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The
Business of Prophecy The media must ensure that opinion and exit polls are honest exercises
Yet, it can hardly be denied that exit polls do have an effect in staggered elections. It persuades waverers to tilt towards the potential winners and demoralises the ones who are projected as losers. That is unavoidable. What is more under control is the conduct of exit polls. Since there are no foolproof, scientific standards of sampling and projection of results -- every pollster has his own favourite map for converting votes into seats -- the media organisations that sponsor the polls must adopt a measure of self-regulation to separate the professionals from the cowboys. There is scope for honest misjudgment -- polls have gone wrong in relatively homogenous countries like Britain. But extreme care has to be taken to guarantee that the fieldwork was actually undertaken. Since polls have become a part of the campaign rhetoric, there is a tendency for political parties to sponsor spurious exercises to bolster exaggerated claims. It is for the media to distinguish the genuine from the counterfeit. Failure to do so will result in the whole business of polling being discredited. Don't Shoot the Messenger Rather than chase publicity, the priestesses of culture should demystify their world
The tawaifs and devadasis of yore were far more savvy of this situation, as is epitomised in this well-known line of a song by a nautch girl who pleaded, "Hum se nazar kaahe pheri re raja (Why have you turned your eyes from me, O king)." The media is, at best, an ambivalent third -- the woh (the other) -- in this otherwise rather intimate pati-patni (husband-wife) relationship between patron and performer. And then who is to blame for this alienation of the art of the classical dancer from society and, by extension, from the media too? If the connoisseur patron of the past is an extinct species today, the dancers and critics who ruled the roost through the past two or three decades and who are now crying the loudest should resort to some self-assessment. Obviously, while winning for themselves an international niche, they failed to communicate the aesthetics and beauty of the art to the next generation of local audiences and sponsors. As Fitzgerald put it, "Yesterday today's madness did prepare, tomorrow's triumph, sorrow or despair." |
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The Election Commission (EC) has no
reason to feel let down by the Supreme Court decision to overturn its order on the
publication of opinion and exit polls. If anything, the apex court has drawn a line
between what constitutes a legitimate concern for the EC and what is extraneous to its
brief. The job of the EC is to ensure that polls are free and fair. That implies it should
be preoccupied with the modalities of the gigantic democratic exercise -- ensuring proper
electoral rolls, safety of the voters and quick and accurate declaration of results. In
addition, it must ensure that the government machinery is not put to partisan use. It is
not the EC's concern to regulate the debate and it is certainly not its business to
prevent voters from being influenced -- unless it is through liquor, intimidation and
bribery. In fact, elections are precisely about parties trying to influence the
electorate. 
Three weeks after the melodramatic
censure of the media by the country's leading dancers, shrill echoes are still ricocheting
in the pages of newspapers and magazines. But in their rather self-obsessed chagrin, these
apsaras failed to grasp the fact that instead of the media they need to address their plea
to the urban elite that has historically patronised them. The classical arts were never
populist fare and if the dancers want to compete with pop stars and fashion models for
column inches -- as indeed the best of them seem to demand -- it only highlights their
pathetic insecurity vis-a-vis the compulsions of the market. Mass media cannot keep any
art in the limelight if there is little demand for it from readers and viewers. If the
media has turned its gaze away from these performers it reflects the limited interest our
society has in them.