By IANS,
New Delhi : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will win a majority in Uttarakhand while Punjab will see a tight race with the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party (SAD-BJP) combine closely following Congresss near the half-way mark, the Star News-A C Nielsen exit poll said Sunday.
According to a press release, the exit poll predicts that the Congress will have a slight edge over the SAD-BJP with 58 seats in the 117 member Punjab assembly. The ruling alliance is predicted to get 56 seats.
The exit poll says Manpreet Badal’s People’s Party of Punjab (PPP) is likely to get two seats and play a key role in government formation in Punjab where the half-way mark is 59. The Congress had won 44 seats in the 2007 polls and the SAD-BJP had won 67 seats.
The exit polls predicts that in Uttarakhand, both the BJP and Congress will gain in numbers and the difference in seats will narrow down to seven.
It predicts 29 seats for the Congress, up from 21 it won in 2007 and 36 for the BJP from 35 it won in the last polls.
On Saturday, the Star News-Nielsen exit poll on Uttar Pradesh had predicted that Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party will be close to the half-way mark of 202 with 183 seats. It had predicted that the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) would get 83 seats, followed by BJP with 71 and Congress-Rashtriya Lok Dal with 62.