By Ranjona Banerji
The great circus of exit polls started last night and will vanish by Friday morning as actual election results come in. Then we’ll be part of another media hoopla.
This is a fabulous income-generating symbiotic relationship between media houses and pollsters which exists for no actual purpose. One might argue of course that the media itself exists for no purpose and it would be hard to counter that.
I was commissioned to write on the exit polls for the state of Uttarakhand. This forced me to break a long-avowed policy of avoiding exit polls. The results of these polls presented the consumer with various possibilities for Uttarakhand, for instance. The seven or eight polls did not match and thus the voter – who knows who she voted for – is faced with every party with a chance of winning or becoming a hawala transaction.
What therefore is the point except to create studio excitement and drama and less importantly these days, fill up a few physical newspaper pages?
I have had the misfortune during my newsroom years to be part of this opinion poll process. The questions can be skewed to how you want the answers (the classic: have you stopped beating your wife), the target audience can be picked depending on “demographics” and the numbers depend on your budget. Though you can feed yourself and your audience and also your accounts department some complicated statistical bumf about how 1 billion people can easily be represented statistically by members of your family sitting around a sofa last night.
What do we know from yesterday’s exit polls about the five states which had Assembly elections? Largely what you might expect. The BJP will win everything except Punjab where AAP will win. The Congress will win nothing except where it might win.
In between any number of what do they call themselves… soothsayers? seersuckers? no, we are the suckers… oh yes, psephologists – and other sorts of “analysts” and exfarts sort spelling error “experts” entertain us on how if only 7 per cent of the population of 7 villages votes then the sun will not rise tomorrow or whatever they say.
In all honesty, I have to confess that I do not watch TV and I did not watch it last night but I did follow the polls by other means and I still know what they talked unmitigated rubbish. If a thousand monkeys typing away can eventually write Hamlet, then a million psephologists can eventually, statistically, all get it 100 per cent right.
The trend on Twitter this morning I am overjoyed to see is “#electionresults”. Thus, we can do away with elections and the Election Commission does not even have to pretend to be unbiased and people don’t even have to bother to go out and vote.
Because the experts will already tell us how some random per cent of Indians are so poor that they will not vote. Pretty much upending the other theory that rich Indians do not bother to vote. Actually, there is actual evidence that the rich do not vote and the poor do, but never mind. Experts know these things and they have sociological jargon to prove it.
Of course, depending solely on exit polls does remove the need to vote, so rich or poor, what difference, eh?
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In other news, there’s still a Covid pandemic and a war in the Ukraine. Indians are still stranded in the war zone. The publicity machinery of the Modi government still has random ministers standing at airports with roses for students. (This is important nationalistic work, do not mock them.)
And let us not forget the massive excitement that PM Modi was going to speak to both Vladimir Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and thus end the war. I gather that they spoke and they were roundly told to speak to each other and the war has now ended?
No?
What are you saying????
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia every Tuesday and Friday. Her views here are personal