As the polling for Telangana Assembly elections ends on Thursday, November 30, exit polls are indicating a clear lead for the Congress party over the incumbent Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS). India TV-CNX exit poll, for instance, predicts that Congress will obtain a majority of 63 to 79 seats, with BRS procuring 31 to 47 seats in the 119 membered Legislative Assembly. The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), headed by Asaduddin Owaisi, may obtain five to seven seats as per the exit poll.
The ABP-CVoter exit poll speculates that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will win five to 13 seats, which if comes true would mean that the party would be uniquely positioned to be a kingmaker, with the potential to form crucial alliances. ABP-CVoter too puts Congress at the top with 49 to 65 seats, while BRS has been placed at 38 to 54 seats. The poll predicts that other parties, including the AIMIM, will stay within the range of five to nine seats.
According to the Republic TV-Matrize survey, Congress is likely to win 58 to 68 seats, while the BRS may get 46 to 56 seats. They expect that the BJP will go from one seat in 2018 to four to nine seats this time, and that the AIMIM will stay stagnant or fall behind with five to seven.
Jan Ki Baat too predicts that the Congress will likely take the lead with 48 to 64 seats, while the BRS may get 40 to 55 seats. They predict the BJP may get 7 to 13 seats.
The Polstrat exit poll, however, indicates that Congress and BRS would win approximately the same amount of seats — predicting 49-56 seats for Congress and 48 to 58 for BRS. The BJP may get five to 10 seats, they add.
With the Congress appearing to be surging ahead or at least maintaining a slight margin of lead in a majority of exit polls, Telangana Congress chief Revanth Reddy asked party workers to start celebrating their victory from 7 pm on Thursday and not wait for the results on December 3.
In Telangana’s third Assembly elections, BRS contested all the 119 seats, with the Congress contested in 118, allocating one seat, Kothagudem, to its ally CPI. The BJP contested in 111 seats while the remaining seats were given to its ally, the Jana Sena Party. AIMIM contested from nine seats in Hyderabad.
The primary contest this time was between the BRS and the Congress. With the BRS having been in power for two terms since 2014, the party helmed by Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao has faced a huge anti-incumbency challenge this time.
The state witnessed a poor voter turnout of 64.14%, three percentage points less than the previous elections. In 2018, a voter turnout of 67% was registered. Polling was held in a total of 35,655 stations, out of which 10,969 stations were identified as critical.