Opinion polls and exit polls have always been controversial because a majority of them work as PR agents of one party or another rather than doing any critical analysis. From the 2014 general election in India to the 2016 Presidential election in the United States, the opinions and exit polls have gone through their worst in the last decade, but the industry shamelessly continues to be in business as usual mode. The same was put to display by C-Voter recently, which collaborates with Anandabazar Patrika for surveys, opinion polls, and exit polls, when it declared the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC as the winner in the upcoming polls.
Centre for Voting Opinion and Trends in Election Research, popularly known as C-Voter, conducted an opinion poll and gave a majority to the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC despite the fact that popular sentiment is that BJP will win the 2021 assembly elections with a big margin.
So, what can be the actual reason behind C-Voter’s decision to give the majority to TMC in its exit poll? The obvious reason behind it seems to be the fact that C-Voter conducts the majority of surveys, opinion polls, and exit polls in collaboration with the Anandabazar Patrika (ABP) Group.
The ABP Group has three major arms – The Telegraph (English daily), Anand Bazar Patrika (Bengali language Daily), and a number of TV channels including ABP News (for Hindi audience) and ABP Ananda (Bengali news channel). The majority of the company’s profits comes from business in Bengal, where it fully supports the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC government in its editorial lines.
Anandabazar Patrika and The Telegraph are known for taking a hard anti-Modi stance and work more as a media arm of the TMC government, although the Hindi news channel tries to remain balanced.
A few weeks ago, a Twitter user posted a clipping of the 2 March 1985 edition of The Telegraph newspaper titled, ‘City Cong (I) MP has bogues PhD,’ which suggests that Mamata holds a PhD degree from a fake American University. The tweet went viral on social media but The Telegraph removed the story from its website as it does not want to highlight it because nowadays the group is rooting for the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal.
Till in 1985, Mamata claimed to have obtained a PhD degree from East Georgia University of USA. In 1984 LS polls, walls of Jadavpur had “Dr Mamata Banerjee” written all over them. Later found that no such University existed, subsequently Mamata stopped prefixing “Dr” to her name. pic.twitter.com/e6QEmq4U3q
— নীলসুনীল (@trunills) January 24, 2021
The ABP Group is so scared of Mamata Banerjee that it removed Aveek Sarkar, the then chief editor and partial owner from the top post in the company because he had been actively criticising the TMC government.
The Anandabazar Patrika and The Telegraph criticised the Mamata Banerjee government heavily before the 2016 assembly election. Mamata Banerjee did not like the negative coverage of her government and spoke against it in a public rally. After Mamata Banerjee got re-elected, the newspaper removed the owner and editor-in-chief, Aveek Sarkar, and installed his brother Arup Sarkar to the post to appease the Mamata government.
According to a report by The Hoot, the business of ABP news network in FY16 was on shaky ground. The channel accumulated a loss of Rs 282 crore by March 2016, compared to Rs 213 crore in March 2015. ABP group’s main source of revenue is its print arm- ABP Private Ltd. Anandabazar Patrika and The Telegraph make up nearly 85 per cent of its revenues. In FY16, ABP Private Limited earned standalone revenues of Rs 956.5 crore, a modest 3 percent increase over FY15. The report further stated, “The balance sheet of the print business was in good shape, with a net worth of Rs 468 crore in the end of March 2016.”
The Bengal-based Anandabazar Patrika, which seems to be working as a media arm of the Mamata Banerjee government, is showing an opinion poll where TMC seems to be clearly winning along with its Hindi news channel. Therefore, Mamata Banerjee winning in the opinion poll of C-Voter, despite the ground realities suggesting otherwise, doesn’t come as a surprise.