Soroor Ahmed

Is there really any scope for Exit Polls in India? The answer is simply: No.

One can not call it illegal, but one can certainly ask a question: Can not we wait for four days for the final results to come. After all the constituencies which went to poll on April 7, 10 or 17 waited for over a month for results to be announced.

Why these anchors sitting in various studious on May 12 evening started shouting “Don’t go away” before every commercial break, thus asking the viewers to sit glued to TV sets? Is not watching them just waste of precious time? What a wonderful way of creating market for this product called Exit Polls.

Our corporate media can justify the Opinion Polls by arguing that they are done in the West, but what they do not say is that there is hardly any scope for Exit Polls in many developed democracies of the world.

This is simply because the counting commences just after the election process is over and trends start coming in soon. Within a day or two the results are out.

In India the whole election process was spread over five weeks and the counting is it to take place four days after election of all the phases are over, that is, on May 16.

Now take the example of the United States, where along with Presidential election, polls were also held for 435 members of House of Representatives (its Lower House like our Lok Sabha) on November 6, 2012.

As the results started pouring in by the end of the same day nobody is bothered about the Exit Polls.
Not to speak of several western democracies, the same is true in the case of South Africa, where election for the National Assembly (its parliament) and nine provincial legislatures (like our state Assemblies) were held last week, that is, on May 7, 2014. By May 9 all the results were out in great details.

Even in neighbouring Pakistan, where democracy is certainly not as strong as in India, results of election for parliament and provincial assemblies started coming out hours after the elections were over on May 11, 2013. By May 12 the results of the election were already out.

In contrast the four days gap between the completion of election and counting day in India gives a lot of scope for speculators to mint money. And the media becomes its facilitator.

But there are many traders who loses money when the Exit Polls go wrong as it has happened in the past. Nobody can take the media to task for this gross miscalculation, nor are our journalists going to apologize when the Exit Polls result go wrong.

The media would certainly not speak against the Opinion Polls and Exit Polls as they are the primary beneficiaries. 

Journalists would go about tracking stories of corruption involving a few lakhs or crores of rupees. Sometimes they even exaggerate the figures and add spice to the stories so that they sell better. But they would not question thousands of crores spent on television and first-page newspaper advertisements given by the political parties on the eve of election. They do not deem it fit to expose the real story, as none else, but the media-houses are the beneficiaries. The time has actually come to say that the corporate media are hand-in-glove with the political parties in this shady business. The Radia tapes have proved it.

Our anchors should stop their moral sermons.