How a tea-stall survey trumped exit polls…(and more)

Four articles re. the UP elections. CAUTION: LONG POST.

While catching up on the post-election analysis of UP elections, I picked up this interesting article by Vidya Subrahmaniam: “Travelling in U.P. at election time”

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“…on the long road from Lucknow to Gorakhpur — through Amethi-Rae Bareli, Allahabad, Varanasi, Azamgarh, Mau, and Ghazipur — it is impossible not to detect the undercurrent of support for the Bahujan Samaj Party. The BSP is in the race in almost every seat in this region and the contest is invariably pitched in terms of “BSP versus other parties.”

…Stop at a village square for tea and the chances are you will hear one of two things: “Kaante ka takkar hai (it is a fierce fight)” and “Sabhi maidan mein hai (everybody is in the race).” Ask your hosts to name the big two in the fight and the answer will be the BSP and another party. Ask them who makes the best Chief Minister, and they will say Ms. Mayawati. Ask them why and they will say nobody runs the Government like she does. Ask them if there is an issue in the election and they will say “goondagardi (rampant thuggery).” Ask them who in their opinion can end the menace, and they will say Ms. Mayawati.

Quiz them on the BSP’s overtures to other caste groups and they will say the experiment has made an impact, and most tellingly on Brahmins. And finally the admission: “Haan, baspa ka zor hai (Yes, there is a groundswell of support for the BSP).”

Does the gathering at a tea stall make for a scientific sample? Obviously not but it can point to the larger mood, especially if the sampling is done at frequent intervals and it is a mix of social groups that you talk to.…But the trek is worth the effort for the reason that villagers rarely mislead. My rough and ready findings: The Brahmin interest in the BSP is obvious. …With each day of travel, the impression gains strength and it is evident that the various bhaichara (caste amity) committees of the BSP have penetrated social blocs thus far out of bounds for the party.

Indeed, the BSP’s `Brahmin jodo abhiyan’ may be the most talked about of its social engineering projects but less visible, and working almost silently on the ground, are a network of party commanders, each on a mission to integrate a particular caste group — `Pal bhaichara samiti,’ `Rajbar bhaichara samiti,’ `Nishad bhaichara samiti,’ and so on.

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…At her election rallies, the BSP chief proudly enumerates the caste and denominational details of her candidates: 139 from the forward castes, 110 from the OBCs, 93 from the Scheduled Castes, and 61 Muslims. 

The earlier bitterness towards the manuwadi castes seems truly a thing of the past.

Instead, the emphasis is on sarvajan (all caste groups) samaj. “Brahman shank bajayega, haathi aage jayega (the Brahmin will blow the conch, the elephant will advance)” sing her followers at her egging. …in the 2002 Assembly election, the BSP won 98 seats for a vote share of 23.06 per cent. The SP won 143 seats for a vote share of 25.37 per cent. With its plus, plus (Brahmins, Nishads, Pals, and so on) votes in 2007, the BSP’s vote share should touch 28 per cent. Which makes for 180 seats if not more.Over then to May 11, the day the ballots are counted.

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Note that the article was written on 3rd May, several days before most exit polls. I also came across Sudheendra Kulkarni’s well-written piece analysing the BJP’s debacle in UP polls: “How can BJP govern India minus Muslims?”

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…The day after the outcome of the recently concluded Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections was known, Organiser…came out with its instant analysis of why the Bharatiya Janata Party performed abysmally.Its editor, R Balashankar, wrote: “The BJP lost steam midway. Its campaign got stuck between half-hearted Hindutva and development governance (sic)… An aggressive Hindutva approach would have ensured greater success. But the party was extremely restrained.”

…(this)…flies in the face of facts as well as objective analysis. What exactly should the BJP have done by way of an “aggressive Hindutva approach”, which, according to Organiser’s learned editor, would have guaranteed “greater success”?

Should it have brought out more anti-Muslim CDs of the kind that got the party into trouble and ultimately forced it to accept the Election Commission’s diktat to publicly condemn it?The irony of the CD episode is that, even after the party had quickly “disowned” it, those who were instrumental in producing it were proudly claiming, “Our party is going to benefit from it.” Far from benefiting the BJP in any way, the misadventure only served to further antagonise Muslims.

…There is a depressing deja vu in all this. On the day of counting in the 2004 parliamentary elections, when the trends were showing that the NDA was on its way out, a spokesman of the RSS gave his instantaneous judgement to the waiting media: “The BJP has lost because it abandoned Hindutva.” To this day, no leader in the RSS or the BJP has cogently explained what this castigation meant in concrete terms. Rigorous public debate on ideological issues has never been the forte of the Sangh Parivar. However, its judgement cannot go uncontested this time around.

…The reasons for the party’s alarmingly poor performance lie elsewhere. …the BJP failed to project itself as a credible and committed alternative. Its state leadership was internally divided, a handicap made worse by the fact its chief ministerial candidate could not match Mayawati’s ‘strong leader’ appeal. …While wooing brahmins and ‘upper’ castes, the BSP supremo did not alienate Muslims. On the contrary, Mayawati scrupulously tried to expand her base among Muslims, and was handsomely rewarded for her efforts.

…This poses many uncomfortable questions for the BJP and the RSS. If Mayawati’s triumphant and praiseworthy concept of Sarvajan Samaj (all-inclusive society) has a place for Muslims, why is the BJP so queasy about accommodating Muslims in its own electoral strategy? Why didn’t the BJP field a single Muslim candidate in any of the 403 assembly constituencies in a state where Muslims constitute 18.5 per cent of the population?

The party indeed has some justification in criticising its political opponents for Muslim “appeasement”, but is it practicing its own precept — namely, “Justice for All” — when it neither takes up any just issues of Indian Muslims nor feels morally and ideologically obliged to give due democratic representation to such a huge section of Indian society?
 
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Another analysis on IBN Live by Yogendra Yadav & Sanjay Kumar: “Is BJP going the Cong way in UP?”  (although the accompanying picture is of Kerala elections!)

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“…A serious analysis of the BJP’s debacle in UP must begin by noting what went right, or seemed to go right, with the party in this election.…In terms of seats and vote share, this was the worst performance of the BJP since the beginning of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, the first time it fell below the 20 per cent threshold.

Effectively, it was a loss of 3.2 percentage points compared to an indifferent performance in 2002. The losses were not concentrated in some regions or pockets: the party lost substantial votes and seats all over the state…

That is why it is time to ask a big question that the BJP must confront sooner or later:…is the BJP facing the possibility of a terminal decline in UP?

…It is a question worth asking, for parties run the risk of slipping into terminal decline when they miss their ‘turn’ in the incumbency cycle, when they perform badly in an election that was supposed to herald their revival and when the electoral ground begins to change. This is exactly what has happened to the BJP.

This election provides evidence that the BJP may be losing two key elements responsible for its rise to power. (1) The Ramjanmab hoomi movement (which) is no longer salient in UP and (2) …its social coalition of the upper caste and non-yadav OBCs… has fractured…because of the substantial erosion of the OBC vote.

…Thus the BJP faces a challenge of the kind the Congress has faced in UP in the 1990s: its issue has lost salience, its leaders have lost credibility and its challengers are walking away with different slices of its Hindu rainbow. Such challenges are not impossible to respond to, but they cannot be fixed by routine political management.

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and finally, I should add some excerpts from fellow blogger Vinaya Singh’s excellent analysis:

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“…I would like to make a point here that BSP wave is not built in couple of years but this movement was running since more than 100 years and it has only materialized this year.  …average voting in UP was about 45%, out of which 45-55% were franchised …BSP got 32% of total franchised (45-55%) votes of people of underprivileged category.

…Media emphasize that this was an unexpected result. Yes, it was an unexpected result, but not because of social engineering as most of the media elaborate, but because of more than 100 years of movement. A social engineering can’t work in couple of months and that is too just before the elections.

…This is the result of pure polarization of votes of unprivileged category.There is need to mobilize the 55% of sleeping voters which didn’t vote. If 80-90% of voters would have voted, the situations could have been something else.

… let us analyze the scenario, in case if 70% (possible assumption) of voters would have voted in this election. The results show that there were about 271 seats out of 402 where the candidates won the election with the margin less than 10,000 votes. There were only131 seats where the difference of votes was more than 10,000.

Thus, there are about two third of seats where the candidates were declared elected by the margin of 1.5% of total casted votes.

Let us discuss the scenario here:

(1) Constituency Name: C

(2) Elected candidate’s name: E

(3) Runner-up’s name: R

(4) Number of voters in C: 4,000 (assume)

(5) Number of voters casted their votes in C: 1800 (45% of (4))

(6) The voter could have been mobilized to vote in C: 1000 (assume 25% of (4) to make 70% voting target)

(7) Margin of votes with which E won in C: 27 (1.5% of (5). As per the reports, the difference of votes between winner and runner-up was 1.5% in most of the cases)

(8) Number of votes casted by underprivileged category in C: 810 (45% of (5))

(9) Number of polarized votes to BSP in C: 260 (32% of (8))(10) The votes which are divided in BSP and others in C: 1540 ((5) – (9))

So, from the above analysis, we can say that E won the  election in C by 27 votes.

Now let us see what happens, if additional 1000 (25% more of Total number voters in C) sleeping voters would have franchised their votes. Since most of the voters of underprivileged category have already voted in C, so, there could have been leftovers of only 5-10% of them who could have not voted in this election.

Based on statistics collected from various reports, it is possible to derive that the most chunks of the sleeping voters would have gone to other parties rather than the BSP in C. Therefore, I assume here that the BSP would have got about 20% additional votes of sleeping voters.

(11) BSP’s additional votes in C: 200 (20% of (6). Assume all the voters of underprivileged category who missed to vote would vote  to BSP with additional 10% from the other category.)

(12) BSP’s lead would have been in C: 227 ((11) + (7))

(13) Number of votes which would have been divided in others in C: 800 ((6)-(11))Since we have three major parties (SP, BJP and Congress) to share the bulk of the sleeping votes, let us divide the number in (13) by 3. Thus each one will get additional 266 votes.

If we compare this number with the number in (12), it is clear that the runner-up would have got 39 votes more than the winner and in that case the runner-up would have won the contest.

The margin of votes for winning in this case would have been 1.4% ([39/ {(5) + (6)}] x100).The conclusion of this analysis is that the BSP won a large number of seats with very small margins not because of social engineering but because of polarization of votes of underprivileged category and most of the visionary of good governance didn’t take part in franchising their votes.

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