R Krishna Das
If celebration has started in the Trinamool Congress headquarters based on exit poll outcome, hold on! The election results forecast in the state cannot be blindly trusted
The exit poll results for Bengal were announced soon after the final and eighth phase of voting concluded on Thursday (April 29). Majority said Trinamool was easily coming back to power with a majority or would have an edge over the BJP that posed a serious challenge to Mamata Banerjee’s party.
While a section has started celebrating BJP’s “defeat” in Bengal based on the exit poll, political pundits and psephologists in Bengal contest with causes. “The foremost reason for the distrust is that it is a daunting task to conduct such exit polls in Bengal because the voters here always live in an atmosphere of fear and hence an unbiased opinion can never be expected from them,” said one of the experts.
A senior Kolkata-based journalist believed that the tradition had been going in Bengal for a long time. Earlier, the terror of the Communist Party cadre, especially in the rural areas, was so intensified that if people had to go to the police station to write the report of a theft case, they had to get the consent of the local leader. People dared to speak against the Communist party cadre for decades in Bengal.
The ruling Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress continued with the tradition. Many “Bahubali” leaders of the Communist Party are now with Mamata. Experts said that the fear of retaliation had terrorised the voters and they would never express an unbiased view. One cannot imagine that people in Bengal could ever say whom they had voted for that too in front of any stranger.
Voting in all the eight phases, and especially in the last three phases, was marred by violence and attempts were allegedly made by the Trinamool cadre to rig the elections. But it was foiled due to the heavy presence of central security forces. The intense anti-incumbency and widespread anger against the Mamata Banerjee government has put the BJP in a strong position and the party received an impressive grassroots support.
The presence of security forces instilled confidence in the people and they came out in large numbers to vote. The high turnout percentage could be a sign that people who did not want to vote due to Trinamool terror marched out and exercised their franchise to elect the representative of their choice.
It is probably too early to read the minds of silent voters. Especially when Mamata Banerjee herself has threatened that she will teach her opponents “lessons” after the central security forces leave the state.
The exit poll in Bengal has never been authentic on most occasions. If the anti-BJP camps are in a jubilant mood, they have to wait till May 2. The exit poll of 2019 Lok Sabha elections had predicted five seats for the BJP but it bagged almost four times of it by the time final results were out.
