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The Rediff Special/ Dr N Bhaskara Rao

TDP will win again, but with slimmer majority: survey

Should there be an election to the Andhra Pradesh assembly now, the ruling Telugu Desam Party would get 41.3 per cent votes -- that is three percentage points more than what it had polled in the Lok Sabha poll last month.

But that would be 2.8 percentage points less than what the TDP got in 1994, with the late Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao as its leader.

Getting around 180 seats, the TDP will now end up with a little more than a simple majority in the assembly of 294 seats, against more than the two-thirds majority it had got in the 1994 assembly poll.

The Congress will get 39.4 per cent votes -- two percentage points more votes than what it had got in the recent Lok Sabha election and 5.5 percentage points more than what it had polled in the 1994 assembly poll.

That is how, as of now, the Congress will get more than 45 seats, as against the 26 it had got in 1994.

The Bharatiya Janata Party would get fewer votes in the assembly poll than what it had polled in the recent Lok Sabha election. The BJP vote share in the assembly poll would be around 13 per cent as against 18.3 per cent in the recent Lok Sabha election and four per cent in the 1994 assembly election. But it will improve its strength in the assembly.

These are some of the highlights of the Centre for Media Studies post-poll survey, conducted on March 21 and 22, when the TDP had still not decided to back the Atal Bihari Vajpayee ministry.

The TDP's actual tally of seats would, however, depend on its ability to win back the minorities and on whether it would go it alone or strike an alliance with the BJP.

''Gone are the days when a party could get a majority without poll alliances,'' says Centre for Media Studies senior manager N Vijaya Babu.

A triangular fight would help the Congress, though the BJP would not be a major player in the assembly poll.

As of now, both the Congress and the BJP would improve their performance in the assembly poll among the backward caste voters.

The TDP will also marginally improve its share among the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.

The BJP will also improve its performance among certain 'other castes' but will get fewer votes of SCs and prominent castes than in the recent Lok Sabha election.

In the assembly poll, the TDP vote base in the rural areas would be significantly more than among the urban centres, where it would poll fewer votes than in the Lok Sabha poll.

Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu's positive image stands out among the other backward castes and the schedules castes with a little over 60 per cent of these voters holding him in high esteem. But, among the other castes including the Kapus, a little over 40 per cent are against his leadership.

A quarter of the state voters think that Nara Chandrababu Naidu is a 'better chief minister' than his predecessors in the recent years. Nearly half of the voters, however, mentioned one or other former chief minister, with none of these names getting endorsed by more than 12 per cent voters.

Overall, while 55 per cent of the voters praised Naidu's leadership, 35 per cent felt that there is nothing to write home about.

The methodology used for this survey was the same as the one used for the pre-election survey, where the Centre for Media Studies had correctly indicated the trend, using a small sample of voters with attention on the selection procedure.

Three months before the recent Lok Sabha poll, the Centre for Media Studies said there was erosion in the TDP vote despite people's appreciation for Naidu's leadership. In fact, the CMS pre-poll survey had indicated that one in four voters wanted the TDP to align with the BJP in the post-poll scene.

In the present survey, six carefully selected assembly segments in three Lok Sabha constituencies were covered with 330 voters each from 30 villages and six urban clusters.

The Rediff Special

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