BHARAT BALLOT 09: THE PERILS OF POLLING

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 NEW DELHI 000604 SENSITIVE SIPDIS DEPARTMENT FOR SCA/INS E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV PREL PINR KDEM IN SUBJECT: BHARAT BALLOT 09: THE PERILS OF POLLING REF: NEW DELHI 1303 NEW DELHI 00000604 001.3 OF 003 ¶1. (SBU) Summary: As India heads into the 2009 Lok Sabha (Lower House of Parliament) elections in April/May, Indian media outlets will release a torrent of election polls and public opinion surveys. In examining these polls, we will keep in mind that election polling in India is a notoriously unreliable exercise. It suffers from a variety of ailments, from political biases of the polling agencies and news outlets to operational problems stemming from India's mammoth electorate and complex demographics. The widespread lack of technology and poor infrastructure makes accurate polling an immensely labor intensive, expensive, and often dubious process. This cable explores some of the reasons why polling in India is so problematic. End Summary. Local Issues and Regional Parties Complicate Polling - - - ¶2. (U) India has rarely demonstrated a pan-Indian, national voting pattern, except when a single hot-button and emotive issue develops momentum, such as in the sympathy vote following the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi. In general, local issues and identity politics have tended to decide past elections. While a few national issues such as inflation, anti-incumbency and security are perpetually issues of concern, these issues have tended to play a secondary roll. ¶3. (U) Each region has its own idiosyncratic grouping of national and regional political parties. The Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the two principal national parties, exert influence nationwide, but their power has waned in recent decades in favor of regional parties. These parties generally represent certain caste, linguistic, ethnic or class groups, which are often themselves unique to a particular region. This overwhelming emphasis on local politics, local issues and local parties, has given each of the 543 Indian Parliamentary constituencies its own distinctive political color. ¶4. (U) National polling is most accurate when a survey sample can serve as a statistically meaningful representation of the national whole. India's constituencies are so diverse and cast their votes for such different reasons, that a proper sample is incredibly difficult to construct, given problems in properly weighing electorates. To account for the diversity, polls must be taken in most - if not all - of the 543 constituencies. This is both extremely expensive and generally unworkable. Mammoth, Underdeveloped Constituencies Require Door To Door Surveys - - - ¶5. (U) Constituencies in India are numerically huge (most have over a million people) and often hard to access. And despite India's rapidly growing telecommunication and internet industries, the vast majority of Indians live without phone or internet access. A recent study finds that five percent of Indians have internet access, and less than ten percent own a phone in rural areas. ¶6. (U) The lack of infrastructure has made face-to-face, door-to-door surveys the preferred method of polling. Agencies send data collectors to physically survey schools and universities, village and city halls, bazaars and town courtyards, and schools and universities. Unsurprisingly, it is not the most efficient or cost-effective way to do polling. To get a meaningful number of interviews, in a majority of constituencies, an agency would need to employ an army of pollsters. In a meeting with PolOff, Narashimha Rao, NEW DELHI 00000604 002.3 OF 003 a prominent former pollster and current BJP advisor, postulated that "more than a hundred people for each of the 543 constituencies would be needed to do anything resembling an accurate poll." ¶7. (U) No single polling agency in India has the manpower or the funds to do meaningful door-to-door polling in a majority of constituencies. Polling agencies are forced to extrapolate data from one constituency to another; or, in some cases, to extrapolate data from a few constituencies to forecast an entire state. Agencies examine the socio-economic composition of a constituency, look at the castes and religious communities represented, and use the data from that area to calculate and predict the results for another location with similar demographics. Again, this process distorts the precision of the results. Since each area has its own distinctive set of issues and parties, extrapolation of data based exclusively on caste or socio-economic considerations is bound to be flawed. Media Outlets and Polling Groups Biases - - - ¶8. (SBU) An additional source of poll unreliability stems from the relationship between the political parties and the polling agencies and media outlets. Indian news outlets - which ultimately sponsor the polls - tend to be ideologically slanted. Many have long-standing historical ties to political parties. A number of large, national dailies, such as the 'Hindu,' 'Aaj Tak,' and the 'Times of India,' are either owned or operated by political party heavyweights. The Hindustan Times, for instance, was founded by long-time Congress Party supporters, the Birla family. K.K. Birla and G.D. Birla, who at different times owned and edited the paper, have both served as Congress Party MPs and provided a large amount of funding for the party. The 'Pioneer' newspaper, another influential daily, is today partly-owned and edited by a standing MP of the BJP, Chandan Mitra. This political connection has at times colored the polls the papers release. ¶9. (SBU) News outlets do not conduct the pre-election surveys they publish. Instead, they contract private polling agencies to do the polling for them. Some of these companies, like C-Voter and MARG, are exclusively election polling groups. Most, however, are conventional commercial marketing research firms. These commercial marketing agencies appear not to be ideologically tied. Yet, because they are contracted by papers which have political links and are better disposed to certain parties, there is explicit or implicit pressure on polling agencies to skew their results in favor of the sponsor's party of choice. Agencies want to continue their contracts into the future and the papers want to have results that promote their party. As a result, agencies at times choose to ignore certain data, or to extrapolate statistics in a way sympathetic to the sponsor's chosen party. Pollster Narashimha Rao stressed that the adjustment tends not to be so dramatic that the prejudice is glaring, but a gain or loss of a few percentage points here or there in favor of one party or another is not rare. This manipulation is more likely to occur when a race is close. ¶10. (SBU) Narasimha Rao does not believe the gambling community -- illegal but huge and well organized in India -- provides a more accurate alternative to opinion polls in predicting election results. Odds are available on Indian elections and there is significant bettering, according to sources. But in Rao's experience, gambling is as vulnerable to error, corruption and manipulation as the opinion polls. Rao offered the 2007 Gujarat assembly elections as an example. In the three or four days prior to the vote, the odds moved sharply towards a sweeping Congress Party victory NEW DELHI 00000604 003.3 OF 003 in the state. Gamblers threw enormous amounts of money on a Congress win. The bookies (or some other manipulators of the betting odds) cleaned up when Narendra Modi and the BJP ultimately came up on top with a comfortable margin. That's Actually None of Your Business, Shukriya - - - ¶11. (U) Adding to the problem, the Indian voter is in general tight-lipped with his or her responses to pollsters. This has even been the case in more innocuous surveying like census data collection. Pollsters report that many voters do not think that polls or surveys are innocent, and that their responses to election polling will come back to harm them through retribution by the one party or another. Many opt instead to refuse to answer the questions, others just offer up an answer they think the pollster would like to hear. There is also an increasingly reluctance, especially among more educated urban voters, to admit that they will be voting on the basis of what they perceive as politically incorrect grounds such as caste or religion. The Polls Stumbled Horribly in 2004 - - - ¶12. (SBU) The lead up to 2004 Lok Sabha election highlights the unreliability of national polling in India. Nearly all pre-election polls suggested a robust BJP/NDA victory. Post reported in April 2004 (Reftel) "Six weeks before the first round of parliamentary elections, every poll taken to date predicts that the BJP will return to power." The polling agencies and media outlets were left red-faced when the results showed a Congress Party upset. So while polling organizations may claim to employ the most sophisticated statistical modeling tools available, history has proven it unwise to take Indian polling results too seriously. ¶13. Comment: Despite the many shortcomings of election polling in India, the enterprise is not without its value. Opinion surveys, for instance, provide valuable insight and seem to be less prone to error. Furthermore, even in the face of the unanticipated Congress Party victory in the 2004 elections, pre-election polls, when taken in aggregate, do actually provide some valuable insight. If all polls, taken by all the polling agencies, all point in the same direction by a large margin, we can feel fairly confident that the findings are sound. Given India's tendency to keep politics local, this perception holds especially true with polls conducted on a local scale. WHITE