Bihar Poll Pulse: From Lofty Targets to Ground Realities

With the Bihar Assembly election around the corner, the BJP had initially set a target of winning 225 out of 243 seats for the NDA. But during his two-day visit to the state, Home Minister Amit Shah revised that goal down to 160 on Saturday.

It’s the classic election-season ritual—leaders adjusting projections as ground reports trickle in.

Back in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections, during the final stretch of campaigning, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi addressed a rally at Gandhi Maidan. Senior Bihar Congress leaders—Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav, Vidyakar Kavi, Kedarnath Pandey and Sitaram Kesri—were present.

As her speech began, tomatoes and eggs came flying from near the Maurya Hotel at the north-west corner of the Maidan. The stage stood in front of the Biscomaun building. Her appeal failed to land; midway, Indira Gandhi abandoned the speech and flew back to Delhi. The press was told she would instead speak at Raj Bhavan.

This was an era before TV channels, when even newspapers were few.

At Raj Bhavan, in the presence of the state Congress leadership, Indira Gandhi picked up where she’d left off. A journalist asked, “Bihar has 54 Lok Sabha seats. How many will Congress win?”

State Congress president Sitaram Kesri promptly replied, “Forty-eight to fifty.”

Indira Gandhi, reaching for a biscuit from her breakfast plate, flushed with anger, flung the plate toward Kesri and snapped, “After what you saw at Gandhi Maidan, you still claim forty-eight?”

In Odisha, Biju Patnaik had his own style of forecasting. His campaigns began at Puri’s Jagannath temple. In the middle of his speech, he’d often fall silent, close his eyes and then declare to supporters, “I was speaking to Kalia (Lord Jagannath). He said the Janata Party will win 26 seats.”

When the results went badly, he offered wry explanations at a press conference. A journalist asked, “You must be terribly disappointed?”

Patnaik smiled: “You don’t know me. I once contested from seven constituencies at once and lost all of them. Even then, I wasn’t disappointed.”

Someone reminded him, “But you said Jagannath himself told you you’d win everywhere. The opposite happened.”

He quipped, “There was some problem in communication. Kalia said six, I heard twenty-six.”

In Chhattisgarh’s first Assembly elections in 2003, Chief Minister Ajit Jogi—himself a former IAS officer and experienced election administrator—was eager to gauge the public mood after voting. He sought feedback from district magistrates, expecting Congress to win around 50 of the 90 seats. One collector told him, “We’re getting eight out of twelve here.”

Most officers were overconfident. They underestimated the RSS’s quiet grassroots mobilization for the BJP. In the end, Congress won only 37 seats.

Meanwhile in Gujarat, Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel read the ground far better—not through bureaucrats but through vegetable markets and fish bazaars.

He convened top officials from Saurashtra and Kutch at the Rajkot state guest house. After the formal agenda, he asked each commissioner, IG and collector for seat projections. All painted a rosy picture for the ruling party.

But Commissioner Ravindra Narayan Bhattacharya offered a starkly different assessment. Curious, the CM asked why. The Bengali officer replied, “Every morning, I personally visit Jubilee Bagh’s vegetable market and fish bazaar—no security, just conversations with people.”

When the results came in, the numbers from the markets proved the most accurate of all.

And in Madhya Pradesh during the 1998 Assembly elections, Digvijay Singh remained uncertain until mid-noon on counting day.

He hoped for a majority with help from the Bahujan Samaj Party and independents who had rebelled against Congress. The doors of the CM’s residence stayed open as visitors streamed in. Watching TV in the drawing room with Ramesh Chenitallah, he suddenly spilled tea on his white shirt, left the hall, went upstairs and joined a havan in progress.

When his candidates won from Bhilai and South Bhopal, a call came from Sonia Gandhi through Ramesh’s mobile. Digvijay told her she could congratulate him in advance.

In the neighbouring 45 Bungalow of BJP leader Sundar Lal Patwa, a chief-secretary-rank IAS officer and an ADG had called on the former CM to offer support. But Patwa’s security officer rushed in with a transistor: “Sir, both Vikram Verma and Kailash Joshi ji have been defeated.”

All predictions had failed.