Parties learn to live with exit polls

MANDATE 2004

When the first set of exit polls came out after the voting on April 26, Congress party manager Jairam Ramesh, whose job (among other things) is to roust Congressmen to campaign, found he could not get a single person from the Congress to attend television debates.

The polls predicted a sweep for the BJP-led NDA in the first phase and, on the basis of that, said the Congress would dip below 100. No one from the Congress wanted to explain to the public why it was in such bad shape, he said.

"The evenings of April 28 and 29 were the worst in my life. I just did not know how to battle the despondency and the demoralisation of the Congress," he said.

By contrast the Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee took a review meeting to discuss polls, the BJP was chirpy and upbeat and party chief M Venkiah Naidu talked about crossing the 300-seat mark.

This time, the boot is on the other foot. "I did not have to call anyone, they called me. They wanted to know when the meeting of the strategy committee was, why they are not invited, and whether they could help in any way. If the last time the Congress had to be gee-ed up, this time, I had to dampen the enthusiasm, play down the jubilation," Ramesh said.

"And the Prime Minister is taking no meetings, Naidu has blasted the polls," he remarked.

It is clear now that accurate or inaccurate, opinion and exit polls have become part of elections. Managers realise that the quicker a political party is to understand this and factor them in the campaign, the more chance it has of neutralising their effect.

For, public knowledge of victory or defeat is equivalent to dud currency for political parties. And parties might resent them but exit polls are here to stay.

"They affect the body language of the parties. They affect morale and sensibility," said Ramesh. He admitted that the party had two different electoral strategies, pre and post exit polls.

One of the BJP's poll managers, Sudhanshu Mittal, said psephology and astrology had a lot in common"" both called themselves sciences and both claimed they could see the future.

But in the Indian context both had proved to be inaccurate, so the BJP was going ahead with its own election plans without bothering too much about the polls.

But within 24 hours of their coming out, the Prime Minister had to refer to exit polls in public meetings in three different places in Lucknow and Farrukhabad. Obviously they had impacted on politics enough to warrant a mention.

The net result of exit polls has been that while the BJP has stepped up its campaign to a high-voltage quality campaign with one top leader being put in charge of each of the 32 seats in UP in the next phase of the election on 5 May, the Congress has redeployed its leaders for a phase of elections both parties consider crucial.

With Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, parts of UP, Bihar and Goa going to the polls on May5, the Congress has to increase its tally if it wants to be anywhere within striking distance of Raisina Hill, and the BJP has to retain its strength in these regions, if not improve it.

Ramesh said the accuracy of exit polls was an academic issue. "The poll is online. So you will never get the chance to test its accuracy or correct the bias. Exit polls can be spot on. But they can also be 100 per wrong, as in the case of the exit poll by The Hindu in the last Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, or the one done in the UK in 1999 where the forecast was a Conservative government but a Labour government came back to power," said a senior politician.