In the good old days, when the sarkar was still the mai-baap and the aam janata knew its place in the pecking order, opinion polls were the exclusive luxury of the Congress which ruled at the Centre and in the States and commissioned surveys via the intelligence agencies. By all accounts, the agencies did a good job, perhaps gave tactical guidance. For throughout the era of one-party-dominance when Congress was sole maseeha of the poor and downtrodden, a key winning strategy was to ensure that large swathes of the countryside did not vote. Distribution of ballot boxes was thin on the ground. Chosen sections of the electorate were ferried to booths in trucks and tempos courtesy the party with money power; musclemen would block exit points of villages suspected of dissent. Violence occurred in places where people did not take the hint. QED, as Euclid would say.
About three decades ago, things began to change. Chief Election Commissioner TN Seshan introduced voter identity cards to nix bogus voting; introduced ballot boxes in hamlets that had not voted for decades; and ensured adequate security against anti-social elements. Distribution improved in urban areas with booths at walking distance; this ended the myth of the apathy of the rural and urban voter. As voter turnout improved, political parties began to be voted out of office at the Centre and in the States.
Dr Pranoy Roy pioneered psephology in India, and dominated the scene for a while. But soon the number of private foreign and Indian television channels increased, and election forecasts and exit polls evolved into an independent industry. After initial unease, the non-Congress opposition parties adjusted to the opinion polls, that is to say, they learnt to take negative forecasts in their stride. But now Congress, still heading the UPA coalition for the ninth year, wants to ban opinion polls on grounds that they are misleading and prone to manipulation (read tilt the electoral playing field against the party). The reason, of course, is that despite being the ruling party and having the power to control many rival political leaders through the use of a ‘caged parrot’, the party is finding it difficult to stomach surveys of impending rout, and particularly the battering of its de facto prime ministerial candidate Rahul Gandhi.
So amidst the deafening silence of anti-fascists who double up as the nation’s conscience and intellectual pillars, namely, UR Ananthamurthy, Ramachandra Guha, Girish Karnad, with Rajmohan Gandhi as bonus (don’t laugh), the party has with a straight face mooted a ban on opinion polls. The increasingly irrelevant Digvijay Singh has lent his decibels to the claim. Attorney General GE Vahanvati, who remains acceptable to the Supreme Court despite being found dealing directly with the CBI in sensitive corruption cases, has chipped in. But on what grounds can opinion polls be banned? The truth of the matter is that opinion polls were fine when Congress looked like a winner, and unacceptable was Rahul Gandhi is projected as a loser. It remains to be seen if this can pass muster as a legal or moral ground to ban opinion polls.
The real fear – if this wholly improper demand is allowed by the Election Commission – is that the ruling combine may next suggest ‘consolidation’ of polling booths in the name of minimizing electoral violence or improving efficiency! After all, if we can contemplate banning poll projections after they have been around for nearly three decades, to revert to the secretive methodology of intelligence agencies, it is not far-fetched to feel nostalgic for the age in which inconvenient voters were cast into the darkness. Both are facets of the same reality.
This was why Congress was able to win elections on the basis of 33 per cent of the vote. Most political pundits have erroneously concluded that Congress was kept in power for decades because of an (unholy) alliance of Muslims and Scheduled Castes, who have hence been regarded with varying shades of unhappiness. Many have lamented that the Hindu majority is disunited because of the caste system (a colonial propaganda continued by the heirs of the British Raj).
The reality was selective disempowerment of voters in rural India coupled with a measure of apathy in urban India on account of a deep-seated sense of not having a stake in the system. (A similar system was employed by the Left combine in West Bengal; huge numbers of urban voters had not voted for decades until the communists were finally routed in a flood of public anger). That is why the spread of the ballot box has seen the rise of new leaders and new political parties in many States.
The move to ban opinion polls is thus not mainly about media freedom as many have suggested, though it is undeniable that a ban will adversely impact the income-generating capacity of the television channels. This would be particularly unfair at a time when all channels are experiencing economic distress. A major aspect of opinion polls is that they stimulate public debate (on the channels and on the street) on the issues exciting the voter in a particular State, or at the national level. Informing and stimulating public opinion is an important part of the mandate of the media, both print and electronic, and curtailment is to that extent an assault on the freedom of expression. At a more fundamental level, it impedes the media from carrying out its journalistic duty.
In fairness, it must be admitted that opinion polls can be inaccurate or even biased (Narendra Modi was slated to lose the last two elections that he won handsomely). But it is for the media house that pays for such a poll to decide if it is worth the risk to its credibility. What is unfair and inaccurate is to believe that opinion polls unduly influence the voter. The Indian voter is too savvy to be swayed by opinion polls. Anyway, there is also an existing ban on airing opinion polls 48 hours before polling – coterminous with the official end to electioneering by political parties – and that is quite adequate. Exit polls are aired only after voting is over, and thus should not cause heart-burning to anybody.
It is understandable that the move to ban opinion polls has been lambasted across the nation; some have called it a prelude to banning elections themselves. The Gujarat Chief Minister has been quick to point out that the Congress has been itching to control the social media for some time now; and that it used Section 66A of the Information Technology Act to harangue innocents using Twitter to express their views. Some months ago it had threatened a restaurant in Mumbai for politely mocking the UPA on its cash receipt. More recently, television channels were reprimanded for disrespectful coverage of the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech, in other words, for airing the counter-speech by Narendra Modi! Clearly the party is yearning for some version of the Emergency era censorship, or the discredited Postal and Press Bills. Unsurprisingly, fellow-travellers like CPM MP Sitaram Yechury have jumped on to the bandwagon. It would be in order for President Pranab Mukherjee to step in and advise the Prime Minister to put an end to this nonsense without further ado.
Niticentral.com, 6 November 2013