As the nearly two months of polling with breaks in between in India’s Lok Sabha election cross the finishing line on June 1 with the voting in 57 seats in the seventh and final phase, conversations have predictably shifted to the results after votes are counted on June 4.

The halfway mark in the 543-member Lower House of Parliament is 272. In 2019, BJP on its own won 303 seats. Together with its allies, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance had 353 MPs. BJP got over 50% of the vote share in 224 Lok Sabha seats five years ago. But then half a decade is a long time in the vortex of Indian politics.

What seemed a certain victory for the BJP and a rare third tenure for Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this year appears to be turning into a closer contest now. What makes the ongoing election difficult to predict is that there is no discernible wave for or against the government in most parts of the country.

Will Prime Minister Narendra Modi return to power for a third successive tenure since he first assumed power in May 2104 to equal the feat of India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru? Or will the opposition alliance of a dozen parties come in the way?

At the start of the electioneering earlier this year, Modi-led BJP was projected by all opinion polls to win up to three-fourths of the seats, with the opposition led by Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty, a distant second. BJP launched its campaign with a promise to better its 2019 tally of 303 seats in the 545-member lower house of parliament. Once polling started, reports of low voter turnout made the BJP's target of an “Ab ki Baar 400 paar” seem a stretch.

The two main reasons for such a projection was the saffron party’s victory against Congress in state assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh late last year and the Hindutva hype generated by the consecration of Ram temple in Ayodhya in late January.

However, after the first two phases of voting, analysts and political workers began suggesting that the chances of the BJP getting above 362 seats, the two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha, had been affected. What apparently prompted this assessment was the lower turnout in those two phases. One reason for that was the perceived waning of euphoria over temple consecration in January.

There was a feeling among a section of political analysts that the temple hype had peaked a tad too early and it was hard to sustain it.

The underground betting market is currently predicting that BJP will win less than 300 seats but well clear of the halfway mark for a majority. All this, along with media reports, suggested a tighter contest in some areas than earlier thought. Can the temple fervour carry BJP to victory by trumping the opposition’s planks of rising unemployment and inflation?

The dip in voter turnout in the first three phases had raised concerns about BJP’s support. While there are no definite reasons for the slide, analysts and poll watchers ascribe the trend to several factors including an ongoing heat wave across the country and the lack of an overarching emotive issue to rally voters.

Modi and the opposition have sought to mobilise the voters mainly around questions of religious and caste identities. Modi has alleged a conspiracy by Congress and its partners to give away the reservation meant for Hindu subalterns cutting across caste divides to Muslims.

On the other hand, Congress and its allies are aiming to hit where it could BJP the most — Hindu consolidation. Congress faced trouble when US-based Sam Pitroda, a close friend of Rajiv Gandhi and one of its advisers, used a racist vocabulary to describe India’s ethnic diversities. Pitroda had said people in south India look more like Africans.

Maharashtra, India’s most industrialised state, is the focus of considerable speculation in this election for the simple reason that it has the second highest number of seats 48 and has often been described as the bellwether state in parliamentary polls. But this time it is a difficult state to assess as traditional alliances turned upside down and the state is hit by agrarian distress, water shortages and a Maratha quota reservation agitation.

With no overarching theme defining the ongoing election campaign in this general election, parties and leaders have been testing various slogans to rally voters around. The lack of a wave on any single issue has been partly blamed on apathy among party workers believing victory is assured and seems to have prompted Modi to change tack in his campaign speeches to try to charge up the party’s core support base with aggressive Hindutva issues and draw them to polling booths, political analysts said.
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The writer is a veteran Indian journalist