Election time in India has become a litany of defeat for the Congress where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) plays the magician, pulling rabbit after rabbit from its hat, to the gasp and adulation of the crowd. BJP president Amit Shah knows that it is not numbers alone that count, one needs an excitement, a flair, where each victory sounds a bit different from the last to keep spectators on edge and to make commentary a risky exercise. He wanted to make Karnataka a historic movement , a statement of the BJP entering the south. If he sounded like an imperial invader, he knew he would be forgiven because no BJP mistake could match the consolidated idiocy of the Congress. In fact, insiders often complain the Congress behaves like an Indian nawab before the British, losing to infighting and arrogance long before it confronts the enemy in battle.
It’s the mathematics
There was too arrogant an emphasis on leadership when almost all parties knew it was not leadership in the charismatic sense, but social issues and trends that were going to determine the complex mathematics of this battle. Former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah saw himself as more permanent than the Congress, enacting an arrogance that was unbelievable, abandoning the constituencies that had sustained him for decades, flashing his son’s name, turning succession from a strategy to a party disease. He allowed for infighting while the BJP was collecting morsel after electoral morsel, realising it was the final results that count. From a realist politician with a sense of the ground, Mr. Siddaramaiah became an inflated balloon, a spectacle that deserved to be deflated.
But it was not tactics that created the loss of numbers, it was a lack of strategy, a narcissism that made the incumbent Chief Minister feel he did not have to build bridges, that he did not have to hyphenate with the Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S), when people had already sensed that no party was going to play a Virat Kohli on its own. The BJP sensed this lack of imagination and nursed it subtly, so Mr. Siddaramaiah attacked the JD(S) when it was time to play healer and consolidator. He lacked the vision and the generosity to read the signs on the ground. With a bit of adjustment and political chutzpah, he could have blocked BJP instead of opening the flood gates to a party which is master at two things, reading the opponent and the art of waiting. It also knew how to encourage the Congress to repeat its long ritual of self-inflicted injuries.
But beyond tactics and strategy, Mr. Siddaramaiah was a poor sociologist. He did not see that the divide between town and country was no longer working for him, that while the Congress was still strong in rural areas, its command and understanding of cities was fragile. In a way, it repeated the error it committed in Gujarat, where the demography and mathematics of voting in three cities, Surat Ahmedabad and Baroda, wiped its political ambitions.
Ideologically, the BJP might wallow in the morass of the past, but when it comes to reading voter profiles, it is fine-tuned to the present and the future. It is ready to go beyond old stereotypes and read the voter as an aspirant of the city, deeply involved in issues of governmentality rather than justice. In Mr. Siddaramaiah’s regime, every major civic issue has been subject to benign neglect, from garbage to transportation; and the BJP realised that local issues make for deep consolidations.
The Congress was no longer reading the plight of the city. Bengaluru was no longer the cosmopolitan myth it claimed to be. Bengaluru was changing at the level of the neighbourhood. Even old Bangaloreans proud of the plurality of the city realised it was becoming a city where outsiders lived parallel lives in gated communities. Electorally Bangalore becomes two cities. The first vision is the much touted vision of the IT dream, the Mecca of Indian professionals; and the second is the feuding city, where neighbourhood tensions are played down to sustain the brand image of the city. Politicians should have sensed this much earlier than policy-makers. Five minutes of gossip in any road side café would have let them sniff future trouble. When politics loses its sense of negotiation, healing, of the noise of public spaces echoing with complaint and debate, the ideals of a city collapse. The votes show the Congress has forgotten to read the city, caught as it is in inner-party factionalism.
Finally, one has to admit that its attempts to campaign for the Lingayats as a special religion with equivalent entitlements were poorly thought through. Rather than being a major electoral move, it disturbed people who read in it a certain idea of disruptiveness than any progressive idea of politics or rights. To the general electorate, the Lingayat issue was not central. Their movement was not read as a philosophical and religious rupture. What the Congress proclaimed as theology, the people read as caste calculation and reacted accordingly. Often an electorate behaves more secularly than a political party looking for fanciful options. Sometimes, like Sigmund Freud, the citizen is quite happy to say, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” One can read deeper meanings at one’s own risk or fancy.
Little to choose
Oddly, while the election is a devastating critique of Mr. Siddaramaiah, the BJP mandate is a cautious one. In a sense the electorate is saying that there is little to choose, that the theories of change that Mr. Siddaramaiah offered were cosmetic. Corruption still retained its dynamic at the panchayat and taluk office. Worse, Mr. Siddaramaiah offered little that was different about communalism and community. I asked an old theatre friend of mine, who often sees politics as melodrama, what he thought about the Karnataka elections. He said there was little to be excited or disturbed about. He said the only danger was if the BJP mandate was read as an encouragement to hardline communal groups encouraging them to go on the rampage. Otherwise politics in India continues to be politics, with gods in heaven and corruption and communalism in place, one feels all’s right with the world. The Congress and JD(S) might be tempted by sheer arithmetic to form a coalition. Whether that augurs well for a future is to be seen as Karnataka stumbles into the future. A coalition by default might pip the BJP’s dream for the south, leaving politics an open domain. Maybe there is a touch of citizens’ wisdom in it. Politics remains the sordid art of who gets what, how and when, with a few surprises.
