India 2014 Lok Sabha Elections - Election Analysis

Election analysis and advocacy are two different things. 

An analyst is a neutral person and tries to make conclusions from the data as it is emerging. An advocate is trying to change the reality. There are political leaders and their party members, and supporters who are changing their plans and doing activities to maximize their benefit from the election. The analyst is only gathering information or data from various sources and evaluating it against accepted logic and making conclusions regarding the outcomes on base line basis and also may attempt to say what will happen if the political parties change some of their plans and activities.

My own interest in election analysis this stems from the fact that many share broking firms are coming out with reports on election outcome now. Share broking firms are active in security analysis. I am also a teacher of security analysis. Security analysis has firm base on analysis of past data in the form of balance sheets. Apart from the balance sheet analysis, they interact with the managements to find out their future plans, they interact with customers,  suppliers and employees and find out information related to variable that affect future performance and feed that information into models and make predictions. Of course, predictions are accompanied by perils and many a great analyst is humiliated by actual results. But the theoretical basis of future action is prediction and profits go the entrepreneur for bearing the risk associated with action for benefit in the future. Risk is financial loss when money is invested and reputation loss when information is given. I wrote an interesting poem on risk taking. So keeping the loss that comes from wrong estimating, I ventured this time into active election analysis.

Party Membership Numbers

Party Campaign Activities  -  AAP  - BJP - INC

Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)

11. January 2014
One crore membership will be attained by 26 January. It is going to be a huge number. We need to check the membership numbers for other parties and then assess its likely performance.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)

Presently  BJP seems to be a party whose performance is highly visible from analytical perspective.
It also announced its plans for campaigning. The plans are very elaborate and BJP has never done such an elaborate campaign till now according to some journalists. Their main plan is titled BJP Mission 272+.
My analysis for a possible achievement of the plan is:

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State-wise  BJP Mission 272+ (Plus)  Seat Targets (Main page)

Andhra Pradesh(5) - Arunachal Pradesh (1) - Assam (5) - Bihar (30) - Chattisgarh (10) - Delhi (5)
Goa (2) - Gujarat (26) - Haryana (5) -  Himachal Pradesh (4) - Jammu and Kashmir (2) - Jharkhand (10)   Karnataka (20) - Kerala (1) - Madhya Pradesh (25) - Maharashtra (20) - Manipur - Orissa (3)
Punjab (3) - Rajasthan (25) - Tamil Nadu (5) - Tripura - Uttara Khand (5) Uttara Pradesh (55)
West Bengal (5)      Total:  272

Andaman & Nicobar Islands - Chandigarh (1) - Daman and Diu (1) - Puducherry

Click on  Links to go to the page having campaign news of the state

BJP Leaders of the respective states are showing their commitment to these numbers. Also some independent analysts are also predicting a number close to these numbers. That makes the BJP Mission 272+ a realistic plan. What is the probability that it be successful? I do not have a number estimate at this time neither methodology. But 272+ is the most likely number.

Visit  BJP Mission 272+ (Plus) Realistic - State Leaders Committed to Targets

See the past election performance of BJP for doing an analysis based on past data.
Visit BJP Election Performanc from 1998 - 2009 and Best Performance in each state  - The total of the best comes to 239 seats.

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Indian National Congress (INC)

Indian National Congress is presently in power 12 states. It is going to put up a stiff fight to retain power. Sonia,Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi and Manmohan Singh may campaign heavily in the elections.
The appointed Dentsu with Rs. 500 crore budget for an advertising blitzkrieg.

So far the negative point is that no opinion poll has given them any positive outlook. The antiincumbency is an important issue in election forecasting. Also a declining economic performance and inflation are negative points. But one has to watch out for their main campaign to see whether they can establish a connect with the masses now

Communist Parties and Left Front

They also have a national presence. But till now they are very subdued. Third front is a divided house because of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal.

The other parties are regional parties. We will add them in due course of time.

First posted on 11 January 2014