M J Akbar
Thought for the day, or perhaps the next hundred days: Where did it all go wrong for Ravana? He was the highest of the high-born, a king of kings, a blue-blood intellectual, a classical aesthete. Why did his rule sink to nadir?
Ravana had too many heads. It just doesn’t work.
It is a safe bet that most of his ten heads were barely on speaking terms with one another. Ravana remains the ultimate metaphor for coalition politics, the Third Front of his time, and symbol of disaster for all eternity in India’s sacred verse.
A significant, if still barely recognized, by-product of the tortured UPA decade is the collapse of voters’ trust in any patch-up, last-minute conglomeration. Accretion is no longer seen as strength, but as invitation to weakness. Dr Manmohan Singh has used “coalition compulsions” once too often to justify the politics of barter with greed and incompetence, turning UPA into a foxtrot between partners in blackmail. Policy decisions were negotiated through a CBI stick in one hand, while the other opened the nation’s treasury for loot as reward for compliance: witness spectrum, Coalgate or land grab deals.
Matters have come to such a pass that Congress itself is behaving like a wayward, irascible coalition. Its internal fractures have turned it into a hospital case. Its chief minister in Andhra Pradesh leads the revolt against Delhi’s decision to create Telangana so that it might win a few Lok Sabha seats; Central ministers hold up Parliament while Dr Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi shrug helplessly. No action is taken.
The ebb of coalitions will not be complete, but it will be substantial. We will not return to single-party rule in 2014, but we are moving towards it. Congress will be punished for preferring power to duty; its support has already crashed to around 18% and could slip further. But its UPA allies will be maimed as well, as for instance Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati in UP. Nitish Kumar lost credibility in Bihar when he abandoned opposition space to flirt with Congress. Regional parties who did not join UPA, or – like Mamata Banerjee – escaped at the right time, will do well. Bengal’s chief minister heard jeers from Delhi’s pundits when she left UPA. Today, they should recognize her wisdom.
The BJP will improve its numbers from two electoral consequences. There will be a Squeeze Effect in states where BJP is dominant, like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh, which will maximize its seat count. Opinion polls show BJP at around 50% of vote share in MP against 30% for Congress. This translates, in theory, to about five seats for Congress. But with the squeeze, and the growing irrelevance of smaller parties, the BJP could take 27 or 28 out of 29 MP seats. Similarly, Congress got more than a dozen seats in Gujarat in 2009. This could collapse to one or two.
In non-BJP states there will be a Dribble Effect. In Assam, this could enable BJP to rise to six seats; in Odisha, from comparative insignificance to four seats; in Kerala, from non-existence to two seats. Such accruals could take BJP’s tally to 220 seats if the present patterns of voter intent hold. Congress, in the meanwhile, faces double jeopardy: implosion of its base, and explosion of the Modi spread. Such bad news is already reflected on the visage of Congress leaders. They are merely worried about BJP. They are terrified of Modi.
It is time to bury the myth of the irrational voter. Caste and creed are the weakest strands in the knit that is forming the present surge. Indian democracy, like any mature polity, works best when it revolves around economic empowerment, when it functions like a welfare ladder. All of us live on some rung of that ladder, and all of us want to climb a rung, enabled by good governance. It is axiomatic that those at the bottom must rise at twice the pace of elites, but it is essential that everyone must ascend. A simple question will shape the voter’s decision: who can best assure this ascent?
You can tell what is selling in the market when even Lalu Yadav discovers that he once sold tea in a shop, a bit of biodata that remained obscure until Modi launched his tea stall movement. But here’s the thing. Modi would not have been candidate for PM if he was still selling tea. It is his rise to chief minister, and success in that job, that has made him an aspiration man. He won a silver spoon in the race of life. He was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
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