Sometimes, the absurdity of strange things that happen in our politics makes you want to laugh out loud. And sometimes, you just laugh wryly and sadly at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. Because if you don’t, you will weep at the sight of our political system being ripped to shreds before our eyes.
On Tuesday, we saw an example of this during an election that should not have been of any great consequence. The voting to elect the Mayor of Chandigarh had first been postponed by the presiding officer, Anil Masih, on the grounds that he had a backache. When he condescended to let the vote happen, the result should have been easy to predict: the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) were aligned, and together they had a clear majority.
But no, the presiding officer, appointed by the Bharatiya Janata Party and is a former general secretary of the BJP minority morcha, declared that the BJP candidate, Manoj Sonkar, had won. Masih managed this by the simple expedient of declaring eight of the 12 votes of the Opposition invalid.
He then departed the municipal corporation house as scuffles broke out and some of the ballot papers were reportedly destroyed.
Why were the ballot papers declared invalid? Well, they had marks on them, claimed the presiding officer. This may or may not have been true except that the TV feeds showed the officer himself making those little marks on the papers. Was he spoiling them?
Yes, declared the Opposition. Oh no, said the presiding officer, when he finally returned to face the TV cameras. The opposition leaders spoiled the papers, he claimed.
The matter is now before the Punjab and Haryana High Court but the headlines have already been written and the news channels have done their jobs: “Setback for INDIA coalition,” they gleefully declared.
That anyone should care enough about a Mayoral election to engage in this kind of shameful behaviour points not only to the essential absurdity of Indian politics today, but also to the absence of any standards: You do what you like because you believe you can get away with it.
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The great switch
Let’s take a more serious matter: the latest somersault by the noted Bihari acrobat, Janata Dal (United) president Nitish Kumar.
The current consensus among the chief minister’s former allies in the INDIA coalition is that he didn’t switch sides voluntarily. Why would he? The assembly elections, where his alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) might have been defeated, are still many months away. And his position as Bihar’s chief minister was in no danger.
The only difference his defection makes is that it will increase the BJP’s vote share in Bihar in the upcoming Lok Sabha election. This is unlikely to make much difference to Kumar or his party JD(U). The BJP will get most of the seats. And even if Kumar does stay in alliance with the BJP until the next assembly election, and they win together, nobody is going to make him chief minister again. The BJP sent former Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan packing. Why would they be more considerate to Kumar?
On the other hand, the little that was left of Kumar’s reputation as a leader of principle and substance has now been ground to dust. His frequent changes of loyalty have come to be seen as representing his essential shallowness and greed for power. At this stage in his career, with no threat to his chief ministership, he certainly does not benefit much from his latest leap across the divide.
Hence the suggestion, made covertly and now increasingly overtly by his former INDIA allies, that he switched to an alliance with the BJP under pressure. Nobody will say what the government had on him but they do say that only this explanation fits the facts.
Perhaps. But what is clear is that before and after the great switch, there had already been a certain absurdity to the statements that emanated from the Nitish Kumar camp and from himself. The current explanation offered by his minions is that the Congress and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee ganged up to keep Kumar from claiming a top post in the INDIA coalition (convenor, perhaps?). Even if this is true—the evidence is far from conclusive—it still reflects very badly on Kumar. What his men are saying, in effect, is: He is a spoiled child. If you don’t make him leader, then of course he will immediately forget every terrible thing he said about the BJP a few months ago and promptly go and join hands with it.
Nobody in the Nitish Kumar camp seems to realise how absurd this sounds.
Blow to the alliance
Then there is the matter of Kumar’s behaviour at INDIA meetings, which former allies are now beginning to talk about. Apparently, he wanted the alliance to be called the IMF. When it was pointed out to him (by Mamata, apparently) that the initials had already been taken and stood for the International Monetary Fund, he was still not convinced.
He then objected strongly to the name INDIA on the grounds that it included the letters ‘NDA’ and therefore evoked memories of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (of which he has been part, off and on). This did not worry the other INDIA leaders who said that the alliance won’t be known by its initials but by INDIA, as in the whole word. “Okay,” Kumar finally asked, “could we put the letter M in it instead of the N in INDIA?”
By now, warning bells had started going off. Was Kumar thinking straight? Did he really intend to continue focusing on the name of the alliance and coming up with silly objections? There was already a substantial body of opinion within the alliance parties that Kumar was yesterday’s man with limited electoral strength. Did they really have to indulge his every whim? (For the record, they are wrong about that: Kumar plus the BJP makes for a formidable electoral alliance and the BJP will win most of Bihar’s seats in the Lok Sabha election.)
As far as I know, Kumar has not spoken in detail about the circumstances that led him to put his professed principles to one side and quickly jump over to the other. So, perhaps we should be cautious about accepting the version given by his allies especially since they are made anonymously.
But it does point, once again, to the absurdity of today’s politics: Ballot papers are destroyed in full public view; idiotic quarrels break out over initials; and the very people who call for the Opposition to unite, suddenly and quickly, change their minds and run off to the other side.
I have never been a great fan of the INDIA coalition, which is essentially a collection of ex-Congress members and Congress haters brought together in an alliance of convenience to fight the BJP. The moment anything goes wrong, their knee-jerk response is to blame the Congress.
But the events of the past week remind us how hard it is going to be for any opposition alliance to fight—let alone defeat—the BJP. Elections are manipulated, the media behaves like the government’s Pomeranian, and so-called opposition leaders have no principles.
So, it will be impossible to prevent Narendra Modi from winning a third term. As it is, I don’t think a BJP victory was ever in doubt. But Modi’s task just got much easier.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
For the BJP, retaining most of Bihar’s 40 seats was the dominant consideration. Despite sharing power for three terms, the party does not have capable leadership in the state. For them, CM Nitish Kumar brings value to the table. For him, the futility of the opposition challenge made this a wise decision.
Sickular Ayatollahs feeling pain in all the wrong places, time to consult good proctoligist.