RIGHT ANGLE – Electoral Lessons

How does one view the results of the just concluded Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand? It all depends on what prism one looks through. Naturally, it will vary from freebies-politics at one end to the EVM-tampering at the other, with factors of caste, religion and development etc. in between.

Therefore, I would like to avoid ‘how” and “why” things happened the way they did. Rather I would highlight “what” in my considered view has (have) happened.

One, the results defied the general trend that incumbent governments find it very difficult to fight the anti-incumbency to continue in India. If the ruling NDA has retained Maharashtra, so has the ruling JMM-led alliance in Jharkhand.

Two, voters do vote differently in Assembly elections than what they do during national elections. In the general elections held just a few months ago, the NDA led by the BJP had won only 17 out of 48 seats for the Lok Sabha in Maharashtra, but this time for the assembly polls, the ruling alliance has got 235 out of 288 seats.

Similarly, during the Lok Sabha elections, the NDA had done much better than the JMM-led INDI alliance by winning 9 (nine) out of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Jharkhand, but this time it has done what could be said disastrously by getting just 24 out of 81 seats in the Assembly.

Of course, the above phenomenon has been proven many a time in the past, something our political pundits do not pay much attention to. In Rajasthan, the BJP had comfortably won the assembly elections, but a few months after when the Lok Sabha elections were held, the Congress-led INDIA group did very well by getting 11 of their candidates elected as MPs out of 25. But, again, in the 7 (seven) by-elections to the Assembly that were held last week, the BJP reestablished its ascendancy by bagging as many as 5 (five) seats.

The same has been proved to be the case in Uttar Pradesh too. In the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP and its allies in NDA displayed arguably their worst performance by getting only 36 out of 80 seats. This was, perhaps, the most important reason why the BJP failed to get its own majority of 272 in the Lok Sabha, the number it had obtained easily in the 2014 and 2019 general elections. But within a few months, it seems to have retrieved the most of the lost ground, with its victory in 7 (seven) out of 9 (nine) by-elections to the state Assembly last week.

The moral of the above examples is that issues dominating the national elections are invariably national in nature, but in Assembly polls there are local or state level issues that voters do take into account. It is not that they disregard the national issues; in the Assembly polls , issues for them are national and “plus” (local).

Three, and this is a corollary of the above point, in India, it is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on the authenticity or credibility of the media and pollsters in projecting the electoral ground realities. More often than not, their projections or predictions are going off the mark. And, that, in turn, means that they are increasingly being partisan in their work and the supposed neutrality that they should reflect is becoming increasingly rarer. They tend to presume that people will be voting the way they would be voting themselves.

What is funniest here is the perverse or fraudulent role that the so-called astrologers are playing. In the process, they are giving a bad name to astrology, one of the prized treasures of India, otherwise.

Four, the losers in Indian elections, particularly if they happen to be the Congress party and its allies, are causing great harm to the country’s image and its glorious record of peaceful transfer of power by challenging the election results. Whenever they lose, they find fault with the Election Commission.

For them, there are free and fair elections in India as long as the Congress and its friends/ allies win. The moment BJP wins, then the Election Commission is “sold out” for manipulating the electronic voting machines.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the Congress and its allies found elections in Jharkhand to be free and fair with correct functioning of the EVM, but they are crying foul in Maharashtra just because the BJP has won.

Of course, this theory of “everything is right as long as I benefit but anything that I disagree with must be shunned” has the greatest votary in Rahul Gandhi in India today. Going by this theory, the country must not be governed by those who win in elections, but by those who lose. India must be run the way Rahul Gandhi or his allies want.

Debates, so essential for any true democracy, are welcome as long as these are not based on ground realities, facts and figures. Debates for these “great minds” can only be based on assumptions and presumptions, which will be repeated day in and day out to be projected as “their” facts. The judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular must deliver judgments on the basis of what one Rahul Gandhi or one Prashant Bhushan or one Dushyant Dave says on a given issue. If the Court does its job and pronounces its verdict to the contrary, then that is because of a judicial-takeover by the Modi government.

Five, both in Maharashtra and Jharkhand, the voters have disproved the faith of the likes of Rahul Gandhi and those perception-makers or sellers in their “ever-relevant” dictum that winning elections depended on caste or religious calculations rather than on any administrative or development agenda. If one heard Rahul Gandhi and read the strategies and analyses of his followers, victory depends on how many castes are with you on the one hand and how many Muslims on the other. See how he is obsessed with “caste census” these days. His underlying assumption was that people belonging to a particular caste and religion (Islam) were all monolithic blocks and would vote for parties irrespective of what he and his allies said and did.

If the NDA led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is winning more elections than Rahul Gandhi in recent years, it is essentially because its electioneering is not limited to the identity politics of caste, creed and region. The latest round of elections has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that people have not voted on caste lines. And, it is a healthy development. Indian democracy will be much stronger if one votes as an Indian, not as a member of a particular caste or religion.

Unfortunately the dominant sections within the Indian polity, and this includes the intelligentsia, glorify identity politics. All told, it is absurd that caste should continue to be given such importance in Indian elections. Suppose a Yadav or Jatav becomes a Chief Minister. Our so-called pundits’ theory is that irrespective of what he or she does, power will always remain with her or him because of the ability at forging a caste combination.

Had that been the case a Mayawati or an Akhilesh Yadav would never have been defeated or lost power in Uttar Pradesh. The same would have been the case with Lalu Yadav and his wife in Bihar and great Maratha leaders like Shard Pawar and Udhav Thakeray in Maharashtra.