Frustrated polls showing AAP losing, Kejriwal circulates fake polls, call media "pimps{

AAP


AAP IT head shares fake survey after Kejriwal attacks news channel for real survey         (Op-India.Com)                       

Once upon a time, AAP and its supremo Arvind Kejriwal used to be a big fan of media and surveys, which used to show AAP gaining popular support. The survey findings were not unexpected as the party had emerged from a popular movement aided by the mainstream media and thus people wished to give it a chance. AAP used to put findings of such surveys on their campaign posters, especially during the Delhi assembly polls.

The party made an impressive debut in 2013 Delhi assembly elections though ndia.ComKejriwal resigned after just 49 days in power. Then came the 2014 general elections, where the party performed impressively in Punjab winning 4 Lok Sabha seats. And then in 2015, it swept the Delhi assembly elections. Many surveys indicated that AAP could repeat its Delhi performance in Punjab assembly elections too.

Two years have passed since then. The party has seen internal feud that led to acrimonious exit of founder member Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, who now accuse the party of being as good as any other political party. Governance in Delhi is marred with controversies. And the party has been accused of hiding its source of funding. In Punjab too, the party is embroiled in various controversies.

As a result, recent surveys have indicated that AAP many not sweep the elections as was being predicted earlier. Some surveys have even predicted that it could actually end up at the third position.

This made Arvind Kejriwal make a U-turn and he started asking people to not trust pre-poll surveys by the media. This (click here) explains the U-turn of Kejriwal over the issue.

Now Kejriwal has gone a step ahead and accused a news channel of taking bribes for showing AAP on the third spot in a pre-poll survey. Kejriwal made this accusation on Sunday against TV channel News24.

Not just he accused the channel’s owner of taking bribes, he called some journalists (without taking names) “dalaal” (pimps):

This is not the first time Kejriwal has referred to journalists as pimps. Earlier he had identified former Indian Express Editor Shekhar Gupta as a pimp.

On expected lines, Kejriwal was not attacked by the journalistic fraternity as he continues to enjoy considerable support among them. Earlier Kejriwal had shared a picture on Twitter that showed a newspaper page being designed. This suggested that he had loyal supporters working in newspapers who leak to him the news even before it’s published.

Nonetheless, after Kejriwal attacked media and declared the unfavourable pre-poll survey “paid”, his team has now gone ahead and started circulating images of surveys that show AAP winning around 100 seats in Punjab. Some of these are the old surveys, while others are fake.

One such fake survey was shared by the IT head of the Aam Aadmi Party Ankit Lal, which claimed that Today’s Chanakya – the research group that had correctly predicted 2014 general elections and 2015 Delhi assembly election results – had predicted 100 seats for the party in Punjab elections.

AAP circulates fake Chanakya Poll for Punjab causing huge twitter uproar

AAP

It all started with Ankit Lal, Head of AAP Social Media Cell tweeting that a poll by Today’sChankaya projects AAP with 100 out of 117 seats in Punjab. This set the stage to trigger a huge twitter uproar.



The participants of this twitter exchange included Today’s Chankaya who not only denied their involvement with the survey but also denounced it categorically as fake, AAP’s former co-founders Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan and Yashwant Desmukh Founder-Psephologist of CVoter. 

AAP then circulated over social media a very similar poll for Goa where they claimed like Delhi they would clean sweep Goa.


AAP is a habitual offender in circulation of fake polls. For Delhi University Student Body Elections, AAP’s Student wing CYSS plastered a fake poll in hoardings all over Delhi claiming they would clean sweep the polls in 2015. AAP came a poor distant third to BJP's ABVP and Congress-NSUI registering a mere 20% vote share – a whopping 35% vote share decline, just months after they won Delhi with a mind boggling 55% vote share. Last year, fearing a further decline in their popularity, they skipped contesting DUSU elections all together. 

Interestingly, CVoter who took part in the twitter exchange themselves projected 100 seats for AAP in a poll for HuffPost in April 2016. The HuffPost editorial line has been felt leaning AAP.

 
Some months ago, the polling agency Today’s Chanakya was in the news of a touted leaked confidential electoral analysis they did for BJP submitted to Narendra Modi. While this blog can’t vouch for the authenticity of the document below, this is first page of their alleged letter as found circulating in social media:


Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan were key members of AAP’s top leadership during the 2014 Lok Sabha & Delhi Assembly 2015 Polls when AAP used to circulate many “internal polls”. Yogendra Yadav himself a renowned psephologist had published internal polls of his constituency he contested in Haryana during Lok Sabha 2014 projecting himself near winning position only to find himself losing his security deposit.



This intricate web of relationship between political parties, polling agencies and media is bound to throw back at the quality of published polls dished out to the general public means that poll numbers are increasingly manipulated to be politically weaponised tools to condition public opinion rather than simply capturing them at any given time interval as it is meant for. Readers are unable to reliably tell a good poll from a bad one and increasingly dismissing all polls as bias. This blog was conceived to precisely address this problem – through critiquing published polls attempting to demand more accountability and transparency by polling agencies. See our archive HERE


 “Ever since the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was elected to rule Delhi, the word "alternate politics" has become the new buzzword on social media. While alternate politics is familiar to political scientists, it is new to the lexicon of the hoi polloi who actually elect their representatives. So how is "alternate politics" different from mainstream politics?  "Alternate politics" is about setting the agenda for mainstream political parties to take up issues that are crucial to the environment and to the very idea of human survival itself. "Alternate politics" believes that social activism, NGO movements, et al can transform into political movements.”


These are extracts from Patricia Mukhim’s article “Age of Alternative Politics” in the AsianAge.  Accordingly we would have expected AAP to walk their talk and detest from despicable practices other mainstream political parties may indulge such as circulating photoshopping crowds of their rallies to create allusion of large crowd support and fake opinion polls. It is clear the experiment has failed. AAP has revealed themselves as confidence tricksters by making such utopian driven claims which they have hardly an intention in actualising.



 

Like us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter