Of the total 543 constituencies in the country, there were 15 seats — all of them in Uttar Pradesh — where the winners polled less than 30 per cent of the total votes cast in their respective constituencies in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. That’s not all. There were 95 constituencies where the winners polled between 30 and 40 per cent of the votes cast.

Almost half (46 constituencies) of these were again in Uttar Pradesh, giving the state the dubious distinction of electing 61 candidates — out of the total 80 constituencies that it has — as MPs who had polled less than 40 per cent votes.

That underlines the unpredictability of the UP electoral scene — a nightmare for psephologists.

Predicting electoral outcomes will be more difficult this time, what with multi-cornered contests likely to be witnessed across the state. With the SP and Congress failing to work out a pre-poll alliance in the state, the bipolarity of the state’s political field established during the 2007 Assembly elections — with the BSP and SP as the two major players — is no longer there. While the Congress has decided to go it alone, the BJP has joined hands with the RLD led by Ajit Singh.

Though it appears that the ruling BSP has an advantage, it would be erroneous to think that the ruling party in the state can have the edge over others in the polls, as in the 2004 elections both the ruling SP and Opposition BSP won five each of the 15 seats where the winners polled less than 30 per cent of the total votes cast. The Congress, though marginalised in the state, bagged three of these 15 seats, and the remaining two were won by the fringe players in the state politics — JD(U) and NLP.