CONGRESS QUESTION MARK ON OPENION POLLS

An opinion poll which for the first time projected majority for the BJP-led NDA in the Lok Sabha polls was "fixed and doctored", Congress alleged today.
Union Minister and senior Congress spokesman Anand Sharma told reporters that the opinion poll was carried out by some of the people who have been allegedly involved in the campaign of BJP Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.
Sharma claimed that a high ranking person from the firm that does work for Modi has started another outfit which has done the opinion poll shown on a TV channel on Monday.
Congress has been opposing opinion polls saying that they lacked credibility. To drive home its point, the party has highlighted that the opinion polls before the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha polls had predicted a victory for NDA, but the Congress-led UPA had emerged triumphant.
The latest opinion poll had predicted a clear majority for any pre-poll alliance projecting that NDA would get 275 seats in the 543-member House. This is 16 seats more than the poll had predicted last month.
BJP on its own would win 226 seats — the highest tally ever for the party and the best by any party since 1991, the opinion poll estimated. UPA would win just 111 seats, with Congress sinking to its lowest-ever tally of 92 seats, it had projected. 
Sharma said that coming out with "fixed and doctored" polls consistently is part of a larger design aimed at making mockery of democracy and to lower the morale of the rivals in the electoral battle. He wondered as to how could BJP think of a clear majority in the 543-member Lok Sabha by just contesting 445 seats. This is far away from ground reality. "A web of deceit (mayajal) is being created in which even respected channels are getting trapped", he said adding " today, Modi and BJP are doing false encounters with truth". In a dig at M J Akbar, Sharma said that people who had said in 2002 after the Gujarat riots that Modi deserves Nishan-e-Pakistan have now become "celebrated new entrants" to the BJP. Smriti Irani, who had denounced the Gujarat Chief Minister, is now a much talked about BJP leader while Murli Manohar Joshi has been denying the very existence of the Modi wave, Sharma said.