Mama Mia! We just voted!

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.
-- Clement Atlee


Clement Atlee should have known, for his victory over Sir Winston Churchill, at the end of the Second World War, practically ended the latter’s political career. This, despite the fact that it was Churchill, surely one of the greatest Britons that ever lived, who had led Britain to victory from the jaws of what would have been a humiliating and decapitating defeat. Not many doubted Churchill’s credentials as a leader and Atlee’s popularity ratings were nowhere near Churchill’s, yet the Conservatives lost.

Atal Behari Vajpayee is facing a similar predicament. If the latest opinion poll figures are any indication, he is by far the most popular leader that India has had since Rajiv Gandhi. Yet, ironically enough, the NDA combine has been voted out of power. Sonia Gandhi, whose foreign origin and lack of political experience had been made election issues by the ruling alliance, and who, by a count of the same opinion polls, is not half as popular as Vajpayee, would, in a few days accede to the most powerful office in the land.

Psephology is a queer profession and its practitioners have a knack of getting their ‘predictions’, which are billed as being based on “scientific data”, wrong every now and then. Yet, each time the country votes, they stubbornly appear on our TV screens predicting newer predictions, only to realize that the voters have got the better of them.

If psephologists must find a way of not getting “foxed” by the voters, the share marketwallas must invent ways of keeping their sentiments in check. Every time an ‘opinion poll’ or an ‘exit poll’ result is announced they send the markets into a tailspin. Just the other day, the Bombay Stock Exchange crashed by over three hundered points; the day’s losses were over two billion dollars.

It is not funny. Such a mammoth loss simply because a certain set of people could not hold their bladders…I know I am being fastidious, but let us have no illusions, we are still a “third world” country.

Election 2004 would be remembered for reasons other than the Vajpayee government’s shock defeat. It was the first completely electronic election in the largest democracy in the world. Trends and results started pouring in minutes after the counting centers opened for business and within three hours, it was clear that the NDA regime had been voted out of power.
What was not immediately clear however was who would form the next government and who would be the PM. There is now a broad based consensus to the effect that the Italian born Sonia would be the Prime Minister; the Mulayam Singhs and the Laloo Yadavs need time to strike a profitable ‘deal’ not only for themselves but also for their ‘horses’ before these ‘horses’ (‘cattle’, in Laloo’s case) are ordered to gallop in a certain direction.

The fact that the Congress Party must turn to the Nehru-Gandhi family to seek ‘leadership’, does not, in my humble opinion, order well for them. Till Sonia took up the mantle of presiding over the party, it had had a rudderless existence. This clearly indicates the massive internal strife that engulfs the top brass; it is for this reason that they felt the need to impose a leader onto themselves. Now that she is the most likely successor to the politically seasoned Vajpayee, this woman from Turin, a relative novice in politics, must deliver, else her detractors both within and outside her combine would find valid reason to point fingers at her.

Then there is the Left. Buoyed by the fact that this time around they have got the largest number of seats ever, in the Lok Sabha, they are getting ready to taste power for the first time at the national level. Negotiating for the Left is an octogenarian Sikh, who has never fought an election and therefore has no electoral base to talk of.

Further, it is unprecedented in the Indian electoral history that both the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker have lost. Deputy Speaker P.M. Sayeed, a veteran, had been elected to the lower house a record ten times. But this time, he lost by a margin of just 71 votes in a constituency of over a million eligible voters, probably the lowest margin of defeat that this election has witnessed.

Again, it was probably for the first time that an incumbent government used state resources so as to further its electoral fortunes in such an overt manner. Nearly twenty million dollars were spent on the much-criticized ‘India Shining’ campaign. Weather India really was shining or not is a matter of public debate and indeed one issue that has undergone intense public scrutiny; my sole intention here is to highlight the manner in which a blatant attempt was made to lend legitimacy to an exercise, which was nothing more than a pseudo election campaign that had shaky foundations.
‘India Shining’ did more harm than good and the incumbent alliance was quite literally shown the door. But the ‘think tank’ of the Sangh, which has time and again sought to morally police the Indian masses, is at it again. Quite a few of their cadres, former ministers among them have threatened to resign from their membership of the Parliament and other public offices that they hold, if Sonia does take the oath of office, citing her foreign origin. It is not ideology that is driving this decision, let no one have any misgivings on that.

It is an outright attempt to appeal to their target vote bank; in the days to come we may as well see an ultra rightist posture being adopted by the Sangh, the pillion on which they rode to power in the nineties.

The Indian political scene has sadly become a number game…Ideology is something that existed till a good fifty years ago. Post Nehru, India has produced no statesman. Even his claim to such a stature has time and again been challenged by nay sayers like yours truly…