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What exit polls are missing about the Indian voters

Worse than the exit polls is the fact that the results don't start rolling in until Thursday.

India's parliamentary election concluded on Sunday followed by several exit polls - all of which showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi returning to power. It looks more than likely that he might, even though exit polls in India have been unreliable in the past 20 years, except for in 2014 when the Modi tsunami was hard to miss. These exit polls raise suspicion chiefly because most are run by polling agencies or media outfits that have been slavish to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the past five years. A prominent agency that gave 300+ to the BJP (out of 543 Lok Sabha seats) not only did not reveal a methodology or even sample size but even posted a disclaimer that its results were the result not of surveys or statistical tabulation, but of 'popularity of party', whatever that means. Any technology advance in polling seems futile until the time that pollsters are able to telepathically reach directly into the Indian voter's mind.
Worse than the exit polls is the fact that the results don't start rolling in until Thursday. This alone gives exit polls more importance than they merit. If you look at other democracies, the UK allows exit polls after polling closes at 10 pm. The media reports on exit polls but the counting also gets underway and results begin rolling in at around 11 pm and continue to 3 or 4 am. As a consequence, the actual results dominate the next morning's news, not the exit polls. And because the exit polls are being immediately put to the test by the actual results, they are more credible than, for instance, the Indian agency that gave the BJP over 350 seats on Sunday night, a projection that's likely to be forgotten by the time the electronic voting machines (EVMs) are tallied on Thursday afternoon.
In the US the counting begins in each time zone as soon as the polling ends; this introduces an anomaly in which the east coast's results begin getting 'called' by the networks even as people on the west coast are still standing on line to cast their ballot. Americans don't seem to have a problem with this, however.
This leads to speculation about the importance of the exit polls in the Indian election. One clue came on Monday morning, during the first 60 seconds of trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange, when Rs3 trillion of value was added to investor wealth. The Sensex went up by a stunning 1,400 points to end near 40,000. Of course, the stock market was enthused by the news that Modi was likely to return to power, for he has always been the darling of the finance world in India even though his five years in power did not fulfil the promise of big returns that investors expected. Like the past four elections, the exit polls predicted massive gains for the BJP and the stock markets correspondingly soared.
The other consequence of India's exit polls was a somber mood in the opposition camp, even though various political leaders like Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu counseled supporters not to pay heed to 'exit poll gossip'. There was a definite sluggishness in their backroom parleys that began on Monday, though that could also be construed as fatigue after two months of nonstop electioneering.
The lesson for this columnist, at least, is that India ought to adopt the ways of other democracies and begin counting as soon as the polling of the last phase of election finishes. One might argue that India is a vast and spread out country, but then we consider ourselves a rising and advanced nation, and we are technologically adept enough to use EVMs, so counting at 5pm ought hardly constitute a technological or logistical challenge that can't be overcome. True, several polling stations/booths undergo 'repoll' in the interregnum between polling and counting, but that shouldn't bother us. And anyway, don't we have by-polls while a government is already in power?
Lastly, the election should be avoided at the height of summer; more than politicians it is a punishment to voters, and discourages higher turnout. And the election should not be spread out over two months; India can easily handle the logistical challenge of a more compact election. These are matters to ponder as we go past this week's results.
Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist based in India