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UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 NEW DELHI 000604 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
DEPARTMENT FOR SCA/INS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PGOV PREL PINR KDEM IN
SUBJECT: BHARAT BALLOT 09: THE PERILS OF POLLING 
 
REF: NEW DELHI 1303 
 
NEW DELHI 00000604  001.3 OF 003 
 
 
¶1. (SBU) Summary: As India heads into the 2009 Lok Sabha 
(Lower House of Parliament) elections in April/May, Indian 
media outlets will release a torrent of election polls and 
public opinion surveys.  In examining these polls, we will 
keep in mind that election polling in India is a notoriously 
unreliable exercise.  It suffers from a variety of ailments, 
from political biases of the polling agencies and news 
outlets to operational problems stemming from India's mammoth 
electorate and complex demographics.  The widespread lack of 
technology and poor infrastructure makes accurate polling an 
immensely labor intensive, expensive, and often dubious 
process.  This cable explores some of the reasons why polling 
in India is so problematic.  End Summary. 
 
Local Issues and Regional Parties Complicate Polling 
- - - 
 
¶2. (U) India has rarely demonstrated a pan-Indian, national 
voting pattern, except when a single hot-button and emotive 
issue develops momentum, such as in the sympathy vote 
following the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi. In 
general, local issues and identity politics have tended to 
decide past elections.  While a few national issues such as 
inflation, anti-incumbency and security are perpetually 
issues of concern, these issues have tended to play a 
secondary roll. 
 
¶3. (U) Each region has its own idiosyncratic grouping of 
national and regional political parties.  The Congress Party 
and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the two principal national 
parties, exert influence nationwide, but their power has 
waned in recent decades in favor of regional parties. These 
parties generally represent certain caste, linguistic, ethnic 
or class groups, which are often themselves unique to a 
particular region. This overwhelming emphasis on local 
politics, local issues and local parties, has given each of 
the 543 Indian Parliamentary constituencies its own 
distinctive political color. 
 
¶4. (U) National polling is most accurate when a survey sample 
can serve as a statistically meaningful representation of the 
national whole. India's constituencies are so diverse and 
cast their votes for such different reasons, that a proper 
sample is incredibly difficult to construct, given problems 
in properly weighing electorates.  To account for the 
diversity, polls must be taken in most - if not all - of the 
543 constituencies.  This is both extremely expensive and 
generally unworkable. 
 
Mammoth, Underdeveloped Constituencies Require Door To Door 
Surveys 
- - - 
 
¶5. (U) Constituencies in India are numerically huge (most 
have over a million people) and often hard to access. And 
despite India's rapidly growing telecommunication and 
internet industries, the vast majority of Indians live 
without phone or internet access.  A recent study finds that 
five percent of Indians have internet access, and less than 
ten percent own a phone in rural areas. 
 
¶6. (U) The lack of infrastructure has made face-to-face, 
door-to-door surveys the preferred method of polling. 
Agencies send data collectors to physically survey schools 
and universities, village and city halls, bazaars and town 
courtyards, and schools and universities.  Unsurprisingly, it 
is not the most efficient or cost-effective way to do 
polling.  To get a meaningful number of interviews, in a 
majority of constituencies, an agency would need to employ an 
army of pollsters.  In a meeting with PolOff, Narashimha Rao, 
 
NEW DELHI 00000604  002.3 OF 003 
 
 
a prominent former pollster and current BJP advisor, 
postulated that "more than a hundred people for each of the 
543 constituencies would be needed to do anything resembling 
an accurate poll." 
 
¶7. (U) No single polling agency in India has the manpower or 
the funds to do meaningful door-to-door polling in a majority 
of constituencies. Polling agencies are forced to extrapolate 
data from one constituency to another; or, in some cases, to 
extrapolate data from a few constituencies to forecast an 
entire state.  Agencies examine the socio-economic 
composition of a constituency, look at the castes and 
religious communities represented, and use the data from that 
area to calculate and predict the results for another 
location with similar demographics.  Again, this process 
distorts the precision of the results. Since each area has 
its own distinctive set of issues and parties, extrapolation 
of data based exclusively on caste or socio-economic 
considerations is bound to be flawed. 
 
Media Outlets and Polling Groups Biases 
- - - 
 
¶8. (SBU) An additional source of poll unreliability stems 
from the relationship between the political parties and the 
polling agencies and media outlets. Indian news outlets - 
which ultimately sponsor the polls - tend to be ideologically 
slanted.  Many have long-standing historical ties to 
political parties. A number of large, national dailies, such 
as the 'Hindu,' 'Aaj Tak,' and the 'Times of India,' are 
either owned or operated by political party heavyweights. The 
Hindustan Times, for instance, was founded by long-time 
Congress Party supporters, the Birla family. K.K. Birla and 
G.D. Birla, who at different times owned and edited the 
paper, have both served as Congress Party MPs and provided a 
large amount of funding for the party.  The 'Pioneer' 
newspaper, another influential daily, is today partly-owned 
and edited by a standing MP of the BJP, Chandan Mitra. This 
political connection has at times colored the polls the 
papers release. 
 
¶9. (SBU) News outlets do not conduct the pre-election surveys 
they publish.  Instead, they contract private polling 
agencies to do the polling for them.  Some of these 
companies, like C-Voter and MARG, are exclusively election 
polling groups.  Most, however, are conventional commercial 
marketing research firms. These commercial marketing agencies 
appear not to be ideologically tied. Yet, because they are 
contracted by papers which have political links and are 
better disposed to certain parties, there is explicit or 
implicit pressure on polling agencies to skew their results 
in favor of the sponsor's party of choice. Agencies want to 
continue their contracts into the future and the papers want 
to have results that promote their party. As a result, 
agencies at times choose to ignore certain data, or to 
extrapolate statistics in a way sympathetic to the sponsor's 
chosen party. Pollster Narashimha Rao stressed that the 
adjustment tends not to be so dramatic that the prejudice is 
glaring, but a gain or loss of a few percentage points here 
or there in favor of one party or another is not rare.  This 
manipulation is more likely to occur when a race is close. 
 
¶10. (SBU) Narasimha Rao does not believe the gambling 
community -- illegal but huge and well organized in India -- 
provides a more accurate alternative to opinion polls in 
predicting election results. Odds are available on Indian 
elections and there is significant bettering, according to 
sources.  But in Rao's experience, gambling is as vulnerable 
to error, corruption and manipulation as the opinion polls. 
Rao offered the 2007 Gujarat assembly elections as an 
example. In the three or four days prior to the vote, the 
odds moved sharply towards a sweeping Congress Party victory 
 
NEW DELHI 00000604  003.3 OF 003 
 
 
in the state. Gamblers threw enormous amounts of money on a 
Congress win.  The bookies (or some other manipulators of the 
betting odds) cleaned up when Narendra Modi and the BJP 
ultimately came up on top with a comfortable margin. 
 
That's Actually None of Your Business, Shukriya 
- - - 
 
¶11. (U) Adding to the problem, the Indian voter is in general 
tight-lipped with his or her responses to pollsters.  This 
has even been the case in more innocuous surveying like 
census data collection. Pollsters report that many voters do 
not think that polls or surveys are innocent, and that their 
responses to election polling will come back to harm them 
through retribution by the one party or another.  Many opt 
instead to refuse to answer the questions, others just offer 
up an answer they think the pollster would like to hear. 
There is also an increasingly reluctance, especially among 
more educated urban voters, to admit that they will be voting 
on the basis of what they perceive as politically incorrect 
grounds such as caste or religion. 
 
The Polls Stumbled Horribly in 2004 
- - - 
 
¶12. (SBU) The lead up to 2004 Lok Sabha election highlights 
the unreliability of national polling in India.  Nearly all 
pre-election polls suggested a robust BJP/NDA victory. Post 
reported in April 2004 (Reftel) "Six weeks before the first 
round of parliamentary elections, every poll taken to date 
predicts that the BJP will return to power." The polling 
agencies and media outlets were left red-faced when the 
results showed a Congress Party upset.  So while polling 
organizations may claim to employ the most sophisticated 
statistical modeling tools available, history has proven it 
unwise to take Indian polling results too seriously. 
 
¶13.  Comment:  Despite the many shortcomings of election 
polling in India, the enterprise is not without its value. 
Opinion surveys, for instance, provide valuable insight and 
seem to be less prone to error.  Furthermore, even in the 
face of the unanticipated Congress Party victory in the 2004 
elections, pre-election polls, when taken in aggregate, do 
actually provide some valuable insight.  If all polls, taken 
by all the polling agencies, all point in the same direction 
by a large margin, we can feel fairly confident that the 
findings are sound. Given India's tendency to keep politics 
local, this perception holds especially true with polls 
conducted on a local scale. 
 
WHITE