Wanting to know what will happen in any election is as primordial and giddying as wanting to know who is sleeping with whom. The only thing more powerful than that is wanting to tell what will happen in any election - and who is sleeping with whom. Depending on your self-confidence, and sheer ability to turn wild conjectures into sisters of certainty, you hold forth. Till the 4th, in this latest iteration of crystal ballpark-guessing.
Over the last month or so, I have mentally murdered at least a dozen people, some of them dear to me, who have asked me, 'So, what do you think?' My smartass answer has been, 'I don't think Arsenal will win the title.' My more serious, Prannoy Roy-holding-a-phone-in-one-hand-and-mic-in-another reply has been, 'I have no frickin' clue.'
After which I go on to elucidate for 20-odd minutes the tricky laws of causality, supply-demand economics of electoral information consumerism, the Kerala model with Gujarati characteristics, and the appeal of a broader Hindu consolidation among Bengali bhadralok faced with utter redundancy. The enquirer usually slinks away.
But when people ask 'So, what do you think?' it's, of course, an obvious excuse to barf out his/her opinion on 'what will happen'. Which is why grown-up things like TV expert panels and exit polls come so handy. They have the firmness of credibility, like Govinda's decolletage in Aunty No. 1, without being the final word that ends all speculation on result day.
Imagine this model of heightened speculation applied to school exams. Incorporating information about how well one had prepared for an exam, level of difficulty of the questions, and innate faith in one's own aptitude, a student comes home and gives his or her parents a 'reliable' lowdown of how things went. This could turn out to be accurate, inaccurate, or totally off the mark when actual results are out.
In school exams, student proficiency is tested. But in elections, competence of contesting political parties is not tested. It's their popularity. So, conducting a school exam exit poll would mean going around asking teachers - after the exams have been conducted and before the results are announced - how they graded candidates. Understandably, many will invoke Faqruddin Ali Ahmed and not tell the pollsters anything. (Polling agency Axis My India admitted that about 70% of those approached for its exit poll in West Bengal 'declined to participate'.) Others will lie to ensure that some influential parent of some kid doesn't go after them. And others will go along to reveal whom they actually gave high and low marks to. In real exit polls, of course, the participating 'teachers' are the anonymous voters.
Take the split-flap display of West Bengal exit poll numbers released on Wednesday. It's like a mock UN session, where various pollsters with FMCG company-sounding names like Matrize, P-Marq, People's Pulse, JVC, Janmat Polls, and Poll Diary (which could have easily been 'Poll Dairy') pretend to be Election Commission for a few days. Like simulated sex in movies and other formats of light adult entertainment, everyone knows it's not the real thing. But the pleasure in suspending one's disbelief about such 'scientifically captured' information is irresistible.
People see their own garden variety psephological insights (read: slow-marinated opinions) being mirrored, amplified, and confirmed by ten-headed pundits and polls. Exit polls are almost always wildly varying. But that's the function of the poll sabzi market. One bunch is bound to get it right and is hailed as the next Maharishi Bhrigu.
A colleague of mine once wrote a column before the 2019 Lok Sabha election predicting with Fukuyaman confidence that the Congress-led UPA would storm back to power. In that early 'Mo-di! Mo-di!' mausam, his prognosis seemed totally out of whack. But that was beside the point. The strategic point in his analysis was that if UPA somehow did win, he would be remembered till the end of democratic time as the sole person 'who told you so'. If he got it wrong - which he did-well, no one remembers, do they?
Death is inevitable. And yet, what happens in between life and death can be made to be immensely exciting, entertaining, even worthwhile. Tomorrow's results, too, are inevitable. And yet, between the heaven of a successful punt and the hell of voting for the losing side, before every election, you'll keep dancing your speculative limbo dance. Happy resulting!
Over the last month or so, I have mentally murdered at least a dozen people, some of them dear to me, who have asked me, 'So, what do you think?' My smartass answer has been, 'I don't think Arsenal will win the title.' My more serious, Prannoy Roy-holding-a-phone-in-one-hand-and-mic-in-another reply has been, 'I have no frickin' clue.'
After which I go on to elucidate for 20-odd minutes the tricky laws of causality, supply-demand economics of electoral information consumerism, the Kerala model with Gujarati characteristics, and the appeal of a broader Hindu consolidation among Bengali bhadralok faced with utter redundancy. The enquirer usually slinks away.
But when people ask 'So, what do you think?' it's, of course, an obvious excuse to barf out his/her opinion on 'what will happen'. Which is why grown-up things like TV expert panels and exit polls come so handy. They have the firmness of credibility, like Govinda's decolletage in Aunty No. 1, without being the final word that ends all speculation on result day.
Imagine this model of heightened speculation applied to school exams. Incorporating information about how well one had prepared for an exam, level of difficulty of the questions, and innate faith in one's own aptitude, a student comes home and gives his or her parents a 'reliable' lowdown of how things went. This could turn out to be accurate, inaccurate, or totally off the mark when actual results are out.
In school exams, student proficiency is tested. But in elections, competence of contesting political parties is not tested. It's their popularity. So, conducting a school exam exit poll would mean going around asking teachers - after the exams have been conducted and before the results are announced - how they graded candidates. Understandably, many will invoke Faqruddin Ali Ahmed and not tell the pollsters anything. (Polling agency Axis My India admitted that about 70% of those approached for its exit poll in West Bengal 'declined to participate'.) Others will lie to ensure that some influential parent of some kid doesn't go after them. And others will go along to reveal whom they actually gave high and low marks to. In real exit polls, of course, the participating 'teachers' are the anonymous voters.
Take the split-flap display of West Bengal exit poll numbers released on Wednesday. It's like a mock UN session, where various pollsters with FMCG company-sounding names like Matrize, P-Marq, People's Pulse, JVC, Janmat Polls, and Poll Diary (which could have easily been 'Poll Dairy') pretend to be Election Commission for a few days. Like simulated sex in movies and other formats of light adult entertainment, everyone knows it's not the real thing. But the pleasure in suspending one's disbelief about such 'scientifically captured' information is irresistible.
People see their own garden variety psephological insights (read: slow-marinated opinions) being mirrored, amplified, and confirmed by ten-headed pundits and polls. Exit polls are almost always wildly varying. But that's the function of the poll sabzi market. One bunch is bound to get it right and is hailed as the next Maharishi Bhrigu.
A colleague of mine once wrote a column before the 2019 Lok Sabha election predicting with Fukuyaman confidence that the Congress-led UPA would storm back to power. In that early 'Mo-di! Mo-di!' mausam, his prognosis seemed totally out of whack. But that was beside the point. The strategic point in his analysis was that if UPA somehow did win, he would be remembered till the end of democratic time as the sole person 'who told you so'. If he got it wrong - which he did-well, no one remembers, do they?
Death is inevitable. And yet, what happens in between life and death can be made to be immensely exciting, entertaining, even worthwhile. Tomorrow's results, too, are inevitable. And yet, between the heaven of a successful punt and the hell of voting for the losing side, before every election, you'll keep dancing your speculative limbo dance. Happy resulting!
Indrajit Hazra
Editor, Views