Disturbed by the hugely misleading exit polls that projected a runaway victory for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coalition partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the recent general elections?

If so, you may be primed to side with the opinion that American writer E.B. White offered in 1948, saying: "The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy.”

In other words, to White’s mind, psephology (the statistical study of elections and trends in voting) was no better than summoning ghosts and goblins to figure out one’s fate, often spawning tragic consequences, such as the one encountered by Macbeth.

Shakespeare scholar Professor Andrew Cecil Bradley called the witches' prophecy an "equivocation of the fiend." But there was no equivocation in the Indian exit polls. There was no doublespeak or a forked tongue that would insidiously support both sides of an argument. The exit polls, as Indian National Congress (INC) leader Rahul Gandhi led the field in suggesting, were a straightforward trick, a confidence trick, played on the small investors, for the benefit of market punters.

India’s leading pollsters, nearly all of whom had predicted a clear sweep for the BJP, turned out to be so spectacularly off the mark that speculation is on the rise about who benefitted

At its core, psephology is best described as the science of reading the pebbles. The term draws from the Greek word for pebble — psephos. The ancient Greeks used pebbles to vote. Similarly, the word ballot is derived from the mediaeval French word ballotte, meaning a small ball. In its less suspect avatar, psephology attempts to both forecast and explain election results. Exit polls, like the ones seen in India, are offered as a reliable tool in this endeavour to divine the people’s will, before the vote is counted.

Why on earth would anyone want to know the results of........

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