It is high
time that such a charade is put to an end forever. Election after election,
absurd pretence has been thrust on the people in the form of the so-called exit
polls and countless hours of mundane analysis on something which is a far cry
from reality. Soon after the polling is over, broadcasting channels go gung ho
over their predictable election outcome without any iota of shame when they are
so off the mark when the final results come in.
In a
country as vast as India, is it advisable to bank on the opinion of a few voters
leaving a polling station after they have cast their vote? What is the
guarantee that the voter is not lying? Moreover, in many instances it has been
found that there is a pronounced contrasting pattern of voting in
constituencies. Do the media channels cover each and every constituency? Importantly,
a very small sample of population is covered for exit poll and a very few
constituencies are targeted. Predicting the results of an election with around
900 million voters is awfully difficult. This is the reason why there is a
boomerang effect on such predictions.
 |
| Pix courtesy: indiatoday.in |
The case in
point is the 2004 Exit Polls when almost all the major television channels went
horribly wrong when they predicted the return of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA
government. To their shock, the Congress-led UPA emerged victorious. Again in
the Delhi assembly elections in 2015, the predicted victory margin of the Aam
Aadmi Party was nowhere close to the reality when it bagged 60 of the 70
assembly seats. And in the latest case, all pollsters, except the India Today,
predicted the humungous victory of the Manohar Lal Khattar government between
71 to 80 seats in the 90-member House. The performance of Khattar-led Bharatiya
Janata Party was nowhere close to the expectations as it could not even achieve
a simple majority leading to the hung house. The Congress, which most exit
polls predicted to win between 11-12 seats, went on to win 31 seats.
What has
often been seen that a media channel propounding the cause of a particular
political party tends to defend as well as predicting its victory? And when the
shocking election results are announced, the channel would not eat the crow. It
is an open secret that most of the Indian media channels, barring a very few,
are biased and they tend to overzealously favour a particular political party
(no prizes for guessing), often jeopardising their authenticity.
When the
ludicrous exit polls are beamed, it has a cascading effect. Besides the usual
spectacle in the news channels, there is eruption in social media. They too
join the party, take over from the channels and start expressing their
political views. Amidst all this frenzy, who gets martyred? Investors! The
stock exchanges too react to the exit polls and sometimes a fortune is wiped
out. The markets open disastrously if a defeat is predicted for the incumbent
ruling party or the possibility of a rag-tag coalition government.
Given the
vast difference between the predicted and actual results, these Exit Polls should
do well to widen their sample size to arrive at a more realistic opinion. But
can they afford it? Given the cut-throat competition, media channels often run
against time and are forced to telecast the show immediately after the polling
ends as it has high viewership and generates healthy advertisement revenues. It
is high time all the media houses ponder over the issue and take measures to
come out with more pragmatic opinion polls.
