The foul-mouthed Mamata Didi has gone to the extent of terming the exit polls ," plan to manipulate or replace thousands of EVMs through this gossip". For N Chandrababu Naidu, once in NDA and now straying in opposition. TCP leader and AP chief minister," Exit polls have proved to be incorrect and far from ground reality in many instances". Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, otherwise more sensible among contemporary breed, believes "exit polls are all wrong". He quoted Australia whers last weekend, 56 different exit polls proved wrong. However, Jammu & Kashmir NC leader and ex-chief minister, Omar Abdullah, also a proct of dynastic politics, was more sensible saying, "Every single exit poll can’t be wrong!
Interestingly, the same leaders (chiefly Cong) have willingly and gladly accepted the exits polls of Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh assembly elections as these favored them. Then BJP leaders were not readily accepting the exit polls.
Exit polls are not the final results and these are just estimations and projections of possible outcome of voting trend. World over, many time they proved wrong. Recently, pollsters were proved wrong in Australia as for over two years, polls had put the left-leaning Labor party ahead of the conservative Coalition and were consistently predicting a Labor win. Of the 16 polls held since the election was called last month, all went in favour of the Labor Party. But final results proved otherwise and labor party again lost to Liberal-led coalition. Frustrated over failure of pollsters,some politicians and commentators called for scrapping of opinion polls. ABC’s election analyst Antony Green called it “a bit of a spectacular failure of opinion polling”.
Not only Australian, pollsters went totally wrong in U.S in 2016 presidential elections. All pollster were dead sure of Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton victory, but Republican and real estate mogul defied pollsters to defeat Clinton.
Last year Israel's pollsters were left red-faced after re-election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s election victory. Most of the pollsters were predicting Netanyahu’s defeat. Later pollsters admitted they were "blindsided by reticent rightist voters and unwittingly prodded waverers to back the incumbent".
Such aberrations are there and may give little hope for opposition parties in India. But, it is highly unlikely that Indian pollsters could have been blindsided by Right wing Indian voters. May 23 will throw light on this.
But, rule of fair game is that you should accept the umpire decision. Accept the exist polls as they are and let the May 23 final outcome decide who is right and who is wrong/
(Chander Sharma )