Hits and misses of exit, opinion polls

It was the then Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani who asserted in an event in Mumbai that there was a ‘feel good’ factor prevailing everywhere in the country. This was the year 2004.

The NDA Government was at the Centre and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was at the pinnacle of his popularity. NDA did look invincible and so confident was the BJP about its popularity that it decided to advance the general election. This was the backdrop in which the slogan ‘India Shining’ was coined. NDTV got an opinion poll and survey done by AC Nielsen.

Their opinion poll projected a victory for the NDA and 287-307 seats in the Lok Sabha. While predicting that NDA would return to power, the survey also projected 143-163 seats for the Congress. Once the counting was done and dusted though, NDA was found stranded at 181 seats while Congress and its allies had secured 218 seats. With 271 seats in the Lok Sabha as the halfway mark, Congress later stitched an alliance with Left Parties to form the UPA and formed a coalition government. NDTV till then had enjoyed an enviable reputation in surveys, opinion polls and exit polls. Afterall, the founder of NDTV Dr Prannoy Roy was a pioneer in the field and was instrumental in bringing psephology to India. How could the NDTV survey have missed the mark by such a wide margin is what everyone in the business talked about after the election. Was the survey to be faulted? Did people conducting the survey slip? Did external forces try to influence the survey or were the findings manipulated to benefit a political party or alliance? It was not uncommon for losing political parties to question the credibility of exit polls and opinion polls.

But 2004 was the first time when questions were raised over the possibility of deliberate manipulation of survey findings. Conducting surveys is a scientific and statistical exercise, which has been explained in great detail by Sanjay Kumar of CSDS in his book ‘Measuring Voting Behaviour in India’ (2013) which has a foreword written by well known analyst and now political activist Yogendra Yadav. CSDS enjoys very high credibility among agencies engaged in conducting surveys. It also stands out because unlike other agencies, it has consistently refused to project the number of seats different parties would secure. It confines itself to estimating the likely vote share that political parties would get in an election. Media Houses, however, commission statistical analysts to translate the vote share into seats. In the general election of 2009, CSDS conducted the survey for CNNIBN (now CNN-News 18). CSDS is also different from other agencies in so far as most agencies conduct their exit poll on the day of the polling while CSDS does it the day after. It does post-poll survey and its surveyors call on the voters the day after polling.

CSDS survey indicated that UPA had good chances of returning to power and that the vote share of the Congress itself would go up. The present director of Chennai Mathematical Institute, Rajiv Karandikar, then translated the vote share into seats and projected that Congress alone would be bagging around 200 seats. But this was against prevailing wisdom. The popular speculation was that the UPA was on its way out. The channel chose to play safe and decided to project 185-205 seats for the UPA. The effort at balancing the perception turned out to be unwarranted as the Congress, as per projections by CSDS and Karandikar, bagged 206 seats on its own. Bihar assembly election of 2015 provided us with an even more interesting scenario. Virtually all exit polls predicted BJP and its allies would secure between 108-155 seats.

The agency Today’s Chanakya, hailed for predicting 300 seats for the NDA in 2014 general election, predicted that BJP and allies would secure 155 seats. It gave the ‘Grand Alliance’ ( Mahagathbandhan) of JD(U)+RJD+Nitish Kumar just 83 seats. The most optimistic forecast for the Grand Alliance put its seats at 130.

CNN-IBN too had engaged a new outfit, Axis-My India, to conduct an exit poll in Bihar. This agency projected 169-183 seats for the Grand Alliance and only 58-70 seats for the BJP and its allies. The findings caused a minor upheaval on the Election Desk with which I was associated. All other agencies were predicting victory of the BJP and it seemed findings of this new agency may not get close to the actual result. The findings triggered a number of high-level meetings involving the Editor-in-Chief, the Managing Editor, President(News), Executive Editors and others. After several long deliberations it was decided against airing the survey. Although the survey had already been announced, the decision was to hold it back. The agency was not given any reason, but it was pointed out that as per the agreement, the channel reserved the right to air or not to air the findings. Notably, the ownership of the channel had been transferred to Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries barely two months after the general election in 2014. But there was a twist in the tale. Axis-My India, in anticipation, had posted the findings on its website by then. It had also printed some copies and distributed them to a section of the media and others. When the Bihar results were finally announced, BJP and allies secured 58 seats, as correctly predicted by the agency and the ‘Grand Alliance’ bagged 178 seats. Was it a desire to be on the right side of the BJP that prompted the decision against airing it? Or, were there instructions from the management against airing the findings? Speculations abound but few know what finally tilted the scale against airing it. It would of course have been a journalistic coup for the channel if it had gone ahead and aired it. The agency was so disappointed that it ended its contract with the channel.