Whenever India loses a must-win cricket match, fans suspect a fix. When vote predictions go horribly askew as they did in the recent Uttar Pradesh polls, the aam admi says, so what else is new, they too must have been rigged to influence outcomes in the remaining phases of voting. I don’t know whether matches and polls are fixed. When we ran predictions during the days I edited India Today, we maintained rigorous secrecy and submitted psephologists Prannoy Roy, Titu Ahluwalia and Dorab Sopariwala to the most rigorous cross examinations. But in today’s atmosphere I am compelled to question the sanctity of poll predictions on, say, a TV channel that is earning crores of rupees in campaign advertising from a political party that features in this exercise. Are not, then, polls similar to paid advertorials?
After being unable to anticipate one of the greatest upsets in India’s electoral history, it is pathetic to watch these failed media outlets using the same psephological data to make intricate analyses of the results. Only, the public isn’t buying. For several reasons.
Media polling has become a handmaiden of the Mandal Syndrome, a part of the Statistical Establishment of media instapundits and politicians that uses the reduction of individuals to statistics and sociological cohorts as an instrument of political and psychological control; the pigeon-holing of people into false and empirically incorrect identities to be converted into vested interests and exploited for patronage.
Any good general will tell you that computers and gadgets do not win wars. The infantry does. The generals who run our media armies and empires have forgotten that the footsoldiers of the press are the work-a-day reporters who slog it out in villages, kasbas, tehsils and mofussil towns, intermingling with naibs, kanungos, tehsildars, sub-divisional magistrates, LIUs (local intelligence units), district collectors, block development officers, deputy superintendents of police – state and local government officers who have a better people pulse-grab than all the citified pollsters leering at us superciliously from behind the comfort of TV screens. These reporters and their skills have been devalued and our press has lost its most valuable eyes and ears.
The Mayawati Movement has punctured the bubble of the Mandal Establishment. It stood statistics on its head. It was all about We the People, and not We the Yadavs or We the Kurmis or We the Brahmins. We the People voted the rascals out. That’s what democracy is all about.
Inderjit Badhwar
Inderjit Badhwaris a veteran journalist, novelist and the former editor of India Today. He has written for various Indian and American newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times and Outlook. Now based in New Delhi, Badhwar heads gfiles, India's first magazine on the Civil Services of India.
