Congress terms Bihar exit polls slap on NDA's face; results will be different on 10 Nov, responds ruling alliance

The Congress and the RJD welcomed the exit poll results for the Bihar Assembly elections, a majority of which projected an edge for the Grand Alliance, the BJP sought to dismiss the predictions, saying these are not the real results. Congress leader Salman Nizami termed the exit poll results a “big slap on the face of the NDA” and asserted that Bihar had chosen development and secularism.

Exit polls are a big slap on NDA's arrogant face. Grand Alliance will clinch a much bigger victory with 160+ seats. Tejashwi Yadav & Rahul Ganhi are Bihar's choice. Development & secularism are Bihar's choice! pic.twitter.com/Rh5GkPvVWX

— Salman Nizami (@SalmanNizami_) November 7, 2020

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh said Bihar wants a government that gives employment, gives MSP to farmers, ensures new industries come, and ensures that education and health, which are on the backburner become the centrepoint of governance and that’s why Bihar is voting for change “We are confident that Bihar has voted for a change and Bihar will vote for the change,” he told reporters.

Various exit polls have predicted a clear majority for the Opposition coalition, with the Chanakya’s Today going as far as to project a landslide. Only the one conducted by Dainik Bhaskar has been an outlier, with its forecast of the NDA winning a comfortable majority and the Mahagathbandhan, performing poorly. Meanwhile, BJP leader Aparijta Sarangi, speaking to CNN-News18 after a near-unanimous poor projection of NDA’s performance by various pollsters, said, “With the support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Nitish Kumar government has done extremely well. These are not real results.” Manoj Tiwari, BJP MP from Delhi who hails from Bihar, hoped that the results will be different. “There have been no doubts about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity among the masses in Bihar. Moreover, the party leadership had assessed that Nitish Kumar was the popular choice for state-level leadership, a reason why it stuck with him. We hope the results will be different,” Tiwari said. The Janata Dal (United) cited the exam of the 2015 exit poll results to argue that pollsters have not always been accurate when it comes to the state. “Exit polls have often gone wrong in the case of Bihar. These had predicted a loss for us in 2015 while our opponents were shown ahead. We secured a two-third majority. Such discrepancies occur because silent voters, who comprise a bulk of our supporters, are not very vocal about their voting preferences,” PTI quoted Vashishth Narayan Singh, state unit chief of the JD(U) as saying. “We are confident that the results on 10 November will be different from the projections on exit polls. People of Bihar acknowledge Nitish Kumar’s good governance over the last 15 years”, Singh said. JD(U)’s Sanjay Kumar told the  CNN News-18 that the Mahagathabandhan might get a lead on the counting day but whether it gets the majority needs to be seen. He asserted that the NDA still has a chance. “But there’s a caveat. The caveat is that out of the four polls, two polls are giving a decent margin for RJD’s victory and two are saying its neck to neck but RJD is ahead. There is always a margin of error and if the margin of error is in the range of 2 to 3 percent and it goes in the other direction, there is still a possibility, a bleak possibility that the two polls which indicate a thin majority for the RJD, there is still a possibility that on the counting day we might see NDA ahead of the Mahagathabandhan by four or five seats. So there is still a possibility,” he maintained. In 2015, the JD(U) had contested the Assembly elections as part of the Grand Alliance which then included RJD and Congress. The party helmed by Nitish Kumar returned to NDA in 2017. The Grand Alliance has undergone many changes in its composition since the last election and, at present also comprises three Left parties. Lok Janshakti Party leader Rameshwar Chaurasia, a formal national secretary of the BJP who quit the party recently and entered the fray on an LJP ticket from Sasaram, said the exit polls “prove that we were right in taking a stand against Nitish Kumar”. “Since long we had been sensing that there is tremendous anger against Nitish Kumar but our pleas for snapping ties with the increasingly unpopular chief minister were ignored because of senior BJP leaders like (Deputy CM) Sushil Kumar Modi,” Chaurasia said. “No wonder, of the less than 150 LJP candidates in the  Assembly elections, nearly 50 were formerly with the BJP,” the former BJP MLA, who claimed to have turned down an offer of a ticket from the saffron party because of its reluctance to break away from the JD(U), said. Congress MLC Prem Chandra Mishra also said that in addition to the anti-incumbency factor, the JD(U) boss could have been done in by the “trap laid by the BJP in the form of Chirag Paswan’s rebellion”. “There is no doubt that there was public anger against Nitish Kumar. He seems fatigued and he would have faced a defeat in any case. But it was not a good reflection on his political acumen to have not decoded the BJPs gameplan to finish him off, even at the cost of loss of power,” Mishra said. Meanwhile, the RJD, which as per exit polls seems poised to return to power under the leadership of Tejashwi Yadav, seemed jubilant.

Indeed....'Magnificent' https://t.co/7sDUuDindl

— Manoj Kumar Jha (@manojkjhadu) November 7, 2020

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Manoj Jha, the national spokesman of the RJD had a press conference after the completion of the final phase of polling, asserted that the Mahagathbandhan will be getting a “prachand bahumat” (thumping majority). With inputs from PTI.