Voters brace for tough election

INDIA: NO SURPRISES EXPECTED IN MAY POLLS

In 2014, only one firm predicted the BJP would win an outright majority.

Thousands of candidates, hundreds of parties, endless combinations of possible coalitions – spare a thought for India’s pollsters, tasked with making sense of the country’s fiendishly complicated politics ahead of a general election due by May.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a surprise majority in 2014. Until last year, many predicted a similar result.

But amid rising anger over unemployment and a fall in rural incomes, the BJP lost key state elections in December, making this contest more closely fought than first expected.

That means surveys conducted on behalf of newspapers and TV channels will be scrutinised. Some of India’s top pollsters however, said current surveys could be wide of the mark until the parties finalise alliances, which could be as late as April – and even then, there are challenges.

“In India there are certain relationships between caste, religion and allegiance,” said VK Bajaj, Today’s Chanakya, the only polling firm to predict the BJP would win an outright majority in 2014.

Opinion polls grew in popularity in India in the ’90s, after economic liberalisation saw a boom in privately owned newspapers and TV channels, all demanding their own surveys.

In 1998 and 1999, the polls predicted the share of seats for the BJP-led coalition, according to data collected by Praveen Rai, an analyst who has tracked opinion polls in India for more than 15 years at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, which also runs its own surveys.

But in the last three elections, polls have been wide of the mark. In 2004 and 2009 the victorious Congress alliance was underestimated, while in 2014 only Bajaj’s firm predicted the BJP would win an outright majority.

Many polls are conducted face-toface, and collecting representative samples can be hard in a country that still has several armed separatist movements and tribal communities unused to opinion polling.

When CNX, one of India’s largest polling companies, conducts fieldwork in rural Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand – states with large tribal populations – it often finds many are unfamiliar with the concept of opinion polls.

Many unfamiliar with concept of opinion polls.