By depicting the voters of Uttar Pradesh as almost dumb victims mesmerised by Mr. Modi’s rhetoric, Shiv Visvanathan has devalued the wisdom of voters (“Reflections on the election of our time”, March 15 ). Instead of celebrating the birth of a post-caste polity, he has tried to rubbish a popular verdict as a product of clever propaganda. There is no reason why development should be trivialised while paying lip service to concepts like equality and social justice. If the Samajwadi Party government had delivered justice to all sections of the society, there was no reason why the people should not have approved a second term for Akhilesh Yadav. It is an open secret that the SP government was a ‘one caste’ rule that alienated other social groups by its blatantly partisan mollycoddling of the Yadav community. The fact that it failed to maintain a distinction between minority welfare and minority appeasement made a mockery of its professed secular credentials. Its gravest lapse was the failure of law and order.
There will be few takers for the article’s Cassandra-like prognostications about the possible collapse of liberal political values under BJP rule. The bottom line is that people were more inclined to trust Mr. Modi words than the empty promises of the State’s ruling politicians and Rahul Gandhi.
V.N. Mukundarajan, Thiruvananthapuram
