushing defeat. Sonia Gandhi is the president of the Congress party, but she has had health problems in recent years. Her son, Rahul, recently became the face of the party's campaign effort, but a poor showing in his first extensive TV interview in a decade led to widespread criticism. And his speeches, which often focus on changing the internal dynamics of the party, have not electrified the electorate.
Most importantly, the governing coalition has been tarnished by repeated corruption scandals, and a slowing economy has added a sense of gloom.
In the Pew poll, Gandhi was viewed favorably by 50 per cent of those surveyed and unfavorably by 43 per cent, but even many of those who say they are favorably disposed to him are tepid in their support. Fully 60 per cent of those surveyed said they had a very favorable view of Modi, compared with just 23 per cent who felt the same way about the designated heir of the Gandhi political dynasty.
Courtesy: NY Times
