New Delhi, new voter

As voters become more prosperous, acquire a greater stake in their lives and become more aware, they are rising above petty concerns, hatreds and prejudices when making an electoral choice.

Electoral staff members collect the EVMs and VVPAT machines ahead of the Delhi Legislative Assembly Election in New Delhi in February | Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint

You ask somebody from the Congress or the BJP what will happen in the coming elections and the answer is similar: 3-1. Of course each side thinks it will get three of the four major states. You delve a little deeper and you discover another peculiar thing: Congressmen rarely include Madhya Pradesh among the three they think they are going to win, BJP loyalists never include Delhi among their favourite three.

The Congress’s Madhya Pradesh predicament is different. In times when it is hard enough for an incumbent to get elected after one term, it would be a miracle for one to get elected twice even if the challenger was wrapped in saffron. But Delhi is a different matter altogether. The incumbent is poised to win a vote entirely as a reward for a perception that she has made a positive difference to Delhi in five years. If she wins, it would be against the run of play. You hold a Parliament election and chances are the BJP will once again win all the seven seats in Delhi. You pit Sheila Dikshit against Madan Lal Khurana in a Lok Sabha election in Delhi and she will struggle. But in an assembly election, where she has performance to talk about, she will walk all over him. And she will do this, in spite of the goodies, the concessions and bribes the BJP has been offering its favourite voters, the rewriting of the by-laws, the reversal of the rent act and so on. She will also win in spite of all the sniping, sabotage, bitching and back-biting that goes on in the Congress party. She will also do so in a small state, right in the heart of the deeply anti-Congress north.

Does the 2003 election in Delhi mark the arrival of the new Indian voter? The reason our Hindi heartland finds itself in a hole today is that the voter has stopped expecting or even demanding performance from his leaders. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, voting patterns have now become ossified. So Mayawati will continue to get more or less her fixed share of the vote irrespective of what a lousy government she runs, how little she does for the same loyal voters and how many corruption cases she is arraigned in. Similarly, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s backward-Muslim vote bank will remain with him irrespective of which friends he chooses to flaunt in public, Phoolan Devi or the leading lights of CII and Amitabh Bachchan. The same, more or less, would be the case with the BJP’s upper-caste vote.

In Bihar again, the caste-religion combinations have now become so permanent as to be performance-proof. Laloo’s voters refuse to give up on him even as their state and the quality of their own lives slide backwards. When the logic is, all of them are thugs, so better to have my thug in power than yours, politicians lose all interest in governance or performance. If the voters accept their misery as a given, their leaders are happy to take them for granted.

Please savour the mood in Delhi against this backdrop. A majority of the city’s population comes from the same caste-ridden states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, besides Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs who have traditionally been the BJP’s voters. And yet, while their friends and families vote along caste lines back home, they will be assessing their government here predominantly on performance. Why this variance? What is the sociology of this change?

It actually should be quite simple and, if you accept this logic, encouraging in times when we have come to expect zilch from our political system. Could it be that as voters become more prosperous, acquire a greater stake in their lives and become more aware, they are able to rise above petty concerns, hatreds, prejudices? Also, could it be that once they begin to understand issues, that what matters to them is the quality of governance and not merely caste or ideology of the leader or the bribes he is offering, they become more mature voters. Nobody, for example, would even attempt to tempt the voters in Delhi with free school-bags with his pictures on them, like Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh. Not many in Delhi seem to be buying so many promises of sweet-heart deals from the BJP’s challenger, Madan Lal Khurana.

And could it also be that the crucial error the BJP has made in Delhi is in failing to understand this change. For a couple of years now, as the BJP has become more desperate to win power back in what always used to be its pocket-borough, it has followed the ‘‘free school-bag’’ strategy in one form or another. The same, outdated politics was played on the eve of the municipal corporation elections. Jagmohan was removed as urban affairs minister because he was cleaning up the city, removing encroachments and thereby, ostensibly, angering the BJP’s voters. What the BJP failed to realise was that he was also pleasing so many others, mere citizens of Delhi who too have votes. The party got wiped out in the MCD elections but learnt nothing.

Lately we in Delhi — and not all of us were, or are, Congress voters — have watched with disgust the BJP and its leaders block almost every reformist step that would improve the quality of our lives. It also so happens that poor Khurana has been at the fore-front of all these campaigns. He has blocked every environment-friendly policy in the capital and here the main reason Sheila Dikshit gets elected will be the improvement in the quality of the air we breathe.

He has blocked the shifting of polluting industry, campaigned for a wild zoning policy under which you are free to convert any part of Delhi into a concretised slum and has paraded himself, along with his peers, carrying swords, maces and even riding a horse in an aswamedha yagna of sorts. Who is fooled by all this? What voters of Delhi are too smart to overlook is that in all this he has been backed by his party high command. So even if they were to replace him at the last moment it isn’t going to help. What is also alarming is the way he seems to have opposed almost anything that sounded like a three-letter word: introduction of CNG, the implementation of Delhi Rent Act (DRA), Value Added Tax (VAT), Conditional Access System (CAS) and so on. What if he got elected and discovered sex was a three-letter word as well. You shudder.

Seriously, though, this Delhi election can be a watershed in our voting behaviour. It should give people like you and me the confidence to believe that as people become more prosperous, successful, upwardly mobile and develop a stake in tomorrow, they are more likely to vote for a better future than to take revenge on somebody for the past. That will be the most significant message of the coming mini-general election.