Kamal Ghorui
Exit polls on Wednesday agreed that the BJP-led alliance would win Assam comfortably, the UDF would unseat the LDF in Kerala and the AINRC-BJP combine would retain Puducherry but disagreed on the outcome in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.The most startling prediction was Axis My India’s projection of Tamil Nadu being a tight race between the Vijay-led TVK (98-120 seats) and the DMK alliance (92-110) – in that order – with the AIADMK-led NDA reduced to an also-ran in the 234-member House. The other three exit polls being taken into account here all gave the DMK-led coalition a majority, though a reduced one from five years earlier.
Blockbuster debut by Vijay’s TVK in Tamil Nadu?
On West Bengal, while Axis MY India did not release its findings on Wednesday and some other well-known pollsters too preferred to wait for another day, of the three polls here, the one by P Marq projected BJP to most likely win a majority in the 294-member assembly and Matrize gave the saffron party the edge though not a majority in a state it has never won in the past. The third poll, People’s Pulse, in contrast, projected a decisive TMC victory that would give Mamata Banerjee a fourth consecutive term of office.All four exit polls suggested that the NDA was likely to win a two-thirds majority in the 126-member Assam assembly, which would also mean BJP for the first time winning a majority on its own in the northeastern state.The Congress-led alliance was projected to bag between 24 and 40 seats.If Left loses, it will not be in office in any stateIn Kerala, the consensus was that the UDF would win though the projections ranged from as little as 70 of the 140 seats at the bottom of the Matrize range to 90 at the top end of the Axis My India range. The LDF was projected to end up with at best 69 seats, which would mean that the Left would for the first since 1977 not be in office in any state. Exit polls have had a patchy record in India. The results will be known on Monday, May 4.
