Indian EC's Precaution
The Indian Election Commission has made more of a thought-provoking rather than a conclusive pre-poll announcement of seemingly any exhaustive consequence. It has put a ban not on conducting opinion surveys as such but on publishing the results thereof, from February 14 until February 28 when the crucial mid-term election will have been practically over.
In other words, going by the AP news item that flashed the EC's orders for restriction, the pollsters in India would be able to conduct the opinion polls and publish their results in the run-up to the elections except on or after February 14, the day the hustlings begin.
Two reasons have been cited for the EC's partial but operatively significant ban on opinion polls. In a country as vast as India with pervasive poverty and illiteracy, opinion polls are susceptible to manipulative deflections. The underlying implication here is that cross-sectional random sampling under those unwieldy circumstances can not be relied upon as the mirror-image of broader trends of voter choices in a huge and complex matrix of the Indian electorate. More to the point for the Indian Election Commission is the lurking possibility that such opinion poll results could unfairly influence voters in the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. Most of the recently published survey results suggest that BJP could emerge as a single majority party but not with a sufficient number of seats to form a government on its own. BJP rivals are apprehensive of the snow-balling effect of such an impression circulating; because undecided voters craving for stable government mi-ght just like to help BJP gain a working majority.
What the Indian EC is doing for the sake of fair polls does hold a message for any functioning democracy in the world.
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