Agencies/New Delhi

India’s ruling Congress Party has supported calls to ban electoral opinion polls in the world’s largest democracy in what the opposition said is an attempt to suppress bad news during a busy election season starting next week.
The Congress has fared badly in a raft of recent surveys that show the party is on the back foot ahead of state assembly elections starting next week and a general election due within six months.
“What is the authenticity, what is the scientific process all these agencies are adopting in predicting (results with) these polls?” the Congress Party’s general secretary Digvijaya Singh said in a television interview yesterday.
Singh said opinion polls were negative because they could influence voters to back candidates seen as winners. He also claimed a polling company has asked him to pay a bribe to secure a favourable result. He did not give details.
The party on October 30 backed a proposal by the Election Commission to restrict opinion polls. The commission has long sought to halt such polls once election dates are announced. They are currently only banned 48 hours before voting begins.
India’s size and diversity means that election issues can vary widely between districts and local leaders hold great sway, making results notoriously tricky to predict.  
In the run-up to the last national election in 2009, most opinion polls by large agencies correctly forecast the Congress would win more seats than the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) but underestimated the size of its winning margin. The Congress-led coalition won 262 seats.
After ten years in power, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government is facing an uphill battle to convince voters it deserves a third term.
Welfare schemes and years of fast economic growth have increased prosperity in much of the country, but polls suggest many voters are favouring the BJP’s candidate Narendra Modi, who is running a vigorous campaign blaming the government for high inflation, corruption and a recent economic slowdown.
Several recent polls have put Modi and the BJP ahead in some of the state elections and the general election. The BJP is forecast to win 162 seats in the 545-seat parliament next year, versus 102 for the Congress, according to a survey by pollsters Team Cvoter for two television networks released last month.
According to the CNN-IBN-The Week pre-poll survey telecast last week, the BJP was set to retain Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and defeat the Congress in Rajasthan.
It said the BJP was slightly ahead of the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party in the three-way split in Delhi.
“When the trend of opinion polls is adverse to the political parties, they rubbish them. They start demanding a ban,” senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley said in a statement yesterday. “A potential loser in an election cannot seek to alter the rules of free speech.”
He said the government’s “unconstitutional censorship order” last month concerning “artificial competition” to the prime minister’s national day speeches was prompted by “Modi-phobia.”
He added that opinion polls too were part of freedom of speech.
“Restricting them is constitutionally neither permissible nor desirable. The Election Commission will be best advised to keep away from the controversy concerning the ban on opinion polls and allow the market place of democracy to accept or reject the findings of the opinion poll,” he said.
But the Congress defended its view that the opinion polls should be restricted.
“We have never opposed opinion polls... but the party has maintained that they are doubtful... we don’t trust them,” Congress spokesman Meem Afzal said.