NEW DELHI: India’s biggest metropolises are eagerly looking forward to the Aam Aadmi Party going national and expect it to make a big splash in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, but a majority still view Narendra Modi as a better prime ministerial prospect than Arvind Kejriwal with Rahul Gandhi a distant third.
That’s the message from an opinion poll across the country’s eight most populous cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad — conducted exclusively for TOI by market research agency IPSOS.
The survey found that a third of the respondents thought AAP would win between 26 and 50 seats, another 26% felt it could win 51-100 seats, 11% said it would bag more than 100 and 5% even predicted a majority for the party. Put together, that means three-fourths of all those polled believe AAP will win more seats in 2014 than any party, barring what Congress and BJP won in 2009.
Given that 44% of those polled said they would vote for an AAP candidate if there was one in their constituency, and another 27% said they might, depending on the candidate, it is not difficult to see why the respondents rate AAP’s electoral prospects so high.
