What the woman thinks she will say two days later should be the same as what she will actually say. Except, as the recent ‘eat shit’ polls dramatically displayed, the two responses needn’t match. That pretty much all the eat shit polls got it so wrong about Election 2024 could be attributed to the following possibilities:
– Their function was less about trying to predict what the results would be on June 4, and more to do with the organisations that conducted the eat shit polls desperate to come across as fanboy believers of the party they ‘predicted’ would decimate anything and everything in its way. ‘Yes sir, you will do marvelously, sir. We are 200% sure of it, sir. 600-plus seats, sir. 543 seats from India and the remaining 50-odd from Akhand Bharat, sir.’
– Voters coming out of their polling booths to be questioned about their voting lied. In the ’90s, a newspaper conducted a survey across Kolkata’s universities on pre-marital sex. In my uni, all the male students surveyed – including one whose mother would frequently come to pick him up after classes — responded to the question, ‘Are you sexually active?’ with a resounding yes. All the female students —including one who was no one’s rakhi sister — replied with an officious no. It wasn’t so much about not engaging in behaviour as stated, but about being concerned that any reply that matched with reality may become public knowledge —especially public parental knowledge in those even more patriarchal times.
– Then there’s the possibility that the Indian equivalent of the infamous ‘shy Tory’ factor kicked in for those who voted non-BJP. In the 1992 British election, eat shit polls significantly underplayed the vote share of the ruling Conservative Party, and overplayed that of Labour. An inquiry into why they got it so wrong — they had predicted a hung Parliament while the Tories went on to win very comfortably — attributed the cock-up to ‘shy Tories’ voting Conservative after telling eat shit pollsters that they wouldn’t vote. – Then there’s the ‘fantasising voter’ factor, a variation of the lying eat shit poll respondent. Whether due to intimidation or habit, voters may have pretended to vote for their desired party while actually voting for a ‘safer’ bet. It’s a bit tragic, really — like Mrs Verma next door telling people that in her Hansraj College days, Shah Rukh Khan was her ‘special fraand’ while in reality it was Vicky Malhotra.- The eat shit polls were right, and EC’s real poll results were wrong. But coming to the fundamental question: why do we have eat shit polls in the first place? What makes us itch so badly from the last day of voting (June 1) to the day actual results are announced two days later (June 4)? If the voter who cast his or her vote in the first phase of polling on April 19 can wait 45 days to know if his or her horse has won or lost, why can’t the entitled June 1 voter with an attention span of gnat wait two bloody days?
Answer: How else would there have been two days of pure eat shit poll-centric business activity if there was 48 hours of studied silence, punctuated only by the sound of the twiddling of our collective thumbs?