On the same day, votes were being counted in Bihar and the IPL final was happening in Dubai. But only one contest was one-sided.
Date : 04/05/2024
I was sitting in the lounge of the Hong Kong airport after a midnight travel on November 9th from Delhi. It was 4.00 am HKT. Hong Kong government regulations required me to take the mandatory COVID test in the airport. The expected waiting time was close to 18 hours, so I was accommodated in a large hall with other fellow passengers. Fortunately, high speed Wi-Fi was available at the airport. That was an important day for India. It was the day of Bihar Assembly election results and the much-awaited Indian Premier League final. I thought the results for Bihar would be known in two-three hours and I could start watching the finals after taking a nap. I tuned to YouTube for the election results and I never took my eyes off it. I never even realized the passage of time. I opted for a mug of coffee as that is the only vegetarian stuff I could get then. I settled down with it and just needed a sandwich till I was reasonably clear that the BJP will make it. Compared to that, the IPL final was one sided with Mumbai Indians dominating from the word go. Of course, unlike the losing party in Bihar, the Delhi Capitals did not complain about umpiring or the pitch or groundsmen. Delhi Capitals took it in their stride.
To make it more interesting, I made a score sheet of the opening position of the coalitions and the major individual parties: TheBJP, JD (U), RJD, LJP, and Congress. And started with zeros on all parties as shown by the channels. Rest, I will take through the story as it evolved.
Bihar, the enigmatic Bihar State
Bihar is a rich minefield for psephologists. You can bring in economics, sociologists, historians, political scientists, and learn lessons in all these fields. But, nobody can explain the result once all the seats are declared and all data is available. There would be one common reason: the poor electronic voting machines. Only in the last few years, the psephologists have taken over.
Bihar has 243 constituencies and elections were conducted in three phases in 2020. The elections went without any glitch. This is an achievement for the Election Commission as this was the first election to be conducted in the middle of COVID-19. The total voters were 73.5 million in which 41.9 million cast their votes. In contrast, the number of voters in the recently concluded US election was 155 million. The voter turnout was 57.05%, slightly above the 57.01% recorded in 2015 elections and the percentage of women who voted is more than men. In total 3,733 candidates were in the poll fray with 3,361 male and 372 females.
Two major alliances were in the poll fray, the NDA (the JD(U), BJP, VIP & HAM) and the Mahagathbandhan (the RJD, INC, CPI-ML, CPI and CPM). The Lok Janshakti party (LJP) which is an NDA partner at the Centre contested separately but avoided constituencies where the BJP contested. The NDA projected Nitish Kumar as their Chief Ministerial (CM) candidate and MGB projected Tejashwi Yadav theirs. Nitish Kumar has had a long stint in politics and pitted against him was Tejashwi, who is not new to electoral politics being the son of a former CM, but it was unequal considering the formidable coalition he faced. In fact, on his side, he was carrying the coalition.
Exit-poll circus
Election time in India is festival time. Every year, a whole new elections-related economics comes up. And one of them is the spurt of statisticians and analysts. Just like how festivals in India are frequent, elections are also not uncommon. Given the COVID-19 situation, this time it was subdued though meetings by the PM and Tejashwi stirred considerable interest. Unlike the elections, cricket matches can be conducted anywhere, and the venue got shifted to Dubai though it did generate the usual fervour.
The channels got into action, and started putting out election analysis and forecasts. Fortunately, the Election Commission doesn’t allow forecasts to be broadcast before all the phases are completed. So, the channels waited for the last of voters to vote and activated the dashboards. I did one mischief on the day of exit polls. I wrote an article (https://indiachapter.in/user/article/1/20/36) simply putting out the exit poll forecast of all channels of the 2015 election and the final results. Of both the vote share of parties and seats won. Any casual reader can easily see that these are hardly correlated.
This year’s projections by various media channels based on the exit polls is presented in Table 1. Except Dainik Bhaskar all the pollsters gave MGB the advantage. Further, India Today and Today’s Chanakya gave a brute majority to MGB with 150 and 180 seats respectively out of 243 seats. Rest of them placed the MGB tally close to the majority line of 122. Even though Dainik Bhaskar was able to predict the NDA tally correctly, however it failed miserably in predicting the tally of other parties.
Table 1: Exit poll predictions and final results of 2020 Bihar elections
The early trends (8:00 am - 10:00 am)
I started noting the election results as shown by leading English channels hourly to save my labour, as otherwise the channels were announcing the results real time. The hourly election results telecasted by five news services from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM is presented in Table 2. For the first few houses, it looked like the MGB was ahead of the NDA. News channels and analysts focused the debate on strong anti-incumbency factors against both the Central and state governments due to the COVID-19 migrant crisis, unemployment, etc. During the election campaign, the RJD announced plans to create 10 lakh new jobs for the people. The news channels started telling that this announcement was the game-changer. Also, the major talking point was how a young Tejashwi Yadav is going to trounce a five-time CM Nitish Kumar. This trend persisted from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM and continued for some hours as the vote leads were very marginal in many constituencies.
Swing phase 1 (11.00 am - 12.00 pm)
When the battle was neck to neck, the tagline of the news channels was wily Nitish Kumar won’t want to give up without a fight. During this time KC Tyagi, a senior leader of the JD(U) hinted at defeat citing COVID as the reason. Channels picked it up and this provided fodder for some time.
Reverse swing (1.00 pm - 3:00 pm)
The trend started consolidating with the NDA showing consistent numbers with their lead hovering a little above the majority mark. The psephologists who predicted with a lot more confidence based on exit polls became more circumspect, stressing the uncertainty of elections and strength of democracy. The psephologists could predict with small samples at pre poll and exit poll stage but not after even 90% votes have been counted. The analysts were predictable. The analysts reasoned why the NDA is winning and the MGB supporters said why they should wait till the last seat is declared.
Tail end: Post 3:00 pm
The counting of votes took more time than usual due to the increased number of polling stations owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. After 3.00pm, the same trend persisted more or less. Late evening when the MGB started complaining about the election commission, it became clear that the NDA was winning. The BJP simultaneously started planning for celebrations and JD(U) followers started bursting crackers.
Table 2: Party wise hourly results by news services
Final results
The vote share, seats contested and won by major political parties are presented in Table 3. The RJD ended as the single largest party beating the BJP by one seat. The RJD also received the highest vote share with 23.11%. However, the BJP had the better strike rate winning 74 of the 110 seats it contested. The JD(U) tally reduced significantly from 71 seats in 2015 to 43 seats in 2020. The communists increased their tally from 3 to 16 seats. The role of the AIMIM and LJP became talking points.
Table 3: Seats contested and won by parties with vote share
Role of the AIMIM
AIMIM contested in 20 seats in Seemanchal region and it majorly impacted the victory of MGB. Out of the five seats won by AIMIM, the NDA was pushed to third place in one seat and in the remaining four, the MGB took the third place. Also, in the remaining seats, the number of votes polled by the AIMIM is more than the victory margin thereby severely denting the MGB hopes.
Role of LJP
The LJP contested all the seats except those contested by the BJP. It was able to win only one seat with a vote share of 5.66%. However, it played spoilsport to the performance of the JD(U) in at least about 30 seats.
The US parallel
Joe Biden had secured 253 electoral college votes to Donald Trump’s 214 on November 3rd but had to wait till 5th before Biden crossed 270 mark. The World was holding its breadth to know the final result for a couple days before some of the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia could be counted. Finally, Pennsylvania helped Biden cross 270. The psephologists kept silence, but the apologists on both sides kept claiming lead.
The analysts
Psephologists who lead the discussion till the counting day, take the back seat on counting day. On counting day, their job is restricted to GIS and dashboards. It is the analysts who lead from the front on counting day. They have explanations for every swing, and it will be interesting to do a swing analysis of the analysts. I wish anti-incumbency works for psephologists and analysts also. The India Today-Axis which gave thumping majority to MGB apologized in a tweet for predicting the results wrongly. In this regard, Mr. Pradeep Gupta of Axis My India tweeted the reason that women voters’ turnout was 5% more than their male counterparts and Covid-19 limited their numbers of women voter’s interviews. It is commendable to see them accepting their mistake.
IPL finals
I was fairly exhausted when I started watching the IPL final. I thought it was going to be another nail-biting finish. But it was one-sided and Mumbai Indians took the cup home.
They say that cricket is a game of uncertainty, but on that day, the Bihar polls took the cake.
Finally, the airport authority cleared me and took me to the hotel. It was an eventful day indeed.
References
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/bihar-election-2020-live-updates-exit-poll-results-of-bihar-after-6/liveblog/79091176.cms
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pollofpolls-at-6-40-pm-opposition-alliance-to-win-124-of-243-seats-nitish-kumars-nda-to-get-110-show-initial-exit-polls-2322103
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