PM Narendra Modi’s ruling alliance will win a thin majority in a general election that starts on Thursday, an average of four opinion polls showed, with a focus on national security appearing to trump concerns over jobs and farm prices. The coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to win 273 of the 543 parliament seats at stake, one more than the halfway mark required to rule.
In the last election,the alliance won more than 330 seats — the biggest mandate in three decades. Most of the polling agencies that released surveys in the last four days said Modi got a boost from the recent tension with Pakistan after a militant group based there killed 40 Indian paramilitary troops in Kashmir in February.
“In today’s India we have seen perhaps for the first time security issues competing with, and outdoing,a bread and butter issue like unemployment,” CVoter said in a statement. “Primarily, the BJP has been unable to sufficiently distinguish itself from the Congress when it comes to making people feel the difference in terms of their livelihoods and economic interests.
“However, when it comes to controlling and responding on terror the same set of respondents do feel a clear and visible difference.” CVoter’s poll is the most conservative, predicting 267 seats for the ruling group, while the Times Now-VMR’s poll is the most bullish, with 279 seats. The main Opposition Congress and its allies are expected to more than double their seats to about 141 on average. Pre-election opinion polls in India, with thousands of respondents, have proved unreliable several times in the past in a vast country of about 1.3 billion people, of whom about 900 million are eligible to vote.