Watch out MNS, Shiv Sena: PM Modi may send regional parties packing

It is too early for the BJP in Maharashtra to be counting it chickens, but three opinion polls - with varying degrees of confidence - seem to suggest that the assembly election may be swinging its way. While all polls indicate that the BJP will emerge as the party with the largest number of seats, a lot will depend on how well the BJP ensures that’s its voters turn up at the polling booth on 15 October. The CVoter-NewsX poll, the most conservative of the three polls unveiled so far, gives the BJP (and small allies?) 105 seats in the Maharashtra assembly; the India today-Cicero poll gives the BJP seats in the range of 125-144 - the top end of the range being the halfway mark. The Week-Hansa Research poll gives the BJP Mahayuti a clear win with 154 seats. [caption id=“attachment_1750863” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Agencies[/caption] We will have to wait till 19 October to find out which one - or none - is correct, but the polls are an affirmation of the trend we saw in the Lok Sabha elections: old voter categories of caste and community are being reshaped by Narendra Modi. The sharp line dividing national and regional politics is also blurring. Even as Modi’s party retains its traditional upper class base, he has effectively repositioned it in a way where the party’s social base has widened to include more OBCs and Dalits. Rather than the Right, the BJP now occupies the centre of Indian politics, which makes it more likely to be a long-term contender for power at both centre and states. While seat-count projections can go woefully wrong in a five-horse race where a 500-2,000 votes may be the margin of victory in many constituencies, it is the vote share that is most interesting. The India Today-Cicero poll, which sampled 7,346 voters, gives the BJP 30 percent, the Shiv Sena 19 percent, the Congress and NCP 14 percent each and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) 5 percent. This shows that the BJP - never the No 1 party in the state - may poll more votes than the Congress and NCP combined. The two national parties (BJP and Congress) are getting more votes than the regionals combined. The BJP, which has had a strong presence in Mumbai, Northern Maharashtra and Vidarbha, is expected to notch up some gains in Marathwada and Western Maharashtra. Marathwada is an OBC belt, and Western Maharashtra is the backyard of Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party. The Sena and the BJP, if they had stuck together, would have swept the polls. But the vote shares also prove that the national party is emerging as the bigger of the two. The only mistake the BJP made was in not breaking the alliance earlier - which would have given it time to consolidate and package its message better. Now, it depends more on the star power of Modi, something which its opponents have not failed to note. Hence their pathetic bleatings about why Modi needs to be in Delhi to deal with the Pakistani ceasefire violations. We have to wait for 10 more days for how voter intent translates into actual votes, and further, how those votes translate into seats, but one this is clear even now: Maharashtra may be about to move out of coalition- or regional-era politics after more than two decades of wallowing in it. It has been accepted wisdom that regional politics is different from national politics. Narendra Modi, if he wins both Haryana and Maharashtra,  may drive a coach-and-four over this piece of pre-2014 punditry. Our English media pundits do not seem to have their ears to the ground.