Predictions for Madurai general seat -2009 elections

Luckily I bit the bullet and took the tough decision to spend some time to do this dumb analysis for poll prediction for Madurai constituency. I took the numbers from last elections( both voters and percentage of votes shared by individual political parties). This time simple maths shows that AIADMK has th upper hand. I have added a rough 30000 additional voters from the last elections.

Since DMK government also is almost 3 years old and it is inherently plagued by the worsening power scenario, increase in price of house hold items, it has to have the anti-incumbency factor coming against it and with same assumptions little doubt for congress. The other factor I missed explicitly is the vote share of DMDK. Even going by the 8% split( for DMK or ADMK??) ADMK emerges as clear leader. Unless for large scale rigging by DMK goondas Madurai goes to AIADMK this time... Refer the charts...see ya...!!!
Votes polled by parties in 2004
(based on overall %age across TN)
Expected votes polled by individual parties
(considering +/- swings)
Predicted result
(DMDK factor excluded)

Indian Elections 2009

Usually It is number game in Tamil Nadu and this time for my part I tried looking into some basic docs from election commission of india and tried doing that. Most striking thing is that ADMK had the biggest poll percentage in the last two parliamentary elections. This is quite surprising for me at the moment. Inspite of the largest support base Jaya is managing to garner in Tamil Nadu it is Kalaingar who is calling the shots in centre for the last ten years. Hard to beleive but it indeed is a fact. DMK was one of the key ally in 1999-2004 NDA government and in 2004-09 UPA government. This can be attributed to nothing else but the explicit shrewedness of Dr.Kalaingar.



He is the one who can demand key portfolios of choice( plain english - which will fetch money ) in Ministry and still manages to be minority state government with mere 96 MLA's in Tamil Nadu. He is the one who can stab the back of his own grand children for his scions. He is the one who can be part of both BJP and INC which is literally North and south pole of Indian politics. The chart above shows the poll percentage of the major TN political parties in 2004 and 1999. It's written on the wall. Whatsoever the whether is, People stick to their party with a minimal swing and whoever is smart enough to be in right side gains point. The only catch here is how DMDK will affect this numbers??

I beleive TN voters are smart enough to have separate unrelated patterns for assembly and parliament. One of my good friend commented to vote for ADMK, since patroising DMDK will eventually help DMK. Will this holds good whole of TN? Will this be the line of thinking of the median voters? only results can tell.

Mean while I will work more on these numbers and try for a bunch of postings about the probable tally constituent wise. Let me see how it comes....

p.s: Number source ELection COmmission's statistics doc available in the site

Obama and India

It has become a very looong break infact. Partly to blame the "compile..verify..send" stuffs in office and numerous spread sheets to work with. Mean while a lot has happened, the usual " Israeli attack on yet another Arab groups (and this time it was Hamas), Tigers looks to be almost cornered ( will that be for good/bad deems a separate blog!! though) Obama's team hs come in, World is keep swirling towards an invisible, hapless the dark trench made by these greedy Americans and at last the cliamate change talks taking a back seat logically as well.

This seems to be a oppurtune moment to skim through the important things at stake for the Obama team and what's in it for India. Watching a bunch of Obama's speech one will be naturally attracted towrad's this guy and no wonder entire America whole-heartedly voted for this Afro-American whose very earlier generation did'nt even had voting rights. With the hard-fought race with Hillary for the Democratic nomination, a promising "Yes We can" morale-booster for the Americans especially when Russia is slowly gaining prominence with petro-dollars and a very,very aggressive and new "Middle Kingdom" competitor this guy has real burden in his sholders. And will he be able to repeat a lucky Franklin.DR is a million dollar question.

A whole lot of things are awaiting him. Two wars, a sick American banking system, especially worrisome Iranians, nuclear armed North korea. The most important will be the banking system. If he needs to continue at least short term "surge" before the promised "return of troop" in Irq and Afganisthan Obama has to have his economy spick and span and his top silicon valley execs should make money selling products world wide. And this time problems are manyfold, the automakers are lined up for federal money, sick banks are either beign closed or merged, investment banks are either downgraded or going bankrupt and well established folks like Citi and Bank of America are looking vulnerable. A normal american would not imagined this even in his wildest of dreams. Honestly I am unable to relate their economic crisis with the war but logically a cash-crunched Americans would find it difficult to sustain losing wars. And going through Thomas Friedman's columns it looks to be "fix the bank" will be Obama's first priority. With federal money flowing inside the banking system some senators have already started clamping down on firm's to hire local talent first instead of H1B hires, cap on executive salries and some formal strong messages from Oval office for the untimed wall street bonuses. And to have the very very successful capitalist model to sustain Obama and his economic team has to really work hard to get out of this logjam.

Being said that, worrisome note to ponder is India's external driven growth model which helped to sustain its 8% year on year GDP growth which dares our economist to compare ourself with China needs a real introspection. Although we managed to catch the "IT services" bus with our own big guys like TCS/Wipro and Infosys, these companies are pre-dominantly west-dependent and literally when America sneeze, IT majors will catch cold. Though this model is very very sucessful so far in bringing up India's reputation in world stage a long term plan of improving human developement index, minmal un-employement rates, rural-health care, very very strong farm subsidies, electricity and water and rural infrastructure our leader should start planning for a internally-driven growth model going forward. Our states (It is good for states to vie for Tata nano rather than some American corp ) instead of vieing each other to attract foreign firms should start spendign on school and higher education which forms the backbone of this frame-work, which makes us to compete with chinese and Isralis and Americans.

With all the above items it is naive to expect an unseen generosity from an another classic democrat US president ( all of Obama's new administration are old Clinton hands), and with Hillary as secretary of state in helm of affairs it would be no diffarent than any other democratic president at least for us who (Barack.H.Obama) cribs and claims to stand for all out measures(read support unproportionate military retaliations from Israel) for an out-dated short-range rockets fired from Palestine for the barrage of shells and arial attack from Israel.