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The University of Delhi (DU) immeasurably helped create Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political brand. His sprint towards the stunning 2014 victory had begun on 6 February 2013 at DU’s Shri Ram College of Commerce. The auditorium was packed with students eager to listen to his sermon on the Gujarat model of development. A bevy of television channels were going live across the country, to an audience of hundreds of millions of curious viewers.
The Gujarat Chief Minister was very nervous about this outing. Why? Because Modi had a complex about his lack of facility in English; he feared being mocked by DU’s hip and elite students. Yet he spoke passionately in Hindi for 75 minutes.
His rousing speech was peppered with words that were to become his trademark through that extraordinary campaign: development (20 times); challenges (16); youth (15); growth (12); mitron or friends (180)!
Two thousand students sprung to their feet in a standing ovation that seemed to last forever, resonating across the country. Modi himself was astonished at the applause. Then it came to him in a flash. He could win the following year, riding on the mantra of hope, youth, aspiration, development, more development, and even more development; it was irrelevant to his constituency whether he spoke in Hindi or English.
There are four other reasons why DU, and what happens on that campus, is crucial for Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP):
Given the above reasoning, it’s irrefutable that vote shares thrown up in DUSU elections should give vital clues about the national political mood. I also concede that psephologically, these polls do not make for a scientific sample; so, it would be foolish to project the NDA’s or UPA’s gains or losses from these numbers. But can you glean some tangible insights into the upcoming 2019 battle? You bet!
Here are the key data pointers from the DUSU polls:
Now to the next critical question: Does the DUSU data sync up with other inputs? Does it violate or validate what other credible sources are throwing up? Because if it does validate, then our inferences would have a stronger ring of truth, right?
Let me recall the significant crunching we had done on by-elections held after the Gujarat polls of December 2017. This by-election data is “circumstantially random”, since no systematic bias gets created when legislators die or resign.
Here, then, are the contours of our “real world sample” of ten parliamentary and 21 Assembly by-elections, spread over 15 states, in which over 1.25 crore people cast their votes for nearly 19 political parties:
For those who delight in numbers, do click through to see the granular worksheet.
There is an almost perfect overlap between the DUSU poll numbers and the by-elections’ real voting data:
We can now say, with a huge amount of confidence, that vote shares across the country are hardening at 36 percent for NDA, 32 percent for UPA, 14 percent for potentially anti-BJP regional parties, and 18 percent for the rest.
But wait. Whenever I have done the above analysis, I have been energetically accosted by pro-Modi experts for ignoring a crucial variable (or imponderable): and that’s Modi himself. They argue, quite justifiably, that all this data was gathered when Modi himself was not on the ballot. They assert, again justifiably, that he has a “delta” in which people come out and vote for only Modi, not for the BJP or RSS or any other factor.
I readily concede this argument. There is a “peak Modi” phenomenon, that is, if Modi is in the fray, they would vote for him, irrespective of whether they had voted for non-BJP outfits in other elections.
Now, is there a way we can estimate “peak Modi”? Yes, there is:
In the ultimate analysis then, we could be looking at the following score:
So, who will win? Go figure.
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