26 February 2014, 04:12 PM IST
Is your opinion for sale, without you even knowing about it? It could very well be. Because it seems that a lot of unsuspecting people's opinions are being bought and sold without they themselves being aware of what's going on.
A recent sting operation mounted by a Hindi TV news channel has reportedly uncovered a political opinion poll racket, involving some of the biggest and best known agencies which conduct such polls.
Secretly taped recordings made of the conversations between the channel's staffers posing as party workers and the CEOs of the polling agencies are said to contain proof that many such organisations are prepared to skew their findings, by as much as a crucial 5%, to favour whichever political party is willing to pay for such falsification.
A skewed poll comes at a sizeable premium – invariably payable in cash, and not by cheque, so as to leave behind no tell-tale paper trail – compared with a regular survey.
In one case, a polling agency was asked to come up with opinion poll results showing that a particular party would win 200 assembly seats in UP polls. Subsequently the same agency agreed to do a poll for another party which would show that that party would bag 200 seats in the same election. How could the same agency come up with two such self-contradictory results? By the simple ploy of conducting the second poll under the name of a new polling agency formed overnight for just this purpose.
The sting operation – called Operation Prime Minister – will generate much heated debate in the country's already surcharged pre-election atmosphere. Already AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal has accused the media of being biased towards the BJP by highlighting opinion polls showing the party spearheaded by Narendra Modi to be leading the field, an accusation that has been censored by the Editors' Guild.
The Guild has also taken to task home minister Shinde who threatened to 'crush' the media for supposedly favouring the BJP for the sake of vested interests.
Shinde – who is known for putting both his feet into his mouth – subsequently clarified that the media he had threatened to crush was not the regular media but 'social media' – a clarification which earned him deserved wrath on Twitter, Facebook and other increasingly popular and influential social networking sites.
But the real issue that Operation Prime Minister will bring into focus is the ongoing debate on the legitimacy of political opinion polls in a democracy.
Those against such polls argue that they can act like self-fulfilling prophesies, in that poll prediction can influence undecided voters and cause them to vote for the party that the pollsters favour, since voters might feel that unless they vote for the party predicted to win, they'll only be wasting their votes. This argument is likely to be strengthened by the revelations of Operation Prime Minister, which shows that voter choice can easily be manipulated by money power working behind the scenes.
However, despite the expose of what might be called Pollgate, there is a valid argument to be made in favour of opinion polls under the constitutional rubric of freedom of expression. The freedom to express your opinion is the very essence of democracy. Indeed, democracy is nothing but the meeting point of different – and often widely divergent – opinions. Opinions, and the freedom to express them, are indispensable to a free society.
Maybe there should be an opinion poll on whether or not opinion polls should be banned. Problem is, what if that opinion poll is also rigged?
That's the dilemma presented by Pollgate.
jug.suraiya@timesgroup.com
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