Editorial: Enter light, exit night

The time between polling day and counting day is excruciating for everyone alike, be it a candidate, an analyst, a party spokesperson or a voter. It’s a time when all that can be said about the election has been said and nothing anyone could add can make a difference to the outcome. It’s essentially a conversation between question marks and is fated to end in silence. Exit polls pretend to fill that silence and therefore are a godsend for the media, which has the onerous job of blabbering away through this witching hour.

The exit polls we saw in the media on Saturday ably performed their function of filling up the silence but served no other purpose. Presented with fanfare by partisan anchors, pollsters without exception reiterated the formulation they had kicked off the election with, that Narendra Modi would be Prime Minister for a third term. The numbers we were served, give or take, were essentially those that had been trotted out back in February. Once the 400 paar claim had become stillborn in the first weeks of the campaign, this was the scenario we started with and, if we are to believe the exit polls, that is what we are fated to have.

There is no basis to quarrel with this conjecture, and no point in doing so. The relevance of exit polls is ephemeral, with a full life this time of no more than 60 hours. Even as pointers to subterranean trends, the exit polls of this election offer nothing that had not been foretold by nonpartisan analysts, that there would be a rise in the BJP’s vote share, and perhaps seats, in the South; that there would be an erosion of support for the ruling party in Maharashtra; that poor voters harbour the confounding conundrum of groaning about unemployment, price rise and income inequalities and yet admiring Modi. How are we any the wiser on any of these counts? Despite the cartload of data dumped on us, these riddles remain.

Like tosses of any coin, exit polls come right approximately half of the time. How useful is that? Or even, would they be any more useful if they came true more often? The only people who are finding exit poll data useful this time around are the keyboard warriors on both sides, the right-wingers to crow about it and the left to pick holes in it. To the nonparticipant observer, their warfare on social media is no more than timepass entertainment. One learnt a lot about gaffes galore: Congress winning more seats than it contested in Tamil Nadu, Modiji’s party winning more seats than were on offer, and so on.

Other questions, also pointless, dog these exit polls: Were they kosher? Were they paid for? Were the pollsters singing for their supper? Did the exiting voter tell them the truth? Practitioners will of course claim there’s a method and a science to it, but as any field reporter will tell you, Indian voters are masters of ambiguity. Shanghaied into a TV debate they might thump the lectern for probity in public life but are just as likely to vote for the nastiest crook standing in the election.

Nothing can be gained from the gainsaying of an exit poll. They are essentially entertainment before the revelation. In this long season of ill-humour, they have not even managed to be that.