India’s wildly inaccurate exit polls predicting a landslide election victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party sparked dramatic public apologies from polling companies this week and calls for them to be investigated for possible manipulation.
Almost all of the exit polls released on June 1 forecast Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies would win more than 350 seats in the lower house of the parliament. The final results released three days later put the coalition’s tally at just 293 seats.
The exit polls pushed the benchmark equity index to a record on Monday, followed by a crash a day later when almost $400 billion of value was wiped off the market. Opposition parties called on the country’s stock market regulator and the parliament to investigate the polling companies and BJP leaders for possible rigging.