Hridayapath Election Dispatches: A Post-Mortem

Prologue

In the run-up to the Lok Sabha election of 2024, Swarajya magazine had sent me on a 6,500 km-long journey from Delhi to Nagaland and back to chronicle the state of development and find out how the political winds were blowing.

The May 2024 edition of the magazine was dedicated to the 14 dispatches I had filed from various places.

In this article, I want to do a post-mortem analysis of how the estimates have fared. (I will perhaps do another one on what could have gone wrong). It seems like your favourite writer has had a pretty remarkable hit rate.

Our analysis, borne out of sincere conversations with people, seems to have done much better than the "exit pollsters" (not that they are the standard now).

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won most of the seats that fell in this route, prompting a reader to comment that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) should declare this writer as their lucky mascot and send him on an actual Bharat Jodo Yatra!

I had spent not more than half a day in each constituency. I take credit for the results of four seats where I had predicted close contests and the margins were low. When the margin was terribly bad, like Azamgarh, I have accepted failure. (Please note that I have not abused that option).

Of the 38 constituencies from which I have chronicled stories (in at least 12 more constituencies, I had not asked people for their political choices), I failed in eight, resulting in a pretty handsome strike rate of 79 per cent.

Summary Of The Results

Extracts from the Hridayapath dispatches (14 plus one centred on women) juxtaposed with the results are as follows:

Epilogue

What had lulled me was that I got 12 out of the 18 in Uttar Pradesh correct. I had extrapolated this confidence by assuming that all of the state, barring the opposition strongholds, was in the BJP's pocket. I had not gotten the sense of anger, especially in lower Purvanchal.

I had called Assam 11-3 in Dispatch 8, where I discussed the delimitation in Assam. But the shock of Jorhat (Gaurav Gogoi's win) was cancelled by the surprise of Karimganj (the BJP's Kripanath Malla won by 18,000 votes).

Nevertheless, the idea of this review is in genuine pursuit of truth (the process) and not to tom-tom one's successes. Our fellow citizens have taught us a lot of lessons and burned the screens through which we have been seeing the world. To understand this collective, our country, is a lifetime's work!