On Friday, the ‘veteran journalist’ Rajdeep Sardesai seems to have had an extremely tough day at the job following his refusal to trust a survey that was carried out by his own channel – India Today as the results were in favour of Modi government.
A year after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the India Today-Karvy Insights Mood of the Nation poll was published on Friday. The extremely significant survey, which comes amidst the Chinese pandemic that has struck the country, revealed how Indians continued to be satisfied with the performance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
What the survey said
According to the India Today-Karvy Insights Mood of the Nation poll, almost two-thirds of people who participated in the survey were happy about the Modi government’s handling of the economic crisis. At least 71 per cent of the citizens have rated the Modi government’s handling of the economic distress caused by coronavirus pandemic as ‘outstanding’ or ‘good’.
The MOTN survey of India Today also stated that 43 per cent of the total respondents said that the Modi government had handled the economic crisis better than the previous Manmohan Singh government. The poll showed that at least 88 per cent of the respondents said that the Modi government was better or at par when compared with the previous government in handling the economic crisis.
Rajdeep Sardesai ‘bewildered’ by high ratings that the Modi government got in his own survey
As Rahul Kanwal published these above numbers on his show on Friday, a look of utter shock and despondency swept over the face of Rajdeep Sardesai, who found it extremely hard to believe such favourable response to the Modi government, especially on the economy front that too at a time when the country’s economy has been facing its worst crisis.
Who handled the economy better – PM Narendra Modi or Manmohan Singh? This is what #MOTN2020 survey shows. @ShamikaRavi, Sr Fellow of Brookings Institute, decodes the findings. #MOTN2020 LIVE at https://t.co/4fqxBVUizL
— IndiaToday (@IndiaToday) August 7, 2020
(@RahulKanwal & @sardesairajdeep) pic.twitter.com/xRAVq0kMyz
Commenting on the survey, Rajdeep Sardesai said that he was ‘perplexed’ to believe the survey, saying that he would trust India Today’s MOTN poll on Modi government’s handling of the recent skirmishes with China but not the one showing favourable results for Modi government on the economy front.
“I can to a certain extent understand the China numbers, but I find these numbers bewildering. This is an issue that should be hitting and hurting the common man. If 24% say outstanding and 48% say good, that is a total of 72%! Let’s try and make some sense of that!” the shocked and disappointed Rajdeep Sardesai said failing to agree on the numbers published by India Today, the very own network to which he works for.
Essentially, when Rajdeep says that he can “to some extent” believe the positive response as far as the China skirmish is concerned but not the numbers that support the Modi government’s handling of the economy, he is basically refusing the believe the numbers that have been put out by his own channel.
Further, questioning Economist Shamika Ravi, he asked how can people actually support the Prime Minister when “everything seems to be going northwards”. In his blinding hate for the Prime Minister and his utter dismay at his approval ratings, Rajdeep even made a Freudian slip and said that the economy was going “northwards” instead of saying it was going “southwards”.
The perennial pessimists like Rajdeep Sardesai, who has been throwing the ‘economy on crisis’ bogey against the Modi government for a very long time now, was perhaps found it difficult to believe that the common masses were pretty much happy with the Modi government’s way of handling the economy.
PM Modi still king of Indian politics, says MOTN survey
According to the India Today-Karvy Insights Mood of the Nation poll, a whopping 78 per cent of the people surveyed found the performance of PM Modi to be outstanding or good. The approval ratings of PM Modi is at its highest presently.
The India Today survey comes at a time when India is facing multiple crises in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, economic crisis as well as escalating border tensions with China.
