BJP may need allies to reach majority mark: Ram Madhav

New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national general secretary Ram Madhav has forecast that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led front will require the support of allies to form the next government at the Centre, according to a report by Bloomberg.

"If we get 271 seats on our own, we will be very happy," Madhav said in an interview with Bloomberg on May 4. "With NDA (National Democratic Alliance), we will have a comfortable majority," Madhav added. BJP president Amit Shah and other senior leaders have repeatedly said the saffron party will get a full majority on its own.

Madhav told the publication that the party will make up for expected losses in the northern states by gaining seats in the Northeast and eastern states of West Bengal and Odisha. He said the BJP government would pursue pro-growth policies if it returns to power, adding that it had not shifted to populist cash handouts from its focus on economic reforms.

"We have expanded in eastern India very well — if similar effort had been put into south India also, probably we would have been more comfortable," Madhav said. "As politicians, we must remember that what we achieved last time, we may not repeat because of anti-incumbency," he added.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the Modi-led party swept through the Hindi-speaking belt. Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chandigarh and the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi have a total of 226 parliamentary seats.

The BJP won 191 of these seats in the previous parliamentary election. Its partners from the NDA won 11 seats there. However, in December 2018, Congress was able to wrest Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan from the BJP in one-on-one contests in the assembly elections, largely banking on local anti-incumbency and agrarian distress.