Mamata Banerjee and Left likely to retain tally, say exit polls

KOLKATA: The exit polls for the 2014 general elections unveiled Monday put the ruling Trinamool Congress ahead of its nearest competitor, the Left Front, in the key state of West Bengal, which elects 42 lawmakers, with Congress and the BJP way behind.

The CNN- IBN pol l gave Trinamool 25-31 seats, compared with the 20 it won in 2009. It gave the Left Front between 7 and 11 seats, lower than the 15 it got in the last general elections.

The Congress is seen getting 2-4 seats and the BJP 1-3 seats. The ABP Ananda-AC Nielsen survey was broadly similar, giving Trinamool 24 seats, the Left Front 12 seats, Congress five seats and the BJP just one. Congress had won six in 2009, and the BJP one.

The Times Now-ORG exit poll, however, put Trinamool at 21 seats, lower than what many predicted, with the Left Front at a higher-than-expected 15. The channel gave Cong r e s s f ive seats, with BJP winning in two.

The polls by CNN-IBN and ABP Ananda-AC Nielsen might be the closest to the eventual tally, experts said, although both could have ignored the fact that the voters in the 18-28 age group may have plumped for the BJP.

“Personally, I think we might win between 25 to 28 seats despite the fact that we are fighting a four-cornered contest in most places. We expect to win a significant chunk of Congress votes,” said a Trinamool Congress minister in Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s state cabinet.

The minister felt Narendra Modi’s attack on Banerjee might be one reason why the saffron party will not be able to do as well as it expected. Modi and Bannerjee were involved in a slanging match, especially toward the end of the campaign, leading the TMC to say that it was “shutting its doors” on supporting any government with BJP and Modi in it.

Mohammed Salim, part of the CPI-M’s think tank, seemed confident of the resurgence in the party’s fortunes, after the drubbing it received in the state assembly elections in 2011.