BJP's massive win: Why the NDTV survey is bad for democracy

The results of a new survey released by NDTV are unequivocal. It predicts that the BJP-led NDA will grab 275 seats in the ongoing elections. UP will be swept up in a 51-seat Modi wave with everyone else, BSP, SP, and Congress haemorrhaging their previous totals.  Congress will hit an all-time low of 92 seats, and garner barely 111 seats with its UPA allies. AAP will bomb in Delhi, scraping up one measly seat. Christmas is coming early for the BJP and its supporters. Or so one survey claims. [caption id=“attachment_1480777” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Will the findings of the survey genuinely influence voters? PTI[/caption] At any other point in this election season, the NDTV survey would be excellent grist for widespread speculation. A media coup that answers the question on everyone’s mind. The problem with the poll is not its conclusions but its timing. It comes right bang in the middle of the month-long election. More than half the country has yet to vote. Worse, due to the Election Commission rules, it explodes on the election landscape in splendid isolation. There will be no other polling to confirm or contradict its results, hence amplifying its impact. The NDTV survey honours the letter of the law but wholly violates its spirit. The EC deadline, which forbade the media from conducting opinion polls after 4 April, exists for good reason. It allows voters to go to the polling booth free from the influence of a continual stream of survey predictions. This is also the reason why the release of exit poll results is banned until all voting is completed. To side-step that law by exploiting a loophole – as in all of NDTV’s polling was completed before the deadline – is just plain wrong. The network released some of its tracker data before 4 April, but then chose to withhold the results until now. The decision was surely driven by the need to maximise its impact: release the dhamaka results just when poll fever is at its peak and everyone is yearning for any indication of the outcome. It is certainly a big win for the network in the brutal media race for eyeballs. But at what cost? Predicting a giant win for one party is surely bound to influence voter behaviour – irrespective of whether NDTV intends to do so (I for one don’t believe it does).  Creating a sense of inevitability often drives voters to plump for the predicted victor. This is all the more so in India where there is a significant electoral bandwagon effect, as in voters want to pick the winning side. As one of our senior editors told me, she encountered a number of voters on the campaign trial who planned to vote for Modi, but not because they knew anything about him. They had heard he would be good for the country, but more importantly, that he would win. This is the reason why all politicians insist they are going to win big irrespective of the facts. Sometimes saying so, over and again, does indeed help make it so. Within this context, releasing a survey that anoints Modi as the next PM is highly likely to affect future voter behaviour. If the NDTV survey helps the BJP, it also hurts the others. Not so much the Congress which ought have no illusions about its impending fate, but AAP which, more than any other party, needs to be seen as a viable party in order to survive. The prediction that it will lose big in its sole bastion, i.e. Delhi, will inevitably damp down enthusiasm of potential AAP voters in the rest of the country. To pretend otherwise is to be willfully naive. As with all else in this bitter campaign season, any such argument will be filtered through the prism of partisanship. Principle will matter little to those who welcome its findings, and will become a rallying cause for those who don’t. And that is perhaps the greater tragedy of this election, irrespective of its outcome.