New Delhi : As polling for all the five election bound states — West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry — ended the aggregate of exit polls conducted by different agencies showed that the Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee has retained her hold in the face of the combined Left-Congress challenge, the AIADMK chief J Jayalalithaa is losing to her traditional rival M Karunanidhi of the DMK, in Kerala the familiar switch from the UDF to the LDF is working, and in Assam the BJP is making a big entry, dethroning three term Congress chief minister Tarun Gogoi. Gogoi’s exit would hardly be a surprise considering that it comes after he had ruled the state for 15 long years.
These, of course, are just exit poll results; the big day is round the corner when the counting of votes takes place on May 19. That will be moment for real celebrations, and some heartfelt condolences.
The exit polls have been put out by India Today, ABP, India TV news channels and the poll survey agency Chanakya. The aggregate of these four polls shows that in West Bengal of the 294 seats at stake the tally would be TMC -179, Left+ Congress 109 and BJP-3. In Assam, of the 126 seats, the BJP and its allies would get 73 followed by Congress 37 and the AUDF 12. In Tamil Nadu, of the 234 seats, the DMK+Congress combine is predicted to touch 117, followed by AIADMK (105) and others (12).
In Kerala it is a big win for the LDF with 79 out of the 140 seats; the UDF is stuck at 60 seats.
The political implications of these results obviously go beyond the geographical boundaries of these states. The Assam win for the BJP is a more powerful booster dose than anything it has received in recent times, and would prove that the powerful duo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the party president Amit Shah is back in the business of winning elections, after the setbacks in Delhi, Bihar and Uttarakhand. Similarly a win for Banerjee in West Bengal will show that the Left-Congress alliance has still a long way to go before emerging as a winnable election combination.
The win for DMK in Tamil Nadu is just a minor consolation prize for the Congress, and primarily the outcome of the five year switch that is familiar to the political landscape of the southern state. The same holds true for Kerala, where the difference between winning and losing comes from a miniscule percentage of votes. The return of the Left in Kerala would spare the party of some internal wrangling that would have surely taken its toll.
