A BJP supporter called the Gujarat polls a ‘haemmorhage’ that patient Modi survived. But he must be careful now that Rahul Gandhi is using political martial arts.
Just a day before the Gujarat election results, a strong BJP supporter (though not a Narendra Modi bhakt), who has great interest and considerable knowledge in astrology, told me that the horoscope for Modi did not look very promising.
I told him I did not believe in ‘kundali’ or ‘grahadasha’, but I was quite curious to know what the stars were foretelling about Modi and his Gujarat predicament. The astrologer said there would be an alarming haemorrhage, but the patient would survive.
Impressed with his analogy, I asked him how will the patient be in 2019? He said that would depend on the star configuration at the time of elections. Clever!
After the results, I phoned him to get his reaction to the results. He quickly responded, saying: “We have known humiliating defeats, but rarely do we see humiliating victories!”
No wonder, I thought to myself, that despite victory after 22 years of incumbency, Arun Jaitley looked grim, Smriti Irani looked irritated, Amit Shah looked off colour, and Modi gave an incoherent speech in the victory rally soon after the results.
The only exuberant celebrations one saw were on Times Now, Republic TV and Zee News channels. “A victory is a victory,” the channels were impressing upon the viewers. The anchors on these channels kept on congratulating BJP leaders for Narendra Modi’s “resounding” victory, and pointing out the “humiliating” defeat for Rahul Gandhi! Party leaders surely needed cheering up, as shock and frustration was writ large upon their faces.
Most Congress workers had been reconciled to the ‘exit poll reality’ of defeat, or even a rout. They had not recovered from the shock and awe of the Uttar Pradesh election results nine months ago. Some over-enthusiastic Congressmen, of course, were in a hallucinatory trance, and were even shadow-boxing to decide who would be the chief minister, but this deceptive virus had not hit most of them.
But once the results came out, it almost looked as though Rahul Gandhi had displayed his deft skills in the Japanese martial art of Aikido, something even his supporters had not believed he was a black-belt holder in. He should, in fact, open up a gym for political Aikido and get Congress workers to sign up – even if they don’t learn they real martial art, they will need something special to fight Superman (or should it be Spider-man) Modi in 2019.
The election exposed the vacuousness of the so-called ‘Gujarat Model’. It forced Modi to “invite” Pakistan into the campaign, to introduce Mandir-Masjid, to bring in the issue of dynasty instead of development.
It also demolished Amit Shah’s supernatural skill of micromanaging the electorate, which had worked in Uttar Pradesh because he had built electoral blocks isolating Muslims, Yadavs and Dalits and integrating the rest. But that strategy of organising the ‘rise of the rest’ miserably failed in his and Modi’s home state. Shah tried to partly isolate or divide the Patels, Thakors, Dalits, and Muslims (to neutralise the effect of Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakor and Jignesh Mevani) by communalising their alliance as ‘HAJ’. But the state ended up electorally fractured.
The rural electoral uprising routed the BJP in the agricultural belt. As many as five cabinet ministers lost, almost all those MLAs were defeated whose defections were engineered just before the elections, the BJP candidate lost in Unjha seat (which contains Modi’s hometown, Vadnagar).
The two-digit figure of 99 is surely depressing for Modi and Shah, as it is 51 short of ‘Mission 150’. It is 66 short of 2014, if one looks at the Lok Sabha poll voting patterns in the assembly segments. The 49 per cent vote share is also a self-satisfying claim, because the BJP’s vote share in 2014 was close to 59 per cent. So actually, there is a sharp drop of 10 per cent.
But forget the number crunching. The loss of face and the electoral base has hurt the media-hyped image of Modi-Shah’s invincibility. The question posed to the panellists by the clever anchors during the Gujarat debate was: is Rahul a match for Modi? The question is stupid and superfluous. In 2004, when India was supposed to be ‘shining’, anchors had asked if Sonia Gandhi was even remotely a match for the towering personality of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. We all know what happened.
So the astrologer friend of mine was surely right about the haemorrhage. The patient indeed has to cut the fat, reduce blood-sugar level, do yoga regularly instead of doing asanas only on the International Yoga (extravaganza) Day, and learn to be calm and look inward as the sage Patanjali (not Baba Ramdev) taught.
One of the skills in the martial arts is supposed to be to remain absolutely calm and unruffled. Rahul Gandhi seems to have learnt that too, judging by his choice to go and watch the latest Star Wars movie when the election madness got over. But the TV anchors were ruffled, agitated and were trying to restore the exit polls as the post-truth reality of the Gujarat elections.
The post-truth may prevail in the media, but it is the real truth that drives politics and history.
Biased biased biased….!!
Not a single line of this article is true. All concoctions of a sick unhealthy mind. I thought I am reading a short story by some fiction writer with good english masquerading as a journalist. Rodomontadely rabid.
Mr Kumar ketkar .
Did he not advice you which yogic posture like Shwanasana or markatasana help you to be more aggressive and become laughing stock in TV studios, So people get comic relief from the mundane routine.
Kumar Ketkar in his fiesta Best, such a joy to read him with his tongue in cheek Humour …. nice read on a nice Christmas Day ??