Why did the media get it wrong in Gujarat -- was the question put before representatives of the country's English media on Friday at a debate organised by the Indian Women Press Corps.
In his opening remark, Harish Khare, political editor of The Hindu, said, "I don't think the media got it all wrong and it's incorrect to brand those who didn't say the BJP is going to win as unprofessional."
Nevertheless, he admitted that the media is in the habit of getting things wrong.
Khare, however, stirred the small audience when he said, "To ask why the media got it wrong is an exercise in intimidation."
"This is a bit of an overreaction," said India Today managing editor Swapan Dasgupta. "The larger question is: were we guided strictly by professional motives?"
Dasgupta said some mediapersons had pre-conceived notions about Chief Minister Narendra Modi, which blinded them to his accomplishments as a politician. Modi had managed to strike a chord with the people but the media willfully ignored this fact, he said.
The debate was sparked by the outcome pre-poll surveys published by Outlook and India Today, and the failure of the English media to predict the BJP's victory and accurately reflect the mood of the people.
India Today predicted a victory for the BJP, but proved wrong in its estimate of the scale, while Outlook was completely off the mark.
But its editor Vinod Mehta has no regrets. "It requires an internal debate and no outsider need tell us to re-examine our policy," he said defiantly.
He claimed that even Deputy Prime Minister Lal Kishenchand Advani was surprised by the scale of the BJP's victory.
His brief to the pollsters was that since the Gujarat election was a special one, they should be careful and sensitive during the survey, Mehta said. "I also told them to give the benefit of doubt to the BJP," he added.
"I, as someone who printed that survey (predicting the BJP's defeat), is not going to be told by (BJP president) Venkaiah Naidu how to run my paper," he insisted.
Dismissing the idea of debating over what went wrong in the English media's coverage of Gujarat, he said, "We should discuss what we did get right."
The English media rightly exposed Modi's projection of about 9% Muslims being a threat to 91% Hindus in Gujarat, Mehta said.
Cautioning the media into reading too much into the BJP's victory in Gujarat, Mehta said, "Let us wait for the outcome of a few more elections."
"A section of the media wanted Modi to lose, and the way they projected him helped the Gujarat CM," said The Pioneer editor Chandan Mitra.
"The residue of Godhra has sunk in far too deep and we failed to understand that," he said.
Dipankar Gupta, a Jawaharlal Nehru University academician, said that psephology today is an industry in which lakhs of rupees are invested. "It's not a science."
Besides, "Here you are dealing with human beings," he said indicating that predicting human behavior is no easy task.
"That psephologists are going wrong is good news; it means democracy is working," Gupta said.
The academician also said that psephologists unnecessarily emphasise on the caste and religion factors, which can skew their judgement.
He advised mediapersons not to take surveys seriously because they are 'a major source of gossip and cater to the lowest common denominator'.
NDTV's Barkha Dutt admitted that the media is 'out of sync with the people' of Gujarat.
The participants were divided on whether there was a Hindutva wave in Gujarat.
"There was no wave. In Gujarat, 181 one-day matches were separately played," Khare insisted citing the example of BJP leader from Khadia Ashok Bhatt, whom he branded as the original practitioner of Hindutva. Bhatt had retained his assembly seat with a much reduced margin this time.
Gupta agreed pointing out that 'the BJP won 38 seats by narrow margins'.
"Over 50% of the people did not vote for Modi," he said.
Dasgupta disagreed. "What the English press reported about the mood in Gujarat was at variance with what I saw when I covered some 15 public meetings, which Modi addressed," he said.
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