BJP to lose badly if country goes to polls now, says survey

New Delhi, Aug 12 (UNI) If the country were to go to polls now, the ruling UPA alliance would win a comfortable majority with the Opposition BJP tally going below the three-figure mark, says a new opinion poll.

From its present 222 seats, the Congress and its electoral allies would have won 306 seats if the Lok Sabha elections were held in the first week of August, says 'The Hindu-CNN-IBN State of the Nation Survey' conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Studies.

At the same time, the BJP would have ended up with only 82 seats, the poll says.

The number of seats of the NDA would come down from the present 189 to 120 if a snap poll is held this month, it adds.

The poll says the Congress would have achieved its best performance since 1984 by winning 240 seats, though still away from a clear majority on its own.

The Left is likely to retain its current tally of above 60 seats, it adds.

The survey says the people by and large think the UPA government is better than the previous NDA government, but at the same time more people believe the Manmohan Singh government has performed worse than they expected it to do.

''People feel that the situation has worsened in the last two-and- a-half years in key areas like corruption, national security, price rise and farmers' plight,'' says the poll.

The popularity rating of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi has risen and so is the rating of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh though it has come down in the case of NDA chairperson and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Compared to 23.8 per cent of the votes she got in a poll conducted in January, Ms Gandhi gets 27.9 per cent this time while the rating of Dr Singh rises to 12 per cent from previous 8.6 per cent, the poll says.

The rating of Mr Vajpayee has, however, fallen from 19.3 per cent in January to 18.5 per cent, it adds.

A total of 14,680 respondents spread across 883 villages and urban localities in 19 states were interviewed at their homes for the survey conducted in the first week of August.

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