Nivedita Menon: The “massive mandate” of 2019 and the Role of the Election Commission
This is the elephant
in the room, is it not? Was this “massive mandate” of the Lok Sabha elections
2019, the result of a free and fair election? Should we continue to discuss
this outcome – the scale of the BJP victory, the numbers of seats, the margins
by which seats were won – through political analysis alone? Rather, has not
political analysis of the election become inevitably deeply influenced by these
margins and these numbers of seats, by the scale of the sweep? In other
words, the analysis is of necessity post facto, assuming that these
seats have actually been won fairly, and therefore represent the views of the
electorate.
I found very revealing
a story by two Reuters journalists who covered rural North India
extensively. Mayank Bhardwaj and Rajendra Jadhav ruminate on how they
could have gone so wrong in assessing the mood of the electorate. Although they
say they never thought Modi would lose this election, it looked certain that he
would return with a reduced majority. There was nothing they heard and
observed on the ground that suggested the actual outcome. They conclude that
next time they will travel even more, push their respondents harder, “be more aware of our limitations.”
Many seasoned journalists have the same sense of shock. But what if they were not wrong after all?
The day before results
were announced, BJP told opposition parties to“accept
defeat with grace”, after exit polls predicted a BJP sweep. Exit poll
predictions were treated as the results themselves. Did the BJP leadership know
something we don’t? After Phase 6 of the
elections, Amit Shah declared that after traveling across the country and
gauging the mood, he was confident the party would cross the 300 mark. And so it did, by 3 seats.
One did wonder at this mood that he gauged so accurately, given empty seats at
rallies for Adityanath, Modi, and Shah in Gujarat, UP,
Not to mention what
preceded these elections – massive farmers’ agitations across the
country, militant university campuses, country-wide demonstrations against
lynch culture… But Amit Shah knew
almost to the number the seats his party would get. Even the RSS, with its
massive ground-level networks, had no idea of what was to come, as was evident
from Ram
Madhav’s statement as late as May 7, saying the BJP will need allies
to form government. (Or this could be characteristic Sanghi doublespeak, who
knows.) Let us begin this
story then, with the infamous exit polls.
The dubious role of
exit polls: The chances were very
high that BJP would have emerged as the single largest party, and formed
government with its allies in an NDA formation. Many serious political analysts expected this as a
best case scenario both from the point of view of BJP, as well as its
opponents... read more:
see also
A whiff of evil
Minister Who Got The Loudest Cheers Has A Murky Past
Samjhauta Express blast case verdict: ‘Who will answer for death of my five children?’
Peace as a punctuation mark in eternal war
A Brief History of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan (SVA)
