Sense and Sorabjee

As that droll writer of children’s tales, Lewis Carroll, once observed, “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.” It required the sense of Attorney General Soli Sorabjee to put a firm end to all last week’s chatter about banning opinion and exit polls through the means of an ordinance. Sorabjee observed, as indeed had this newspaper and several others, that a ban on opinion and exit polls would be constitutionally untenable, and bringing an ordinance to ensure such a ban would be tantamount to heaping insult upon injury. The fact that there was political consensus for such a move cannot be viewed as an imprimatur of its legal validity. Sorabjee’s informed intervention may ensure that the country is not shackled by such gag laws — now and in the future — which could push it into the company of such leading practitioners of democracy as North Korea and China.

Hopefully, the controversy is now behind us but there are aspects of the debate that may be useful to dwell upon in our attempts to refine democratic theory and practice. For one, it has helped focus on an important by-product of a professionally conducted opinion poll and that is the deeper insights into the electoral process that it offers. This benefits not just parties but voters, as well. Such opinion polls could have the cumulative effect of making elections, which at present involve a staggering 670 million voters across the country, a more participative affair.

What did also get highlighted in the general discussion were the ways in which such opinion and exit polls need to be done. Everybody agrees that opinion polls conducted for partisan ends — to create a winning aura for a particular party or grouping, or to merely make a fast buck out of the tremendous public interest in elections — are not helpful and require to be weeded out. In other words, the suggestion that the sample size and methodology used in an opinion or exit poll is made public, is worthy of consideration. It would help enhance its transparency. Similarly, measures to regulate these opinion and exit polls could be useful. For instance, there are suggestions that findings of an opinion poll should not be publicised on the eve of an election and that the results of exit polls must not appear until the last phase of the election is over. However, given that the Election Commission does not have the statutory authority to enforce such measures, they should be left as “best practices” that a responsible media would adopt for the sake of its own credibility. Remember, the model code is a purely voluntary prescription, and it still works.