Shivam Vij

 

Pro-BJP trolls on Twitter keep saying I’ve got no election right. Ever. 

The accusation is made repeatedly to delegitimise my reporting and views on elections. So here are some elections I’ve got right: 

Uttar Pradesh assembly election 2007: “The BSP is hoping not just to form a coalition government but one that lasts five years.” 

Bihar assembly election 2015: “Based on recent travels in Bihar, here is this writer’s admittedly subjective view of why the Grand Alliance’s prospects look better than the NDA’s in Bihar.” https://shivamvij.in/2015/10/12/10-reasons-why-the-grand-alliance-is-doing-better-than-the-nda-in-bihar/

Karnataka assembly elections 2018: “Perhaps there is a hawa — the hawa of a hung assembly. The perception that a hung assembly is likely might just result in one.” 

Gujarat assembly election 2017: Anger against the BJP will not turn into a victory for the Congress. 

Telangana assembly election 2018: “There are two reasons why the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) could overcome the arithmetic advantage of the opposition.”

In the Uttar Pradesh assembly election in 2017, I did a deep dive into Kasganj, the state’s bellwether constituency, and clearly found the BJP was likely to win the bellwether seat.

Despite what bellwether Kasganj said, I wrote like many others there was no wave in UP and I stand by it. There was instead an undercurrent for the BJP, because a wave screams at you. But I did write on 22 Feb 2017: “The lotus could be blooming.”

Most recently, I stuck my neck out on 7 December 2018 to say the BJP was not going to win a single state on 11 December – not even Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh – and I did so even before the exit polls were out.

Only fools try to predict elections and one inevitably falls into the trap. There are very few people, if any, who get all elections right. Politicians and parties themselves get their assessments wrong. So-called scientific opinion and exit polls often get them wrong. And so do I. Most embarrassingly, I felt Mayawati would prevent the BJP from doing too well in Uttar Pradesh in 2014. That is what happens when you don’t travel and don’t talk to voters and theorise from Delhi.

One of my greatest regrets is to not have travelled in the 2014 elections. I was instead sitting on the desk and working my ass off to help a brand new website establish itself.  One of the reporters of this new site felt the BJP would win only 9 seats in Bihar, something that trolls wrongly attribute to me. I am also wrongly given the flak for another reporter who travelled by train from Assam to Kashmir and couldn’t see the Modi wave anywhere!

About the important Phulpur Lok Sabha by-poll in 2018, I wrote the BJP could win. I got it wrong because I didn’t speak to too many upper caste voters, presuming they will vote for the BJP anyway. As it turned out, they didn’t turn out to vote! Nevertheless, here’s the key thing I got right in Phulpur: the BSP’s Dalit voters were happy to vote for the SP.

The BJP and its organised troll armies make your life hell if you suggest the BJP is losing and it wins instead. I know journalists who maintain the default position “BJP is winning” only because they fear the consequences of saying “BJP is losing” when the BJP does win. There is at least one journalist who lost a job under BJP pressure only because she got an election wrong in this manner. Is it really a big deal to express one’s sense of an election to find out one was wrong?

Such is the fear of saying “BJP is losing” and getting it wrong that one news channels had dropped its Bihar 2015 exit poll because the numbers for the BJP looked too bad. That was the only exit poll that turned out to be right! I’m told the BJP’s organised troll armies have folders on liberal journos so whenever a liberal journo says anything against BJP/RSS/Hindutva, the folder is opened and the key words come out. Among them is “you never get an election right”. 

It’s okay to get elections wrong because it’s a pretty damn tough thing to get them right, for many reasons. One reason people don’t appreciate enough that public mood can and does change over the course of the campaign, from phase to phase. Many top editors, especially in news channels, have an easier time getting elections right because they have access to exit poll data collected during phases. The putting out of such data is prohibited by the Election Commission before the last phase.

It is not the reporter’s job to predict elections but it is the media’s job to gauge and reflect public mood around an election. This is incredibly important for democracy for many reasons. It’s important to know why people are voting the way they are. If, for instance, there’s a controversy about elections being rigged, you will need the media’s documented sense of the election as a reference point.