What does Bellwether Kasganj, Western UP tell us about the electoral race?
Wednesday, February 08, 2017
This post is meant
more for serious psephologist enthusiasts rather than the casual reader. It
provides an introduction to “bellwether” constituencies besides illustrate the
role old style journalistic coverage of elections serves as an alternate to
opinion & exit polls.
Bellwether
Constituencies
We usually think of sheep more as followers
than leaders, but in a flock one sheep must lead the way. A wether or male
sheep (usually castrated) leads the flock, usually bearing a bell. ... This
animal was called the bellwether, a word formed by a combination of bell and
wether.
How bellwether constituencies became used by
psephology as a technique could be traced to on the day of the 1970 general
election, when the BBC sent a team of reporters to Gravesend. Their task was to
carry out what the BBC’s election anchor Cliff Michelmore trumpeted as
“something entirely new”: an exit poll, based on the premise that “if you know
how Gravesend votes, you know how the nation votes”. After quizzing people as
they left polling stations, the team concluded that Gravesend constituency was
about to elect a Conservative MP, and that Britain was therefore set for a Tory
government – something the national opinion polls had suggested was not likely
to happen. But the exit poll was spot on. It was the first time that the notion
of a “bellwether” constituency had been put to a psephological test.
In this election cycle we have seen at least two
specific instances of “bellwether” techniques being bandied about. The first
was by Dr Prannoy Roy of NDTV who identified Bassi Pathana in Punjab to extrapolate AAP winning
(Read: HERE,
HERE
& HERE)
and Shivam Vij, Deputy Editor of HuffPo-India who selected Kasganj as a bellwether of UP, particularly Western UP
that goes to polls this Saturday. This blog is of the opinion that Dr Roy had
(deliberately?) misapplied the concept of bellwether while we feel Shivam stuck
to textbook research methodology. On March 11th, these opinions of
the blog would be either validated or falsified by the results announced.
Quantitative vs Qualitative Predictions
Here is one commenter on the failure of
opinion & exit polls in the recent US Presidential Elections: “While there
are many lessons to take away from the election of Donald Trump, one is that
numbers can lie. Math and stats and data points don’t always tell it like it
is. Sometimes you need interpretative answers rather than the “correct” answer.
Sometimes the guy spouting words and using simple addition has a keener sense
of the forces that govern our society than the one using statistical analysis.”
Well one such old style journalist is Shivam Vij who has an instinctive nose to
feel the people’s pulse. We saw this evidence clearly during his coverage of
the Bihar polls. And now he is in UP on the election trail. We reproduce his two piece article. Keeping to balance-reporting,
Shivam may not categorically call out the winner. But if you have the knack of reading
between the lines, you may pick up just enough insights to make more sense of
the flashy numbers pollsters bombard us with.
In
Kasganj, the election 'hawa' became clear the moment it became clear who the
candidates are.
The
Bhartiya Janata Party's candidate is a Lodh, Devendra Singh Rajput. The Bahujan
Samaj Party's candidate is Ajay Chaturvedi, a Brahmin. The Samajwadi Party
candidate is a Muslim, Hasrat Ullah Sherwani.
If
you ask them, they will all say they are getting votes from all castes and communities.
"Saaton jatiyon ka
vote mil raha hain," is a refrain you hear often, the
metaphorical reference to seven castes a reminder that this is a mathematical
exercise.
Voters
seem to be aware of these caste equations--called samikaran--and it is after knowing the samikaran that they
determine who the 'hawa' is with. Such is the Lodh domination of this
seat--most MLAs in its history have been Lodh--that caste's domination has
assumed a larger-than-life image for voters. "Lodh's are 65%," says a
Yadav voter. "There are 1 lakh Lodh voters," says a Muslim barber.
Both are wrong, because every Lodh voter knows the exact figure of 62,000.
These numbers overwhelm public conversations around the election.
Read
the full article: HERE
It
is often said that Mayawati's voters are 'silent'. It's not true. They were
never silent. If you asked them, the Dalits, they'd tell you. But they are seen
as being 'silent' because they are not loud.
Upper
castes are found dominating the highway tea stalls and the village square,
wearing their politics on their sleeve, aggressively telling anyone and
everyone who they should vote for. One advantage of having upper castes on your
side is that they help build the election 'hawa' with the disproportionately
large share in the public sphere.
This
election, there is a new silent voter in UP: the upper caste. Their 'silence'
is on account of twin displeasure, demonetisation and the pre-dominance that
OBCs have been given in ticket distribution. The latter is not a new problem in
the BJP. The party's inability to keep together its upper caste and OBCs
leaders led to its decline in the late '90s.
In Kasganj, a bellwether seat that has elected the MLA of the winning
party in every assembly election since 1974, the caste arithmetic is firmly in favour of the BJP. Even if
many upper castes don't vote for the BJP's Lodh candidate, he is likely to win.
If you ask members
of the Vaish trading community, or any Brahmin, they might say they will vote
BJP or "let's see". It is with hesitation and difficulty they are
considering deserting their party, and only for this election.
Read the full
article: HERE
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