E-Paper
Opinion polls: No winners here
It really depended on how much weight you gave Hindutva, say various pollsters who tried to predict the results of the Gujarat assembly elections.
It really depended on how much weight you gave Hindutva, say various pollsters who tried to predict the results of the Gujarat assembly polls.
If you concluded that communal issues, as opposed to caste or just governance, would win the day, your forecast was more or less right and you gave the BJP over 120 seats. If you didn’t, you were like Prem Chand Palety of the Centre for Forecasting and Research — licking your wounds.
His opinion poll for Outlook magazine was the only one which had awarded victory to the Congress by 20 to 30 seats. Palety said, "I believed that Hindutva would not last as a poll issue, that caste and class equations and governance issues would take over." He awarded most of the 24 per cent "indecisive" voters his pollsters came up with to the Congress. "I presume all these were taken by the Hindutva hate wave," he said.
Perhaps because their polls were taken later, pollsters like Yogendra Yadav and T. Ahluwalia had less uncertain votes and had no doubts that the BJP was going to take the swing votes. Yadav, whose poll for Frontline/NDTV forecast 120 seats for the BJP, said, “Despite the fact that ours was a small survey, we got it more or less right. We concluded the BJP would lead by 15 to 20 per cent. And the post-poll figures were 10 to 11 per cent.”
Palety believes there was a direct correlation between the influence of the riots and the success of the BJP, even claiming that the BJP’s better-than-expected results in Saurashtra were a consequence of communal polarisation. He was harder put to explain why the BJP did poorly in south Gujarat.
Ahluwalia's ORG-MARG polls for India Today were curious because their first poll proved more accurate than the latter. Ahluwalia has said that he had pared down the BJP's tally in the second one because he had expected a stronger anti-incumbency factor. However, this sentiment was not reflected in the figures. But unlike Palety, ORG-MARG gave the bulk of the undecided voters to the BJP. This was not only because of communal polarisation, but also because of the view that the BJP government's successes in providing water would blunt the normal "throw them all out" mood.
