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By:

Yogesh Kumar Goyal

19 April 2026 at 12:32:19 pm

The Exit-Poll Mirage

While exit polls sketch a dramatic map of India’s electoral mood, the line between projection and verdict remains perilously thin. With the ballots across five politically pivotal arenas of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry falling silent until the results are announced on May 4, poll surveyors have filled the vacuum with exit poll numbers that excite, alarm and often mislead. These projections have already begun shaping narratives well before D-Day on May 4. If India’s...

The Exit-Poll Mirage

While exit polls sketch a dramatic map of India’s electoral mood, the line between projection and verdict remains perilously thin. With the ballots across five politically pivotal arenas of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry falling silent until the results are announced on May 4, poll surveyors have filled the vacuum with exit poll numbers that excite, alarm and often mislead. These projections have already begun shaping narratives well before D-Day on May 4. If India’s electoral history offers any lesson, it is that exit polls illuminate trends, not truths. Bengal’s Brinkmanship Nowhere is the drama more intense than in West Bengal, arguably the most keenly watched contest among all five arenas. The contest for its 294 seats has long transcended the state’s borders, becoming a proxy for national ambition. Most exit polls now point to a striking possibility of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) majority, in some cases a commanding one. Such an outcome would mark a political earthquake. For decades, Bengal has resisted the BJP’s advances, its politics shaped instead by regional forces - first the Left Front, then Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC). Yet the arithmetic of the polls suggests that the BJP’s campaign built on organisational muscle and the promise of ‘parivartan’ (change) may have finally breached that wall. The TMC, meanwhile, appears to be grappling with anti-incumbency and persistent allegations of corruption. Still, one outlier poll suggests it could yet retain power, a reminder that Bengal’s electorate has a habit of confounding linear predictions. Here, more than anywhere else, the gap between projection and reality may prove widest. Steady Script If Bengal is volatile, the Assam outcome looks fairly settled. Across agencies, there is near unanimity that the BJP-led alliance is poised not just to retain power, but to do so comfortably. With the majority mark at 64 in the 126-member assembly, most estimates place the ruling coalition well above that threshold, in some cases approaching triple digits. The opposition Congress alliance, by contrast, appears stranded far behind. Under Himanta Biswa Sarma, the BJP has fused development rhetoric with a keen sense of identity politics, crafting a coalition that has proved resilient. A third consecutive term would underline the party’s deepening institutional hold over the state. Kerala, by contrast, may be returning to its old rhythm. For decades, the state has alternated power between the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) with metronomic regularity. The LDF broke that pattern in the last election, securing an unprecedented second term. Exit polls now suggest that experiment may be short-lived. Most projections place the UDF comfortably above the 71-seat majority mark in the 140-member assembly, with the LDF trailing significantly. If borne out, this would reaffirm Kerala’s instinctive resistance to prolonged incumbency. Governance records matter here, but so does a deeply ingrained political culture that treats alternation as a form of accountability. Familiar Duel? Tamil Nadu, long dominated by its Dravidian titans, shows little appetite for disruption as per most exit polls, which place M.K. Stalin’s DMK-led alliance above the halfway mark of 118 in the 234-seat assembly. Yet, some sections have suggested a possible upset could be staged by actor Vijay’s TVK, the wildcard in the Tamil Nadu battle. Most polls, however, are clear that the opposition AIADMK alliance, though competitive, seems unlikely to unseat the incumbent DMK. In Puducherry, the smallest of the five contests, the implications may nonetheless be outsized. Exit polls give the BJP-led alliance a clear majority in the 30-seat assembly, relegating the Congress-led bloc to a distant second. Numerically modest, the result would carry symbolic weight. A victory here would further entrench the BJP’s presence in the south, a region where it has historically struggled to gain ground. For all their allure, exit polls are imperfect instruments. They rest on limited samples, extrapolated across vast and diverse electorates. In a country where millions vote, the opinions of a few thousand can only approximate reality and often fail to capture its nuances. There is also the problem of the ‘silent voter’ - individuals who either conceal their preferences or shift them late. Recent elections have offered ample reminders. In states such as Haryana and Jharkhand, and even in Maharashtra where margins were misjudged, exit polls have erred, and sometimes dramatically sp. Moreover, the modern exit poll is as much a media event as a methodological exercise. Packaged with graphics, debates and breathless commentary, it fills the void between voting and counting with a sense of immediacy that may be more theatrical than analytical. That said, to dismiss them entirely would be too easy. Exit polls do serve a purpose in sketching broad contours, highlighting regional variations and offering clues about voter sentiment. For political parties, they are early signals and act as tentative guides for observers. Taken together, this cycle’s exit polls suggest a broad, if tentative, pattern of the BJP consolidating in the east and north-east, and opposition alliances regaining ground in parts of the south, and continuity prevailing in key states. But patterns are not outcomes and only counted votes confer legitimacy. It is only on May 4 when the sealed electronic voting machines will deliver that clarity. They will determine whether Bengal witnesses a political rupture or a resilient incumbent, whether Assam’s stability holds, whether Kerala’s pendulum swings back, and whether Tamil Nadu stays its course. (The writer is a senior journalist and political analyst. Views personel.)

Spies Versus Statesmen: Israel’s Perpetual Struggle with Strategic Restraint

The recent Israeli airstrike in Qatar exposes historic tensions between the Jewish state’s political leadership and its intelligence agencies.

 

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (R) with Defence Minister Moshe Dayan during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (R) with Defence Minister Moshe Dayan during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Last week, the Israeli air force launched an audacious missile strike on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar with the ostensible goal of decapitating the militant Palestinian group’s leadership. Yet, the operation failed to kill key figures, including Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya.

 

More than its tactical failure, the strike unravelled the discord within Israel’s security establishment. If reports are to be believed, Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service, had refused to conduct the ground assassination operation which was ordered directly by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mossad director David Barnea allegedly feared the move could burn a vital mediation channel with Qatar and endanger negotiations with Hamas leaders over the freeing of Israeli hostages.

 

This clash between Israel’s political leadership and its intelligence establishment is hardly new.


Since its birth in 1948, the Jewish state has been shaped by tensions between the two. Its approach to security has been haunted by a persistent dilemma: when to use force, and when to exercise restraint. Key episodes in the past reveal how these tensions have alternately produced strategic gains, humiliating setbacks and long-term dilemmas.

 

The Lavon Affair

One of the earliest and most instructive cases of this dynamic was the Lavon Affair of the 1950s. In 1954, the Israeli military intelligence apparatus launched ‘Operation Susannah,’ a covert effort to bomb Western cultural targets in Egypt and pin the blame on local nationalists. The objective was to destabilise Nasser’s regime and forestall any rapprochement with the West.

 

Pinhas Lavon, then Defence Minister, authorised the operation without full coordination with Mossad, which was wary of the operation’s risks and legality. The mission backfired spectacularly as several operatives were arrested, leading to a diplomatic scandal that almost derailed Israel’s relations with the United States and Britain. The affair exposed deep fissures between political leaders and the intelligence establishment, leading to Lavon’s resignation and a protracted institutional crisis.

 

Israeli Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon (L) and IDF Chief of the General Staff Moshe Dayan with Shimon Peres (background) in 1953.
Israeli Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon (L) and IDF Chief of the General Staff Moshe Dayan with Shimon Peres (background) in 1953.

Yom Kippur War

Perhaps the most consequential case of the friction between Israel’s political and intelligence establishments occurred during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the weeks leading up to it, Aman (Israel’s military intelligence) and Mossad repeatedly warned that Egypt and Syria were preparing a coordinated attack. Yet Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defence Minister Moshe Dayan largely dismissed the intelligence as exaggerated or politically motivated.

 

Meir, fearful of appearing alarmist to the international community, especially the United States on whose support Israel heavily relied upon, was reluctant to mobilise the army pre-emptively and provoke diplomatic backlash. Dayan, influenced by a sense of strategic overconfidence in Israel’s qualitative military edge, regarded the warnings as an attempt by the intelligence establishment to push for mobilisation without sufficient proof.

 

An even murkier dimension was added by the Egyptian spy Ashraf Marwan, Gen. Nasser’s son-in-law who became a close aide to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who became one of Mossad’s most prized assets. For years, Marwan (who was given the codename ‘Angel’) provided Israel with intelligence that seemed invaluable like details of Egyptian military deployments, political manoeuvres and strategic intentions. Yet some have argued that his signals were often ambiguous: sometimes accurate, at other times deliberately misleading. While Mossad regarded him as their prime source inside the Egyptian regime, suspicions have lingered since his mysterious death in London in 2007.

 

Some historians, notably Ahron Bregman, have argued that Marwan was in fact a double agent, feeding carefully calibrated disinformation to entrap Israel.

 

Whatever the truth, Israel was caught off-guard when Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated assault across the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights on October 6, 1973. The initial phase of the war saw devastating Israeli losses, shaking the country’s self-image of military invincibility.

 

There was public recrimination between Meir’s government and intelligence officials. Chief of Aman, Eli Zeira and Mossad director Zvi Zamir were criticized heavily in the Agranat Commission, with blame assigned for failing to act decisively on warnings. While Israel’s political leaders essentially blamed the intelligence for the surprise attack, intelligence chiefs argued that political hesitancy had prevented preventive measures.

 

The 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut tragedy highlighted the dangers of Israeli political overreach and limited intelligence supervision. It remains one of the darkest episodes of Israel’s engagement in Lebanon. Following the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, Phalangist militias (Christian Lebanese forces allied with Israel) entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, butchering hundreds of civilians.

 

The aftermath of the massacre ignited a significant political and institutional crisis in Israel, revealing deep fractures between the political leadership and the intelligence community. While the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were directly involved in facilitating the Phalangist militia's entry into the camps, the intelligence agencies were implicated in the broader context of oversight and accountability.

 

The Kahan Commission, established to investigate the events, found that Israeli intelligence agencies had prior knowledge of the Phalangists’ intentions and the volatile situation in the camps. However, the Commission concluded that the intelligence community did not adequately communicate the potential risks to political leaders or take proactive measures to prevent the massacre. The aftermath saw political leaders, notably then Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon come under intense public and international criticism.

 

The Commission’s report held Sharon personally responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge, recommending his dismissal. It also recommended the dismissal of Director of Military Intelligence Yehoshua Saguy and the promotion freeze of Division Commander Brig. Gen. Amos Yaron for at least three years.

 

 

Reckless Adventurism

Mossad’s tradition of precision and careful planning was severely tested in 1997 in the attempted assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Amman, Jordan. The operation, authorised at the highest political levels by Prime Minister Netanyahu (then serving his first term), was conceived in the belief that eliminating Mashal would decisively weaken Hamas’s leadership at a critical juncture. Mossad agents injected a lethal toxin into Mashal’s ear, only to be caught by Jordanian security forces. The fallout was catastrophic. King Hussein of Jordan demanded Israel publicly disclose the operation’s details and provide the antidote to save Mashal’s life. Under heavy diplomatic pressure, a cornered Israel finally capitulated with the head of Mossad himself flying to Jordan with the antidote that brought back Mashal from his near-death.

 

The Mashal Affair stands as a textbook example when both Israel’s political and intelligence establishments acted with equal recklessness. It reflected a convergence of overambitious political will and flawed operational planning, underpinned by the belief that bold actions could force results.

 

By contrast, the audacious 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor was an instance where unilateral political resolve, even when intelligence counsel was wary, achieved stunning tactical success. Prime Minister Menachem Begin viewed the reactor as an existential threat, fearing Saddam Hussein would soon possess nuclear weapons aimed at Israel.

 

While Israeli intelligence agencies provided essential technical support and reconnaissance, they harboured significant reservations about Begin’s move to bomb the Iraqi reactor. Nevertheless, Begin made the decision to proceed with little deliberative consultation. Operation Opera saw Israeli jets fly deep into Iraqi airspace and destroy the reactor.

 

Facing existential threats since its birth in 1948, Israel’s leaders and intelligence agencies have constantly been torn between offensive action and strategic restraint. The Qatar strike lays bare the perils of privileging political impatience over measured caution. In Israel’s DNA, the porous boundary between war, espionage and politics makes it an especially fraught affair.

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