With the announcement of dates for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections yesterday, the poll season has officially begun. As the dates for polls near, BJP’s prospects seem to be improving in the polls, going by the opinion polls. In the opinion polls conducted in last couple of months, most polls had predicted a hung parliament, with NDA being the largest alliance but not crossing the majority mark. But three opinion polls published yesterday gives far better results for NDA compared to the previous opinion polls.
India TV-CNX opinion poll predicts 285 seats for NDA, with 238 seats for BJP, while the Congress-led UPA is projected to win 126 seats and other opposition parties may get 132 seats.
Two other opinion polls, ABP News- C Voter and Zee 24 Taas predicts 264 seats for NDA, while is falls marginally short of the majority mark 273. UPA and others are predicted to win 141 and 138 in the ABP News survey, and 165 and 114 seats in the Zee 24 survey. The C Voter survey also predicts that if there is no mahagathbandhan of opposition parties in Uttar Pradesh, the NDA tally will go up to 307.
These predictions show an improvement in prospects of NDA over the surveys done earlier.
The prospect of NDA coming back to power cheered the share market as the markets have gone up significantly today. The NSE Nifty 50 went up by more than 132 points to reach the 11,168 mark, while the BSE Sensex reached 37,054 going up by 382 points. Both Sensex and Nifty reached their highest levels in the last six months, and as many as 26 stocks reached their 52-week high points.
Election results have a direct impact on share market performances in India. Generally, when BJP does well, markets go up, while BJP’s poor performance has a negative impact on the markets. During the state assembly elections last year, when the exit polls had shown defeat of BJP in three key states, the markets fell sharply. On the trading session after the exit polls were out, Sensex had gone down by 714 points and Nifty had fallen by 214 points, both the indices losing around 2%. On the results day, the stock markets had recovered partially, which was attributed to the fact that margin of BJP’s loss in the election was very thin and the party did not lose its vote share.