To discuss the entire gamut of reasons as to why Modi failed as a Prime Minister or as the quintessential strong leader like his followers tout him, would be to address a Goliath of a charter, ascribing to a range of issues that will probably bear a cavernous deeper than Aatish Taseer’s “India’s Divider-In-Chief“.
All of that now seems pointless as the exit polls of India’s 2019 general elections are out and the cards are open, all in line with the Modi juggernaut. And if you are flabbergasted by the numbers and beginning to question the veracity of these exercises, it’s time we looked at the substantial demographic we were sure was not voting-in Modi this time.
Let’s just take a bulleted view of who these people are:
The Farmers
Thousands and thousands of farmers marched to Delhi to exhibit their plight borne out of the terrible agrarian distress that wreaked havoc on their lives and protested for days, demanding to see the Prime Minister. But the world bore witness as the Prime Minister of India couldn’t concede a moment to meet them and listen to their woes. Scores of farmers committed suicide over the past five years of the Modi Government and the data was conveniently suppressed and not divulged since 2016. An RTI revealed, in the last 5 years, 14,034, 8 per day committed suicide in the state of Maharastra alone. The agitating farmers battling severe drought conditions in Marathwada were shot at by the state.
The Students
The kind of hostility displayed by the ruling dispensation towards the student community has been unprecedented. Lakhs of students protested over the course of these five years, primarily from the Northern part of India, due to various reasons like scholarship cutting, seat cutting, fund cutting, the crackdown on the students of the various public universities across the country by the RSS affiliated Vice Chancellors who have been systematically and purposefully appointed to these posts, the SSC exam paper leak, slashing of government vacancies and unemployment.
The Teachers
Scores of teachers protested due to the implementation of the roster system, underpayment and due payment of salaries, and autonomy issues.
The Women
Women across India rebelled due to the falling security levels and rising crime rate against them under the Modi government. Women and children across Delhi survive rape every day and clearance to install CCTVs was literally held up by team Modi, that the sitting Chief Minister of Delhi had to stage an in-house protest in the Lieutenant Governer’s office, to get the file cleared.
Women students across multiple campuses organized rallies, fought and bore lathis while they protested against unfair campus rules and sexual harassment cases while their Sangh affiliated VCs victim shamed them and stood in cahoots with their perpetrators. One cannot easily forget the incident when Modi unabashedly escaped meeting girls of his own constituency braving a crackdown in BHU by taking a different route, en route a meeting. There was nil use of Beti Bachao-Beti Padaho scheme in the states and 56% of its funds went into advertisements.
Lakhs of women across the country have been conned under the Ujjwala Scheme where they could never afford the subsequent overpriced cylinder refills and went back to cooking on the Chulah. Much to BJP’s embarrassment the poster lady of the scheme was herself found using her traditional means with an empty cylinder lying across her kitchen.
Scores of Asha, Anganwadi workers have not received their already paltry salaries in Uttar Pradesh. Scores of women lost their secret personal savings due to Demonatisation.
The Small And Medium Enterprises
Demonetisation and a badly implemented GST destroyed small and medium businesses beyond repair. Fifty Lakh men lost their jobs due to demonetization. SMEs suffered in despair. Not to forget the people who died even during the course of this exercise. The economy is in shambles and unemployment is at an all-time high.
The Deal Breaker State
Uttar Pradesh, known as the deal breaker state of the Lok Sabha elections is under extreme stress due to the issue of the stray cattle and the disgruntled farmer who is at his lowest and feeling severely helpless, the directionless-unemployed youth one would find at every nook and corner of the Pradesh, and dire lack of the promised basic facilities under the Modi-Yogi Government. Electrification of the villages in several parts of the state was found to be a sham and still lay unlit.
How can one ever forget the death of those 60 children in the district hospital of Gorakhpur due to lack of oxygen cylinders while Yogi toured Kerala saying the state should learn from UP’s health care system? Almost every voter that the media spoke to expressed his anguish with Modi in UP and was highly favoring the SP/BSP this time.
The Minorities
The increased levels of atrocities towards and the drumming down of the minorities: Muslims and Dalits in the cow belt, totally cornered them to the rare end of the ‘Pro-Modi’ spectrum. They lived under a veil of fear, the past five years, feeling out of place.
Hence the conclusion, the farmers are unhappy. the SMEs are unhappy, youth is unhappy, students are unhappy, women are unhappy, minorities are unhappy. Not to forget a substantial portion of young ex Modi voters who turned anti-Modi after the curbing of freedom of expression and the incessant trolling, abuse and the hateful environment they had to experience as the regime progressed.
And the exit polls did nothing but tell us that all these people voted unanimously for the BJP?
The Number Crunching
Because the last time, they did vote for the BJP, and that’s exactly how they got to a thumping 282. And if this time, say even 50% or less than 50% of these segments of the population cease to vote for the BJP, there is “NO WAY” these exit polls are correct. They come across as nothing but a massive error, an unbelievably massive error, lest these people purely did not vote and then the bigger mystery has to be the average poll percentage which across the seven phases stands at around 60%, which is now evident has ferried the BJP back to its power corridors. Who then is this 60%?
From the affected demographics stated above, the analogy is pretty clear. A person who had voted for the BJP in 2014 ‘may or may not‘ vote for the BJP again. But owing to the massive policy failures and the tainted governance it is highly unlikely that a traditional non-BJP voter or a person who has not voted for the BJP the last time is going to turn around and vote for the BJP this time. Which is a clear indication of the fact that, if anything, the BJP’s share is only going to go down this time and there’s zero probability of it remaining the same, let alone shoot up.
And the last time, even as they swept the polls, they only managed to get about 31% of the total votes polled across the country which got them to a 282 and 69% of the votes still went to other parties across India. And this time considering the fact that the BJP has literally been wiped out from the southern states, how on earth have these exit polls come up with such top-grossing figures crossing 300?
The BJP had the maximum amount of resources in its hands and an unfathomably prodigious amount of money to have conducted the most intelligent and foolproof of surveys possible, to gauge the mood of the voter. Was Amit Shah then so naive, that his team bent over backwards to stitch up those alliances across the states giving their partners a more than generous amount of seats, had the ‘Modi wave’ been so apparent? It was a discernible understanding even they had, that to form a government barring a coalition was a tuff call this time.
Why Do Exit Polls Fail?
An election exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. Unlike an opinion poll, which asks for whom the voter plans to vote, an exit poll asks for whom the voter actually voted.
The 2019 exit poll, therefore, reminds us of some of the theories that moot the failure of these exercises more often than not. One is the theory of ‘The Silent Voter‘, where the voter fears revealing her choice or would tell the pollsters that she is undecided or likely to vote for the candidate she has in reality rejected. Bradley effect or the Wilder effect is a similar theory concerning observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in some United States government elections.
The biggest miss for exit polls was the 2004 Lok Sabha elections where almost every pollster had predicted a landslide victory for the ruling BJP-led NDA alliance, however, the result toppled with the NDA being reduced to 189 seats, against predictions ranging between 230 and 275 seats. Instead, the Congress-led coalition won 222 seats and formed the government.
Then followed the 2009 general elections, which proved to be another failure, where the polls had suggested an equal contest between the ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the NDA. Instead, the UPA ended up winning 262 seats and the NDA 159.
Another most recent example in case is Australia, where last weekend, 56 different exit polls proved wrong when Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s conservative coalition secured the majority overturning the poll predictions of a Labor Party win.
While these anomalies could damage the accuracy of the exit polls, all that a confused citizen can possibly do is to wait for the 23rd to find out what lies in India’s destiny and who gets to steer the wheels for another five years. However, if the results do not vary by a margin, the menace of fertile populism would have emerged larger than one had ever predicted.