Bihar Voters Prove All Exit Polls Wrong

The sweeping victory of the Grand Alliance in Bihar Assembly elections proved all media predictions wrong. Except for a couple of hours in the beginning of the counting of votes on Sunday, the BJP-led NDA was nowhere close to gaining the winning figure of 122.

Interestingly, no exit poll, released immediately after the fifth and final phase of polling closed on Thursday, gave the incumbent Nitish Kumar the numbers which he could garner - the final tally exceeding the two-thirds of the total 243 seats. All exit polls including Times Now-C-Voter,  News X-CNX, NewsNation, News 24-Chanakya gave BJP-led NDA an edge putting it little to far ahead of the JD(U)-RJD-Congress' Mahagathbandhan.

However, news channel CNN-IBN had announced the “biggest exit poll” for the Bihar election but did not telecast it at the announced time on Thursday. The agency which conducted the poll, Axis-Ad-Print-Media (India) Limited, posted the results on its website on Friday and predicted 169-183 seats for the Grand Alliance and 58-70 seats for the BJP and allies.

The agency had refused to share the raw data with the channel and it was not convinced enough by the projections to telecast it. However, the agency claimed that it had shared only the pre-poll survey data with CNN-IBN and the exit poll data was confidential. Incidentally, Axis’s prediction had been closest to the Aam Aadmi’s Party’s final landslide tally of 67 seats in Delhi earlier this year. It had predicted 53 seats for the AAP.

Axis chairman and Managing Director Pradeep Gupta said that his exit poll will be proved “100 percent correct.” He reminded that in 2014 Lok Sabha election too Axis had done the biggest pan-Indian survey. Gupta put the blame on the channel for not showing their poll.