Hic Hic hiccup Cures?!

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!