Rajat Sharma, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of India TV.
Votes were cast for assembly elections in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, by-elections on 15 seats in 5 states and by-elections on one Lok Sabha seat. The Election Commission said that 65.08 percent voting took place in Maharashtra while 68.45 percent votes were cast in Jharkhand. The commission said these did not include postal ballots, and complete data was not available from many polling stations. The atmosphere was heated in both the states but voting took place peacefully. There was no news of any kind of violence or tension from anywhere. After voting in any election, people are most interested in knowing whom people voted for? Who will win? Whose government will be formed? There is only one measure to know this, exit poll. But exit polls have been proved wrong so many times that it is difficult to say anything.
Exit polls of many agencies have come out. Broadly speaking, all exit polls are unanimous that NDA governments will be formed in both Maharashtra and Jharkhand. BJP will emerge as the largest party in both the states. The reality will be known only on 23rd November. Nowadays the credibility of exit polls is very low. In our country, exit polls proved wrong in both Lok Sabha elections and Haryana elections. Even in America, opinion polls and exit polls were showing a close contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Everyone was proved wrong. Trump won a landslide victory but even then the audience remains interested in the exit polls.
According to exit polls, BJP and its allies can form the government in Maharashtra. The opposite happened in the Lok Sabha elections. Mahavikas Aghadi had won more seats there. That is why when the assembly elections started, the victory of the BJP alliance was considered difficult, but the Shinde government organized a fair of welfare schemes and then people started saying that the situation has changed. If the exit polls of Maharashtra turn out to be correct then this will be proved true.
Similarly, when Hemant Soren was sent to jail in Jharkhand, people used to say that BJP made a big mistake. Hemant Soren will get sympathetic votes in the assembly elections but this is not visible in the exit polls. If the exit polls prove to be correct then it would seem that people were angry with the Hemant Soren government and the anti-incumbency factor worked against him. The second thing is that this time BJP formed a strong alliance and fought the elections together. It may have been beneficial, but these are all speculations, conjectures, on November 23 we will know who won, who lost, whose government was formed and whose government was lost. (Rajat Sharma)
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