NEW DELHI, 17 February — The first general elections in India began on Oct. 25, 1951 and continued, in three stages, for about six months as some 17,000 candidates, on behalf of nearly 75 political parties contested for 489 parliament seats and 3,283 assembly places. Ballot boxes and voters moved by bullock cart.
Fifty years later, despite roads and fast vehicles, elections are still a three-stage process: The problem of speed has been replaced by the demands of security. Democracy is under threat from another kind of terrorist as well, the ballot-looter.
In the first elections, results were declared in between; no one thought that the announcement of results in one region would impact on the mood in another. Official results are no longer declared in between, but exit polls are. We know that polls can be rigged; the Election Commission spends a great deal of time and effort to prevent any rigging. But can exit polls be rigged as well? As they say in good parliamentarianese, this begs a supplementary.
Polls can be rigged but they rarely change the overall pattern of an election. Can exit polls, rigged or pure, change the larger mood of the voter during an election that stretches over weeks and is punctuated by predictions that claim to have the sanctity of some science that the rest of us do not understand? The results of the elections in Uttar Pradesh will be announced at the end of this week. The results of the exit polls have begun to come in.
In a state like Punjab, it does not matter what the exit polls say. The results of Punjab have been known for a couple of years at least. Support for the Akalis weakened among the Sikhs and collapsed among the Hindus even before the last general elections, and they would not have got the seats they did two-and-a-half years ago were it not for the cushion provided by a post-Kargil Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
The Congress could have strolled into the Punjab secretariat at the first opportunity, and that has come now. The opinion polls are only debating the extent of the victory, which, given the extent of the landslide, is a meaningless debate.
But in a tight election, a small difference in numbers does matter.
In Uttar Pradesh 10 seats out of more than 400 are probably going to decide who will become the next chief minister. Sane and responsible people have often wondered why anyone should want to become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, but that is another story. (It is fairly common knowledge that if Uttar Pradesh — despite the disappearance of Uttaranchal from its grip — were a separate country it would contain the sixth largest population in the world. What is not advertised is that it would also be the sixth poorest country in the world, on par with Chad.) Governments of large states now consciously try to structure a stage-wise election in such a way that regions in which they are strongest go to the polls first. They expect a bounce from the results of favorable exit polls that will increase the enthusiasm of their support base in regions less inclined towards them.
In Uttar Pradesh the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies are strongest in the west. Chaudhry Charan Singh’s son and heir Ajit Singh was made a Cabinet minister last year in order to ensure that his Jat followers, famous for their ability to deliver whole villages by the simple expedience of preventing others from voting at all, supported the BJP-led alliance in the state. (Indian politics is like physics; every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Ajit Singh entered the BJP camp and out went their former Jat ally, Om Prakash Chautala. Chautala put up candidates in western UP, not to win but to sabotage the BJP. To what effect, the exit polls did not quite indicate. The bigger question is: when will it be possible to write on electoral politics in our country without stuffing the column with parentheses?)
The first exit polls were therefore from west UP, and served their purpose of inducing a smile from a decidedly nervous ruling party. At least one senior leader of the BJP, Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, is a scientist. He is also from Uttar Pradesh, albeit from its eastern side, having lived and worked most of his life in Allahabad. But clearly he is unaware of the law that Indian politics is like physics. If the first exit polls cheered the BJP then they also had an immediate and opposite reaction from the one community that is united in its opposition to the BJP, the Muslims.
A key to the complicated and splintered electoral politics of this teeming state is whether the Muslim vote consolidates behind the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav or splinters, depending upon candidates, between the SP, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress party. If it consolidates then Mulayam will get the edge that can tip him distinctly ahead in a tight race.
If it splinters then Mulayam could lose some 15 to 20 seats by a narrow margin to the BSP or the Congress. (The BJP is sensible enough to have given up any hope of getting a Muslim elected on its ticket; it has named only one Muslim candidate.)
The BSP leader, Mayawati, opted for a clever strategy to enhance her prospects. She took her own Dalit base for granted and distributed ticket liberally among Muslims and upper castes, calculating that these individuals would be able to add their community support to her captive vote and thereby enhance their chances of winning a particular seat. There were indications during the campaign that this strategy was working. Muslims in particular were setting aside their doubts about Mayawati’s intention of forming a government with the BJP after the elections, and opting for community sentiment over common sense.
This was partly due to a feeling that the BJP had little chance of getting sufficient numbers to make a credible claim for participation in the next government: if the BJP for instance gets around 110 seats then even with Mayawati and Ajit Singh it will barely be able to patch a majority.
But a positive first round exit poll will instigate a rethink among Muslims. They are more likely to rally around Mulayam in the second and third stage of the elections to stop the BJP.
But the level at which the swing moves is not going to be very high. Polls and opinion polls can be depended upon to get, more or less, a particular trend right, but there is hardly an election in which they have not made a thorough mess of the detail. But then any intelligent observer with a gift of the tongue and enough time to spend at tea stalls and bus stops can get the trend broadly right.
If clients pay serious money to psephologists then it is to find out the detail. In the last general elections some of the more enthusiastic pollsters had given the BJP 30 to 40 seats more than it got, partly because they had more than 10 fingers when counting Uttar Pradesh. By the same token they underestimated the Samajwadi performance in UP; not a single poll gave the party the 22 seats that it eventually won.
The evidence indicates that the credibility of these polls — pre-ballot or at exit point — is uncertain where it really matters, among the voters. They have become part of election entertainment, like speeches or promises.
The jury is still out on whether they manage to get anyone elected by creating a herd mood toward a front-runner. They may have more influence of a negative kind, increasing worry levels among those hostile to any party that has become a front-runner. The reputation of polls has not been enhanced by the arrival of serious money into the business, both from media companies as well as from political parties. There is mushroom growth of instant polling companies whose expertise is as fragile as their morality.
Money has been known to purchase opinions before. To be fair, the reputed polling companies, who do market research for business houses, cannot be accused of underhand practices as they take extra care to be transparent.
But this science has simply not reached a level of sophistication where the research can be treated with the confidence with which it is projected.
Nothing in any election matches the excitement of the day on which the results emerge. Thank God for that. Which opinion poll, after all, predicted that George W. Bush and Al Gore would finally slug it out in the Supreme Court of the United States of America?
