How do India’s voters really take their decisions now? Pollster Pradeep Gupta reveals his findings
An excerpt from ‘How India Votes And What It Means’, Pradeep Gupta
Voters in queues inside a polling booth.
|
Amit Dave / Reuters
Effectively, communication has flowed in two ways – leader to voter and voter to voter – and both ways have led to informal opinion formulation. Social media has blurred the boundaries for leaders. Politicians have always been held accountable for their utterances, scrutinised for their comments that go into an indelible archive.
In the age of social media, perceptions are created against political opponents without so much as a thought given to propriety. Leaders earlier did not have the privilege of this anonymity if they wished to run a full-fledged slander campaign against their political adversaries.