Instead of mounting her now-famous verbal assault on the ‘Manuwadi’ media, Mayawati preferred sarcasm in her opening statement in the first press conference after the election. Feigning to apologise for being inaccessible during the campaign, she said she did not wish to “disturb” the media while it was busy making all kinds of projections. Mayawati did not mention opinion and exit polls separately, but there is little doubt that these were her principal targets.

After the Lok Sabha poll of 2004, the assembly election of Uttar Pradesh is clearly an instance of collective failure of opinion and exit polls. In relative terms, the Indian Express-CNN-IBN-CSDS post poll can definitely claim to have been the best of the lot. Our forecast captured the trend accurately, projected the BSP way ahead of its rivals (we projected 152-168 seats for it), forewarned that the BSP could “do better than projected here” and said that the BJP will finish a poor third. Yet, as my colleague Rajeeva Karandikar put it, this was the case of the best not being good enough. The fact is that none of the polls, including ours, came close to suggesting a clear majority for the BSP.

This was a clear instance of the triumph of old-style political journalism over the new fangled number crunching. Political reporters may not have talked about a clear majority for the BSP, but they did capture the hawa. If you read the despatches by Manini Chatterjee, reportage by Vidya Subrahmaniam, articles by Mahesh Rangarajan or the field stories in papers like Jansatta and Amar Ujala — you got a clear sense of a decisive victory for the BSP.

... contd.