Pre-Poll Surveys And Exit Polls

  Nalini Taneja

THE sheer number of opinion polls and exit polls held during the current elections is unprecedented in this country. We have not had such feverish activity by the television and print media, in alliance with market and business houses, ever before. The reason, of course, is that elections are taking place in the context of liberalization and growth of corporate media, which align the interest of both media and industrial houses with the fate of liberalization policies. Privatisation of the media sector, particularly in television, has brought forth numerous channels that may differ in the details of their programmes, but nevertheless collectively represent the interests of privatization and an economic policy geared to serve the ruling classes in this country.

MEDIA’S BIAS IN PRE-POLL SURVEYS

The media got into the act almost as soon as the prime minister gave his call for the elections, and it began to give voice to the ‘India shining’ campaign and the ‘feel good’ factor, without venturing into the field to find out what the mood was. In fact all the channels got into the act with such alacrity and in such unison that one wonders whether their first poll surveys, which predicted a landslide victory for Vajpayee and the NDA, were based on any survey at all or were an attempt to influence the outcome of the elections by actually campaigning for Vajpayee.

First we were bombarded with the message by Vajpayee’s government that India has been made shining so we must vote back the BJP to power. Then we were told that stability for the country lies in voting for the BJP, as the Opposition cannot even put forward the name of a prime minister to lead its government, thereby identifying political stability with a status quo in which no member of the ruling dispensation is willing to rock the boat for fear that he/she may not be re-elected or even get a ticket the next time, or even questioning whether a stability which uniformly and consistently works against the marginalisation of the majority is of any worth at all. Simply remaining in power for five years seemed an achievement for which the BJP deserved to be brought back!

MANIPULATING PUBLIC OPINION

Many of the arguments against pre-poll surveys by marketing agencies are, of course, well known: they are an attempt to hold an election before an actual election, create an atmosphere and manipulate public opinion in accordance with the interests of the sponsors of the opinion polls and surveys. These interests and motivations may take many forms—commercial and industrial or political and ideological, and certainly in today’s India the two combine very well. The industrial classes and the financial magnates had definitely put in their lot with the BJP overwhelmingly this time round and sought to sway the regional and smaller parties along the same lines with the great financial clout that they have. The staggered schedule of elections and the initial swing in favour of the BJP was meant to definitively swing the votes in favour of the BJP by the corporate media.

But a more serious charge against such pre poll surveys and exit polls—which served the same purpose as opinion polls because of the staggered elections—is that they fix the parameters of the political debate, foregrounding certain issues at the expense of others. In this sense all opinion polls are serious and direct interventions, a part of the systematic attempt of subverting the democratic process, and influencing leaders to fall in line with their predilections. They are never an innocent exercise in information gathering, or even disinterested predictions. This is clear from the opinion polls we saw in these elections.

One fear that was put in the minds of the middle classes—the targets of these opinion polls—is that you might have Laloo Yadav or Mayawati as prime minister if Vajpayee is not voted to power. The Congress was written off as too weak and not acceptable due to Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin. The fear went down well with the upwardly mobile middle classes with their visions of a liberalized ‘golden’ future.  The media created images of Laloo Yadav and Mayawati as somehow ridiculous in the context of the direction the middle classes want to move towards fed into the fear of the whole of India being reduced to a violence-ridden rural hinterland. At best the election got trivialized into a Vajpayee versus Sonia affair, with the media after all political leaders to find out whether a government could be formed at all as long as she remained at the helm of affairs in politics. They even forgot to remind us that Congress too stands for liberalization and privatization, and that there is a consensus on economic reform along the entire political spectrum, barring the Left. From the great television talks and discussions it would deem the media simply wasn’t aware of this elementary fact!

It is also clear that these pollsters and surveyors are very shy of disclosing the actual methodology or process of surveys, or the true nature of the sample. But the stakes involved can be gauged from the sheer pace of activity on this front and that academicians, in the past brought in by the media only after the elections to analyse the results, are now in big demand to lend their weight to poll predictions till now the preserve of marketing agencies. It is said that the marketing agencies working with the Indian Express-NDTV group (AC Nielsen) and with the India Today-Aaj Tak group (ORG-MARG) belong to the same parent company, with the result that one marketing company is providing two different poll results to two different clients through its two branches!

SUBVERTING DEMOCRATIC PROCESS

Finally, these poll surveys are an exercise in consolidating and feeding into the prejudices, received wisdom, and crass cynicism that informs the middle class mentality about the democratic process, indeed all politics. Politics and political contests are often seen/ presented as base forms of competitiveness among politicians for power and the material gains accruing from it, and the guiding assumption is that “all of them are the same”. The electorate (voters, citizens) in their discussions is reduced to a mere digit, an abstract statistic, and any expression of collective interests and the desire to pursue collective interests, or seek alignments, is dubbed as vote-bank politics. The idea is to feed into the individualistic philosophy, which sees all collective aspirations as herd-behaviour, and reduces the general elections into some kind of a cattle fair. With this jaundiced view they then look for responses that fit into their pre-conceived framework.

The whole electoral process is presented as some kind of a pre-modern market—but a market nevertheless—with its barters and auctions, middlemen, and the herds who are being traded. All this represents a deep hostility to the processes of democracy, even as they go on proclaiming in their shows that the world’s largest democracy goes to the polls.

As for the exit polls, they could this time no doubt influence the later phases of voting, but in general what purpose do they serve when counting is to begin soon and we would anyway get to know the real results? They do arouse curiosity among people in general and also among ‘players’, but one can see that their main purpose today is simply to turn what is a matter of great anxiety for millions of people into something that has nothing more than entertainment value. Politics is being converted into top-class entertainment in front of our very eyes, feeding into the process of trivialization of political and social discourse by the media in this last decade.

A whole class of crystal gazers and presenters has been brought into being that has facilitated the conversion of this entertainment value into concrete commercial gain for the media houses as people sit glued to TVs and corporate houses pour in their advertisements for consumer goods that will be bought by the same people who have been trained by the media to make no distinction between the horse traders like Pramod Mahajan and George Fernandes and leaders who are genuinely trying to put together a secular front. But we will see more of this as we watch the media over its hundred-hour coverage of the election results during this week.