I have been trying to make sense of
the results of the Delhi elections. I am not sure if I should be happy that the
BJP didn’t make it, depressed that the Congress has been pretty much wiped out,
or frustrated that AAP has got one more opportunity! Nonetheless, I am trying
to give this specific result some kind of a perspective and realize that any
attempt to do so, points to just one thing - anti incumbency! I am going to try
and explain this in as annoying a manner as possible – because there is no other
way. Any rational, logical, and intellectual debate on this would mean pushing
a mode of explanation (or ‘paradigm’ which is the fashionable word) to the
point that it would go no further.
So, what caused the AAP victory? By
and large we tend to look for ‘causes’ of things we dislike. We will look for the causes for divorce and never
for marriage; causes of hate, never ever for love; reasons for corruption,
hardly ever for honesty; explore with vengeance the causes for violence, but
turn a blind eye to… let’s just say gentleness! We dislike diseases because
they are by definition abnormal states. The normal state is marriage / love /
honesty / gentleness (or whatever) and this gets derailed in abnormal
circumstances. In the case of violence,
the cause (to quote the psychologist Robin Fox) is “ ‘frustration aggression
hypothesis’ which again assumes the not so aggressive state to be normal, but
derailed by frustration”! AAP did not come in to power because of its 70-point
action plan. (It would be a wonder if 50% of it will be achieved. The optimist
in me hopes that they would). The AAP victory, in more ways than one, is the
result of voters’ expression of violence – a frustration that we saw at work
during the 2014 general elections and which repeated itself with the Delhi
polls!
The fundamental reason (there could be
many more) for the BJP win in May of last year was largely due to the
frustration of the masses towards the silence and regression experienced in the
last decade thanks to the UPA. It was an expression of passive aggressive
violence of an entire nation fervently crying out for speed, growth and
visibility. The mandate was a ‘survival
value’ attributed to the very group that administered the mandate. The Delhi assembly results is a take 2 of
the same scene - a group that resorted with passive aggressive violence to the
nonsense experienced in the last 10 months.
So what has happened in the last 10
months? We have managed to improve our
relations with some of our neighbours, except Pakistan (this is a dream long
lost), built celebrity bridges with the US and closed the nuclear deal, managed
to get the maximum number of bills and ordinances passed during the winter
session, (bills that have languished otherwise for no apparent reason); logged
in greater number of work hours in the Lok Sabha! There are plenty of positives
that provide for a good, intellectual, outcome related and impactful debate. These
deliberations are essential, however, not something that will grip our attention
for long. The positives accomplished were ‘meeting expectations’, at the very
least!
What the BJP needs to understand is
that getting an electoral mandate is like getting ready for some amount of pub
violence. The violence was inevitable! Pubs are venues where there is no
display of reticence and hence conflicts easily provoked. What’s interesting is
the assumption that most people are
not appalled or disgusted. The rationale being people will get drunk, and therefore
will act unpredictable. They become the experimental monkeys whose amygdalas
have been hijacked, and who therefore cannot get a sequence right. What happens in ‘normal/sober circumstances’
is that people are not drunk and are able to appeal to the crowd for support
without being intimidating, as during an election campaign. The state of mind continues when people are
not ‘that drunk’; individuals are aware that they are in a conflict situation
and make an effort to go by the rules; as in a coalition! Within the ambit of
an alliance, individuals react only when the sequence is not respected and it
is at that very moment when drunken spectators interfere and they typically do
so at the wrong moment which in turn leads to a nation wide regression.
In an electoral mandate, there walks
in the motorcycle gang with the bent of mischief and that is when the rest
would want to either fight or run like hell. Reflect this analogy to the last
10months. The bizarre and frivolous comments with respect to the number of
children that women should bear, the repulsive name calling by some of the saffron
clad elected, the ludicrous Ghar wapsi controversy, …these are to name just a
few! These are the individuals (partially or perhaps completely power drunk) in
the pub of national politics whose behaviour is akin to the motorcycle gang that does not care for any kind of progress or growth. They have unleashed their
individual agendas and the centre (intentionally or not) ignores them, which in
turn leads to a panic and /or ‘make hay while the sun shines’ situation. The
people who awarded the mandate are now the experimental group in the throes of the amygdala hijack. They are conditioned to panic and thus they will. It doesn’t
really matter if a maximum number of bills and ordinances got passed this year
round (when compared to the last decade); who cares if the price of petrol /
diesel have been slashed; how does it matter if the nuclear deal has seen its
day; we really couldn’t care if foreign investments have been on the rise and
our markets are doing much better than ever before. We are threatened, the
brain is programmed for threat as a survival instinct and thus we will in a
state of passive aggression pull back what we had awarded. The Delhi results
are a way of saying ‘Get your house in
order’.
Even if we were to make this an
intellectual debate (which can be equally annoying), the narrative goes against
the BJP. The agenda of the BJP government and forcefully broadcasted by the PM
has been ‘more power to states’. This is based on the rationale that the centre should in effect be the support system and play the role of being an enabler to
the local /state governments. For all practical purposes, for a political party
to believe in it, and propagate it, one would infer that it would be based on
the assumption that the state would pretty much display the saffron colour! The
Delhi campaign, or for that matter, any of the state elections post May 2014 is
a contradiction in terms to the mantra of ‘more power to states’. The chief
campaigner has been the PM and not the state party chief/ leader thereby making
a political statement that there is no state under a leader who could be sure
of winning on his own accord. The
campaign has hardly been issue based. Maharashtra was more of yes-no dilly
dallying between the BJP and Shiv Sena; Jharkhand was a no brainer given the abysmal
health of the state; Haryana was a foregone conclusion! That leaves us with
Delhi.
The biggest blooper of the BJP was its
CM candidate. The reasons cited qualify for the bizarre. Presumably, she is the
ideal for many women in the country! I struggle to recall a women’s leadership
seminar where Kiran Bedi has got any good ratings. She has been looked up to
for being the first woman IPS officer which cannot be seen as a qualification and
definitely not a a brownie point for being a CM candidate. It is akin to the
first woman going to school / college / walking in to a place of work! About
time!!!! Presumably, Kiran Bedi is someone who will get things done and speaks
her mind. True, and that would be on the 9pm national debates where she reels
out her opinions like bullet points off a power point presentation. Her performance during the campaign was the
worst of the lot. She projected herself as a ‘yes sir’ with no mind of her
own. There was no way she would live up
to the slogan of ‘more power to states’! She, like the Delhi police, would
report to the central and not the state government! The overwhelming majority
of AAP is more an anti-BJP; not so much a pro AAP! A protesting Er(wind) is more reliable than a
spineless K-k-k-kiran!
The Delhi results are much more than a
wake-up call for the centre. The writing on the wall is clear - Get your act in
place! In the pub of politics, please ensure that you have your bouncers who will
throw out the ill-behaved power drunk barging in motorcyclists!!!!! Stay
focused on the national agenda and not that of your ‘Teacher’s’!!!!! Remember,
the electorate is just a few drinks behind and may soon take on the role of
bouncers in the absence of yours!
