Having returned from Bihar after a gruelling and back-breaking coverage of the assembly election there, I was most startled to see divergent exit polls that hit TV news channel screens on 5 November when polling in the fifth phase ended.
In an informal Whatsapp group, of which I am a member, I predicted a 135-145 seat victory for the Nitish Kumar-led Mahagathbandhan. Others on the group came up with their numbers. But when the various exit poll results came streaming in, I couldn’t help deeming them questionable.
Misreading the Electorate
Today’s Chanakya, which had built up a formidable reputation of never going wrong, predicted 155 (plus or minus 11 seats) for the NDA. NDTV’s duo of Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala predicted 125-130 seats for the NDA. The two polls have now been thrown by the wayside.
They stand discredited for misreading – and misreporting – the electorate’s mind. Exit polls may be widely known as sources of flawed research that cause excitement, but they are really misunderstood tools of political science. So Sopariwala, Roy and others of their ilk must stop masquerading as political scientists.
Should they stay in the business of conducting exit polls? I am no pollster, and do not even pretend to be one. As a humble journalist, my answer is a resounding NO. NDTV has suffered a loss of face, and senior employees are themselves flummoxed by the curious turn of events. And Today’s Chanakya is history. Journalists are not political scientists, and when they pretend to project themselves as such, they usually end up with egg on their faces.
Way off the Mark
Where did they falter, when what was needed was faithful and honest reporting? How else do we explain the large difference between Chanakya and NDTV? Since both reported a win for the NDA, their respective findings should have been closer to each other, or so my journalistic mind says.
Even as I landed in Patna on October 23, the first alarming information that local journalists shared with me was that no less than 18 senior scribes “are being hosted” by a particular party which had taken care to put them up at the high-end Hotel Maurya.
Top-notch English newspapers published stories that showed the NDA to be enjoying a distinct electoral advantage. Stories that went against the Mahagathbandhan, or its leaders were played up as front page leads. The Times of India was at the forefront of partisan reporting, projecting one party over the others.
Getting it Right
On November 7 evening, hours before the results blew Today’s Chanakya and NDTV exit polls, the grapevine had it that a poll conducted by CNN-IBN was not made public because it predicted an NDA rout. And that is what happened today, a two-thirds majority for the Mahagathbandhan. A more reasonable, though incorrect result, was predicted by ABP News which gave 130 seats to the Mahagathbandhan and 108 to the NDA.
It is time our pollsters took lessons from Karl Popper who used the metaphor of clouds and clocks to “represent the common sense notions of determinacy and indeterminacy in physical systems.” Indian politics, as different from the apparently more orderly (clock-like) systems prevalent in western democracies, works more like clouds: individual and collective political behaviour in any given setting is sometimes difficult to predict in India’s more heterogeneous society where groups have fluid boundaries.
In India, it is far more difficult to conceptualise social and political reality as a clock or a cloud. Perhaps it is a mix of both. And that is what the woolly-headed pollsters, part-time or otherwise, must take into account before they come up with spurious findings.
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