Law Kumar Mishra
With the Bihar Assembly election around the corner, the BJP had initially set a target of winning 225 out of 243 seats for the NDA. But during his two-day visit to the state, Home Minister Amit Shah revised that goal down to 160 on Saturday.
It’s routine in every election season — political leaders make their projections based on information streaming in from various sources.
Back in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections, during the final stretch of campaigning, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi came to address a rally at Gandhi Maidan. Senior Congress leaders of Bihar—Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav, Vidyakar Kavi, Kedarnath Pandey, and Sitaram Kesri—were all present.
As her speech began, tomatoes and eggs started flying in from near the Maurya Hotel at the north-west corner of the Maidan. The stage was set up right in front of the Biscomaun building. Her appeal failed to land; midway through, Indira Gandhi abandoned the speech and headed back to Delhi. The press was told she would speak at Raj Bhavan instead.
This was an era before TV channels, when even newspapers were few.
At Raj Bhavan, in the presence of the state Congress leadership, Indira Gandhi touched upon the unfinished parts of her speech. A journalist asked, “Bihar has 54 Lok Sabha seats. How many will Congress win?”
State Congress president Sitaram Kesri promptly replied, “Forty-eight to fifty.”
Indira Gandhi, who was just reaching for a biscuit from her breakfast plate, flushed with anger, flung the plate toward Kesri on the table and snapped, “After what you saw at Gandhi Maidan, you still claim forty-eight?”
In Odisha, Biju Patnaik had his own way of forecasting. His campaigns would begin at Puri’s Jagannath temple. In the middle of his speech, he’d often fall silent, close his eyes, then declare to his supporters, “I was speaking to Kalia (Lord Jagannath). He said the Janata Party will win 26 seats.”
When the results came and turned out poorly, he gave various explanations in a press conference. A journalist asked, “You must be terribly disappointed?”
Patnaik smiled and said, “You don’t know me. I once contested from seven constituencies at once and lost all of them. Even then, I wasn’t disappointed.”
Someone reminded him, “But you’d said Jagannath himself told you you’d win everywhere. The opposite happened.”
He quipped, “There was some problem in communication. Kalia said six, I heard twenty-six.”
In Chhattisgarh’s first Assembly elections in 2003, Chief Minister Ajit Jogi — himself a former IAS officer and experienced election administrator — was eager to gauge the public mood after voting. He sought feedback from district magistrates. His expectation: Congress would win around 50 of the 90 seats. One collector told him, “We’re getting 8 out of 12 here.”
Most officers were giving overconfident assessments. They’d underestimated the grassroots work of the RSS, which was mobilizing for the BJP. In the end, Congress got only 37 seats.
Meanwhile, in Gujarat, Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel received a far clearer picture—not from bureaucrats, but from vegetable markets and fish bazaars.
He convened a meeting of top officials from Saurashtra and Kutch at the Rajkot state guest house. After the official agenda ended, he went around the room asking each commissioner, IG, and collector for their seat projections. All painted a bright picture for the ruling party.
But Commissioner Ravindra Narayan Bhattacharya gave a completely different assessment. Curious, the CM asked why. The Bengali officer replied, “Every morning, I personally visit Jubilee Bagh’s vegetable market and fish bazaar—no security, just conversations with people.”
When the results came in, the numbers from the markets and bazaars turned out to be the most accurate of all.
