Much of the Indian media got the election predictions completely wrong. The BJP and its allies were all set to regain power, and quite comfortably, according to most media and public opinion polls. It appears that since most Indian journalists - and the offices of the publications and television channels - come from the urban areas, a built-in bias crept into the reporting and coverage of issues. And this bias was not something that cropped up right before the election; it has been around for quite a long time, and became more pronounced as the Indian economy opened up in the 1990s (ironically under the man, Manmohan Singh, who is now prime minister).

As the economy grew, the urban areas grew disproportionately at the expense of rural India, but since India has such a large middle-class (in absolute terms) it provided enough of a market for the corporate world and the multinationals to come running and put in tons of foreign investment. The rest of the world, especially Pakistanis who became accustomed to watching India through the eyes of satellite channels, thought that everyone was having it good in India, that the country’s consistently robust GDP growth was in fact trickling down to much of the population.

The results of the election, especially in places like Andhra Pradesh, showed just how much out of tune ruling politicians, and the media, was with the mood, especially among rural voters. Chandrababu Naidu, praised as a dramatically modernizing influence on his state’s fortunes, whose pro-reform policies were said to be the main reason why Microsoft chose Hyderabad over a host of other competing cities to base part of its operation there, was voted out of office.

The rural voters resented the fact that the economic growth and job-creation for which Naidu was so admired had not taken place outside Andhra Pradesh’s urban centres. Surprisingly, the media never picked up on this disconnect in the rural areas and the state was often projected as a model for others to follow.

The reason is the inherent bias in favour of urban areas in the media, in the sense that since most reporters, writers and columnists tend to come from the cities, they, more often than not, write on urban/city-centric issues. In the case of stories and reports this means that important beats like agriculture never get proper coverage and treatment. In fact, public opinion polls conducted a few months before the elections and even some of the exit polls seemed to suggest that the BJP government’s decision to call elections five months ahead of schedule was timely.

However, it seems that since most of these polls, especially the public opinion ones conducted by various media organizations such as NDTV, concentrated on the urban population, they tended to be misleading in the sense that many of those being polled were direct beneficiaries of the BJP’s ’India shining’ campaign.

Another reason, as pointed out in a recent op-ed piece in The Times of India was the presence in the BJP combine of autocratic and arrogant politicians like Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalitha, whose artificially created cult of personality exploits and extravagant family weddings can be compared to those of some politicians in Pakistan. The bias towards the cities has its parallel in the Pakistani media and partially explains why important rural issues tend to be grossly under-reported with very little analysis.

The other problem with the Indian media was its hyped up coverage of entertainment and fashion, much of which now makes it to the front page of most mainstream newspapers. In our terms, this would mean that coverage of an outlandish fashion show would vie for space on the metropolitan section’s front page with a story about a prolonged citywide power breakdown. Mercifully, this isn’t the case here so far with at least the national dailies. Perhaps, then, the Indian elections will lead, among other things, to a reappraisal of the existing narrow base of media coverage.