From May to September

The lesson Modi & BJP should take away from the 2014 election results is that they are a centre-right govt elected to bring about change within the larger constitutional framework.

A file photo of BJP supporters | Photo: Manisha Mondal | ThePrint

This must be our most over-analysed set of by-elections ever. One obvious reason is that these relieve us from the withdrawal symptoms after the May result. The second, psephology is now our greatest national obsession after cricket and the Sensex. And the third, these have produced a surprise that lends itself to so many generalisations that there is something there for everybody. Let’s first get these out of the way.

If you dislike the BJP, you’d say Modi and his arrogant party have got their comeuppance. This is evidence also that “communal forces” can be thrashed only if the “secular” vote is consolidated, and that it thus begins Modi’s journey downhill, ends his honeymoon. If you are from the Congress (anybody still out there?), you’d see signs of revival in Rajasthan and Gujarat. The BJP could say these are just a sprinkle of diverse verdicts in disparate political geographies and quite meaningless. All of these are wrong.

Here are some generalisations, however, that may be arguable. One, that while this is no verdict on Modi’s performance, it certainly tells us that, post-May 16, politics is resuming as normal. That in the summer the voter was driven by twin motivations of throwing out the UPA and bringing in a credible, convincing alternative in Modi. Both objectives were fully met, so the voter is back to weighing multiple local and national factors, from economics to identity.

Let’s first examine and demolish the Left-liberal conclusion: that it is all about consolidation of the secular/communal vote, that in the summer Amit Shah got the Hindus together while the rest were divided, and first Bihar and now Uttar Pradesh have shown how this is reversed the moment the “rest” come together. There is some truth to it, but only some, because polarisation is a game that, by definition, two should be able to play. But it has severe limitations, as exposed by the BJP sweep this summer in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, which were straight contests with no excuse of vote division, and the turnaround in the byelections now in the first two. This theory is also flawed in giving the Indian voter too little credit for her judgement.

I know the hard-secular group would insist on this because it fits nicely with its first, and equally complacent and convenient, formulation: that the verdict of May was no more than a Hindu consolidation. It presumes that if you are a genuinely secular Hindu, you will persist with voting in Congress-Left governments, no matter how lousy their performance. People of India now have choices. In any case, this post-ideological generation of Indians is no longer neurotic about threats to their fundamental constitutional principles. Any departure from these would, in fact, be seen as a betrayal and sternly corrected. Which is precisely what seems to have happened in Uttar Pradesh just as the BJP allowed its agenda to be shifted from achche din to “love jihad”.

They were thrashed not because this scared the Muslim vote into consolidation, helped along by Mayawati’s abstention, but because a large number of Hindus punished the BJP for betraying their trust. You want evidence, look at the truly humongous margins of BJP candidates’ defeat in UP (Hamirpur 68,556; Charkhari more than 50,000; Nighasan 45,976). Incredibly, the party has fallen close to its 2012 vote base. Both pro- and anti-BJP forces are missing the most important point, that India is a secular country, and even more so than ever in the past, also because a vast majority of its Hindus and not just the minorities want it to be so. One side blames a minority consolidation through politics of appeasement for what it calls pseudo-secularism; the other sees its mirror image, a majoritarian herd, as the rise of a state of the Hindu Right.

In the hierarchy of lazy, self-delusional ideas, the BJP sits on the top simply because India is its to rule for at least the next five years. But remember, for now only for the next five years. Talk of a 10 or 15-year reign is heady, but silly and irritates the voter. The party, or more specifically its ideological vanguard, seems to have misread the 2014 national verdict, much as the Congress party did 2009. That was a vote for growth, a reposing of trust in Manmohan Singh and an aspirational restatement where the party or its allies swept almost all of urban India. Yet, its leaders and pundits drew the conclusion they preferred, that it was a vote for povertarian welfarism and so pushed hard in that direction. We saw the political disgrace this led the Congress to. Now, it seems the BJP, or its own 10 Janpath (that is, Nagpur), made a similar and deliberate miscalculation, seeing 2014 as a vote for hard Hindutva. Never mind that through the campaign Modi had been so correct. It was not an ideological or communal vote, but his party’s right hijacked the agenda, from governance to “love jihad”, once again stoking the peculiar and intriguing Indian phenomenon of the majority nursing a minority complex. It was a reality once, and for long, but is no longer so.

In an on-record conversation, I asked Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee how he, a Communist chief minister of West Bengal, could justify his economic reform. A pause, two puffs, and he said he ran a government of the Left but functioned within the larger national polity and constitutional framework. “We are not running a revolutionary government here, we work within the system, ” he said.

That is a lesson Modi and his BJP need to take away from these results. That they are a government of the centre-right, elected to bring about change within the larger constitutional framework. The BJP can succeed as a party of change, but were it to delude itself into believing it had become a party of revolution, electoral punishment will be severe. In democracies governments change, but the regime doesn’t, however loosely that term is used these days. These byelections only highlight the limits within which political change must be manoeuvred. And confined.

Meanwhile: Former CAG Vinod Rai’s memoir looks a bit of a dud compared to Natwar Singh’s. You can see why. Attacking Manmohan Singh simply doesn’t have the same oomph as targeting Sonia. I would never question Rai’s integrity, courage, lack of post-retirement greed. I may quibble with a couple of zeros to the left of the decimal in his presumptive loss figures, but perhaps some sensationalism was needed to rouse our lazy conscience. My argument is confined to his notion of performance audit. If auditors could guarantee performance, our struggling PSUs would have been the most profitable companies in the world with their five-level audit.

Which reminds me of another story to tell you how auditors should also think twice before they get too sanctimonious.

I was among the many editors approached by senior chartered accountant friends to write blurbs for a book of poetry written by a top officer of the CAG. Why were these powerful private sector CAs so interested? Because the CAG is the final auditor for their most lucrative PSU clients. I am making two confessions here. The first that I wrote a fair and safe blurb without reading the book (I didn’t inherit a gene for poetry), the second in a bit. My line, something like how fascinating it was to discover a poet in somebody who spent his life with numbers, shared the back-flap with the high, mighty and wise, from APJ Abdul Kalam to Vir Sanghvi. I, however, gratefully declined the invitation to release the book on May 21 2010, pleading that I would be out of town. So here, my second confession: I had lied.

I got caught out. I walked in to New Delhi’s new socio-cultural hub to receive Sheila Dikshit as chief guest at the convocation of a tiny media school we ran out of the newspaper I then edited, and was surprised by an equally surprised auditor-poet. “I am so glad you cancelled your travel, please come in,” he said, ushering me into a full hall next to the venue of our convocation.

I recovered to soak in the scene. Vir Sanghvi sat in the front as chief guest, looking uncharacteristically bemused. Of course, the proud boss, Vinod Rai, was there too; he had even written the foreword. But most importantly, my reporter’s eye caught the then ONGC chairman, and the backdrop told you why. ONGC was sponsoring the show. It was some show, including a suitably eastern-looking boy and girl with silk sashes across their trunks reading Yin and Yang, respectively, representing the book’s theme, handing out a crisp, deep pink orchid to each guest. It did occur to me that one day I’d ask the CAG a question about the auditor’s brilliant work sponsored by one of his biggest auditees. I finally have my opportunity now. But I learnt a lesson too. Never lie to avoid a commitment, say a straight yes or no.