As if paid news was not enough, now we have a new element in India’s unwieldy democracy — paid opinion poll surveys. Thanks to the News Express TV channel, we now know for sure that the UPA government was right when it complained about biased opinion poll surveys that showed the controversial Narendra Modi ahead in 2014 general elections.
I have steadfastly maintained that Indian media has to take responsibility of properly playing the role of the Fourth Estate. The good news is that now it is happening. First it was Aaj Tak doing sting operations to expose the Delhi police and now it is a newcomer on the block — News Express TV — that has exposed some 11 poll survey companies. The officials responsible for the companies were caught on camera, saying they can increase the winnable number of seats by any party by playing on the 3 percent error of margin, provided the money is right.
Poll surveys are significant because they can sway the undecided voters who ultimately want to vote for a party that is expected to win the elections. But the basic question for me is why should we have a survey poll every week in the months running up to the elections when we know that these polls not only show the trends, but can also change the trends if they are corrupt? Why create hype by conducting several polls for months before the actual elections and overkill the news on TV, day in and out? I can understand a candidate getting surveys conducted to find out what issues are relevant in his constituency, or how big is the threat by the opposition, or which parts of the constituency need more of his attention. But where is the need for publishing those polls or televising them repeatedly unless the aim is to mould public opinion and tilt the results one way or another? Is it just a gimmick for TV channels or is there an ulterior motive of misleading the uneducated people into joining the herd?
The dilemma with biased public opinion polls is similar to the problem that India is facing with “paid news”. They are, in fact, symptoms of a larger problem — lack of education. Education is the most important ingredient of a successful democracy, because it brings accountability among the people and in political parties. Here, we lack both and that is what makes this huge democracy, unwieldy and unmanageable.
People who are not well versed in the methodology of opinion polls cannot discern the difference. How is it possible that one channel is saying something, while the other channel is saying something totally different? If they are so scientific, how can they differ so much? In a recent opinion poll done by AAP, we saw them claiming victory. But it was not credible because the poll was conducted by one of its own members.
For now, it seems India is in transition and is becoming a democracy where the crucial ingredients that can strengthen it are not working in the way they should. Political parties can freely abuse the opinion polls to mislead the uneducated into a herd mentality because there is no check. The voters don’t seem to be concerned enough to check its veracity or to care about who funded the survey to discern any bias. I was not surprised when recently, I saw a politician on one of the TV talk shows, defending a sample of 2,800 people taken in one of India’s larger states of Madhya Pradesh, by saying that in USA a sample of 3,000 is considered more than enough. He had no clue that samples in India must be much bigger because we are talking about more than a billion people whereas the US population is one-third of that.
There is no doubt that public opinion polls play an important role in US politics. But the difference is that the Americans have been working for decades on improving the methods to make the polls more accurate. The process of improving the polls began shortly after the newspapers were stung in 1948, when they relied on the opinion polls and (without waiting for the official vote count) ran wrong headlines that said Harry Truman had lost the presidential election. The public opinion analysts were smart enough to develop better sampling techniques and regain the lost credibility.
So I will say opinion polls, if they are scientific and honest, are a good idea. But in the Indian context, if they are suspect then they are interfering with the process of free and fair elections. In fact the Election Commission of India had asked for a ban on both opinion and exit polls. But our Parliament, in its wisdom, banned only the exit polls.
Now that it is becoming crystal clear every day that in India some corporations are funding political parties, they are funding the media and for all we know, may also be funding the opinion polls. So the question is how do we ensure fair play in our elections? And I contend that the time has come to have a national debate to find out what the real public opinion is about, what else, the public opinion polls.
(Author/news analyst Ravi M. Khanna is a former South Asia bureau chief of Voice of America who now does freelance reporting from New Delhi)
Feedback: ravimohankhanna@gmail.com
