Elections are a form of reckoning, around every five years (or less sometimes), but a reckoning they are. Politicians, that much reviled category of people, have this in their favour that whatever the record of the past five years, they have to face a reckoning. So it was in the Assembly elections in Gujarat this year, when I found myself in Mehsana, in Becharaji constituency to be exact.
The Bharatiya Janata Party candidate there, Rajni Patel, was Home Minister of the State at the height of the Patidar agitation for reservations, and following the death of 14 people at a protest venue in the State, his house had been torched.
That he got a ticket to contest from there again was a surprise — rather uncharitably, many said it was a surprise to the candidate too.
But there he was, at his election office off the bypass to Modhera (where a famous sun temple is) preparing to face his reckoning.
“The house is now rebuilt and it wasn’t his principal residence,” said a supporter. “It was just a bigger house he was building, and it’s rebuilt now,” he added as my colleague asked for directions to go take a photograph. A burnt house was not quite the symbol of redemption, and Mr. Patel’s supporters understood that very well.
‘The same people’
Mr. Patel, a career politician, didn’t care much to hide the plain facts of the case but wanted me to know that he was over it. “The shooting was unfortunate, therefore the people had a right to feel aggrieved,” he said, a faraway look in his eyes. When I asked him how he’d feel asking the people who had torched his house for votes, he was less circumspect in his answer. “Those were the heydays of the agitation, these were the same people who had voted for me the last time around,” he said. “We are both the same people at the same position now.”
In the electoral reckoning, I wasn’t surprised later to hear that Mr. Patel had lost the election to the Congress candidate, despite a rebellion in the local unit of the Congress against the candidate, Bharat Thakor.
Mr. Patel, it seemed, had faced his demons. As a follow-up, I called up his supporter, the one who tried to hide the location of the torched house. It seems the people remembered far more than we gave them credit for, I said, to which he replied, “Oh yes, but that is a story for this election. In the next one, the story will be entirely different.”
No career has as many chances at redemption as politics, it seems.
