Indian election heading for a tight finish

India’s month-long national elections are heading for a tight finish with exit polls on Wednesday predicting that India’s Congress party-led ruling coalition would scrape in for a second five-year term.

Official results are due to be released on Saturday and past exit polls have wrongly predicted the result of the world’s biggest democratic exercise.

Wednesday’s polls indicated that neither the centre-left Congress-led alliance nor a grouping led by India’s other national party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, will garner an absolute majority in India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha.

The winning coalition will have to cobble together an even wider grouping from the plethora of smaller regional and caste-based parties gaining ground in India’s states, opening the way for another five years of unwieldy coalition politics.

“Congress may squeak in but it’s a badly fractured mandate this electorate has given because they haven’t put any of the major two alliances even close to within sniffing distance of the magic figure,” said Vinod Mehta, a senior political commentator and editor of Outlook magazine.

More than in previous elections, the 2009 poll is expected to underscore the gradual fragmentation of India’s political landscape, in which the Congress and the only other national party, the BJP, are increasingly in retreat in many states.

Congress’ share of the 543-seat Lok Sabha has shrunk from 361 in 1962 to 145 during the last election in 2004, chipped away by a rising number of charismatic leaders of smaller parties often active only at the state level.

Early polls on Wednesday confirmed the trend. An exit poll by Times Now television station showed Congress had won 154 seats and its wider alliance 198 seats. The BJP, meanwhile, had 142 seats and its wider coalition 183 seats.

The so-called “Third Front”, a grouping of minority regional parties including Kumari Mayawati, the chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, and leader of the low caste Bahujan Samaj Party, had 120 seats.

A second authoritative poll, by CNN-IBN television station in collaboration with the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, had Congress’ UPA coalition at 185-205 seats, the BJP’s NDA at 165 to 185 and the Third Front at 110-130.

The polls also showed that India’s leftist parties, which until a split last year were an important partner of the UPA coalition, with between 30 and 40 seats – down from 59 in presently.

Most polls showed Congress and the BJP had retained the same number of seats as they won during the 2004 elections.

Analysts said the results showed that there was still considerable uncertainty over who might form the next government.

If the polls are correct, India’s president would call on the Congress-led UPA, the single party with the most votes, to form the next government. But the UPA would need to do a lot of horse-trading with parties presently outside the coalition.

“What is sure is that before we can start playing the game of who will rule India we need to see one of the two parties’ alliances reach at least 220 seats. That is not the case at the moment,” said Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science at Brown University in the US.