Cover Story: Assembly Polls; Exclusive Opinion Poll

India Today, November 30, 1998
Nov 30, 1998

OPNION POLL
In for a Hiding

The INDIA TODAY-MARG poll indicates the BJP is set to lose power in Delhi and Rajasthan and faces a second successive defeat in Madhya Pradesh.

To assess the likely outcome of the November 25 assembly elections in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, india today commissioned ORG-MARG to conduct an opinion poll. It was an exhaustive exercise gathering data for a seat forecast and assessing the importance of issues that concern the voter, whether time-tested and generic or ephemeral and localised. The survey team -- led by Perry Goes, associate research director, ORG-MARG -- used the stratified systematic sampling method to fine-tune its targets. Between November 1 and 10, it interviewed 1,893 eligible voters in 21 of Delhi's 70 seats, 4,192 eligible voters in 24 of Rajasthan's 200 seats and 6,359 eligible voters in 38 of Madhya Pradesh's 320 seats.

As for the seat prediction methodology, respondents were asked the name of the party they voted for in the previous election and the one they intended to vote for in the coming election. The proportion of votes expected for each party in the coming poll was appropriately corrected by the "overclaim/underclaim factor". This in turn was arrived at by adjusting the claimed vote percentage of the previous election with the actual percentage of votes garnered by each party.

The "shifts" for the parties were determined by calculating the proportion of votes lost to or gained from other parties (through a gain/loss matrix). A gain/loss analysis yielded the swings. These swings were applied to the voting data and estimates of the percentage of votes expected were generated.

While every effort has been made to prepare a psephologically foolproof survey sample, there is always the danger of a capricious electorate changing its mind on poll-eve. The "last-minute swing" is any survey team's nightmare. It is the great imponderable that makes every election an open contest till the votes are counted.

Congress on comeback trail

Drubbing predicted for BJP

	1993
	1998 Forecast

Seats

Vote %

Swing

Delhi	BJP	53	43	33	-10
		8-14
	Cong	16	34	50	+16
		53-60

Rajasthan	BJP	95	38	36	-02
		62-70
	Cong	76	38	46	+08
		110-118

Madhya Pradesh	BJP	116	39	40	+01
		133-143
	Cong	174	41	42	+01
		150-165

Who is your candidate for chief minister?

DELHI Two women and a close finish

Sushma Swaraj	27	Shiela Dikshit	26	M L Khurana	13
The most telling figure of all, however, is the 6 per cent rating which Sahib Singh Verma got. Verma was the chief minister from 1996 till just a few weeks ago. There is an evident vote of no confidence against him. As for Sushma and Shiela, their hold on the middle class remains strong.

RAJASTHAN After the patriarch the deluge

B.S. Shekhawat	33	Can't say	27	Ashok Gehlot	23
Veteran Shekhawat is still personally unchallenged despite the anger against his Government. Strangely, Gehlot gets half the Congress' rating. K. Natwar Singh and Rajesh Pilot don't even figure. This absence of new faces must worry all parties. There's a leadership vacuum in the making.

MADHYA PRADESH Incumbency has its advantages

Digvijay Singh	26	S L Patwa	12	M Scindia	8
Digvijay's cocked a snook at the anti-incumbency factor. In a state Congress unit packed with big shots, he has emerged the No. 1. Madhavrao Scindia narrowly beat Arjun Singh to third place. For the BJP, Patwa's poor show was worsened by feisty Uma Bharti's lowly rating of 3 per cent.

Which issues will influence your choice?

	Delhi	Rajasthan	Madhya Pradesh
Rising prices	5.4	4.8	5.1
Law and order situation	3.8	3.8	3.6
Candidate's work	3.6	4.0	3.5
Performance of Centre	3.1	3.0	3.2
Party loyalty	2.6	2.9	3.0
Candidate's reputation	2.5	2.6	2.9
Some elections go down in history in the form of symbols or catch phrases: 1989 was the Bofors howitzer, 1984 had the sympathy factor. This set of polls is certain to be remembered as the onion mandate. Expectedly, price rise is top of the mind for voters in all the states. What is more worrying for the democratic system is that party loyalties are disintegrating. There is greater stress on the individual's record.

Rate the performance of...

Your state government

	Good	Satisfactory	Bad
Delhi	16	31	53
Rajasthan	31	31	38
Madhya Pradesh	39	28	33

Central government

	Good	Satisfactory	Bad
Delhi	22	32	46
Rajasthan	47	28	25
Madhya Pradesh	47	25	28
The people of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh seem relatively satisfied with the performance of the Centre, without quite raving about it. This indicates that the assembly poll verdict in these two states will be a purely local mandate -- for or against the incumbent government. In Delhi, seat of the national government, lies the saffron brigade's Waterloo. The disappointment with the BJP is at its sharpest here since the city bore the brunt of summer-time power and water shortages as well as the onion crisis.

Which issues will influence your choice?

DELHI Do you support the removal of Sahib Singh Verma?

Yes	48	No	27
Verma won't like the idea of being made a scapegoat for his party's imminent drubbing but that nearly half the city's electorate -- including two of every three BJP voters -- agreed with his sacking suggests an extraordinarily high degree of personal unpopularity. Rest: Don't now/Can't Say All figures in percentage

RAJASTHAN Will the Pokhran tests affect your vote?

Yes	25	No	46
If the BJP hoped to reap a nuclear harvest due to the fact that Rajasthan hosted India's nuclear tests in May, it obviously miscalculated. Conversely, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi's plan to paint Pokhran as an example of the BJP's misplaced priorities too has failed.

MADHYA PRADESH Do you support a separate Chhattisgarh state?

Yes	13	No	29
For all the excitement it is evoking elsewhere, Madhya Pradesh's proposed partition has left the state itself cold. There is no mass acclaim for two smaller and more manageable states. If anything, the idea of Chhattisgarh is a big non-issue. An astounding 58 per cent had no opinion on the bifurcation of Madhya Pradesh.

� Living Media India Ltd