The recent Gujarat elections were important because they enabled AAP to gain 'national party' status. It also represented a historic victory for the BJP which has won seats it had never held previously.
Shruti Kapila takes a different view.
The biggest winner of the latest election cycle is Gujarat Congress MLA Jignesh Mevani.
No. His victory margin is down by about 12000 votes. I suppose Shruti mentions him because he is now with Congress and the AAP candidate did not do well. The BJP candidate had formerly been with Congress. Still, his local support was stronger than the BJP's previous candidate. Indeed, Congress had vacated the seat for Mevani in 2017 though he was an Independent. The question now is how loyal is he to Congress? Will he- like Alpesh or Hardik- turn on the party? He has already complained that Congress didn't give him enough money and he had to resort to crowd-funding. Also they weren't using him in their campaign. This suggests that local Congress leaders think the fellow is a bird of passage- forced on them by Rahul whose Bharat Jodo Yatra is now burning up money that should have gone on electioneering.
Mevani is ambitious. He doesn't want to end up just as an Opposition MLA from some shithole constituency where Muslims are the biggest voting block. He can't rejoin AAP because Kejriwal is a banyan in whose shade nothing can grow. But if Congress can't provide him money and a platform why stick with it? Why not go back to being a 'crowd-funded' Independent with a radical agenda?
Mevani did win his election but doesn't feel like a winner. Why? He foolishly gave up Independence to join a Party which just went down to its biggest defeat in Gujarat. Mevani thought Congress would help him in UP where he wanted to campaign against Yogi. Instead, Yogi became a star campaigner in Gujarat. If Mevani gets a 'Muslim supported' tag among Dalits, then he can never dream of being the next Mayawati. Yet that is how he is being depicted in Gujarat. Much depends on Gehlot's attitude to him. If he ropes in Mevani for the 2023 campaign, then Mevani's profile rises. The problem there is that Kharge may take a dim view of Rahul's protege.
All in all, Mevani's prospects are now dimmer than they were when he was still an Independent. Shruti, obviously, will take the opposite view-
Now, if this triggers a dismissive response from you, try and hold on for a second. I invoke Mevani in the hope of outlining emerging changes in Indian politics, and this is because the biggest loser remains Indian political analysis.
Shruti is the biggest loser among Indian political analysts. Still she is right to concentrate on 'emerging changes' as opposed to changes which are refusing to emerge from the toilet till that nasty Modi converts to Islam and goes on Hajj.
As the world’s most high-octane democracy, every election is frustratingly treated with the same cookie-cutter analysis.
Shruti's analysis is kooky.
Excited data crunchers hold sway as they bombard you with colour-coded charts and graphs with mainly two points of discussion: Vote share of parties and the nature of the swing vote, with some noises about caste or ‘incumbency’ usually ending with ‘lessons’ for parties and prophetic statements on the next election.
That's the sort of stuff people will pay for. It may be boring, but it is useful.
The only constant in the current analysis is the power of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Even if you are a die-hard supporter of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Modi, this is less than satisfactory.
but only if you are a kook.
The twin results of BJP’s big win in its prestige bastion of Gujarat and the solid, if hard-won, Congress victory in Himachal Pradesh indicate that both personality and populism have hit a saturation point.
Modi and Amit are popular in Gujarat. This helped BJP candidates. In Himachal, the party made a lot of mistakes.
To put it in street-speak, both bhakti (devotion) and revdi (freebies) look not quite spent but overdone.
In other words, their importance has been exaggerated. But, in Gujarat, bhakts have in fact prevailed. Himachal had anti-incumbency for very good reasons. It appears that the decision not to announce a CM pick worked out well for Congress though there may be tears before bedtime because of this.
Aam Admi Party’s less-than-impressive results compared to its big talk and big media love-in has confirmed its character as a spoiler rather than a contender.
It has become a National Party. It took votes from Congress. The question is whether Congress will remain a contender in Gujarat. Mevani might jump ship. Maybe he has plans to turn his RDAM into a BSP of his own. But, to achieve that, he needs- like Mayawati- to get Forward Caste votes. Otherwise he will be dismissed as a proxy Muslim MLA from a reserved seat (i.e. one Muslims can't contest). Dalits may prefer a BJP candidate who can become a Minister or even CM.
The new, if unnoticed, story is the likely emergence of a different social map of political leadership even as hard identity talk reigns. Look no further than Mevani
previously an Independent but now with Congress. His problem is that the BJP will build up Manilal Vaghela who was the MLA from 2012 to 2017. Congress made him vacate the Vadgam seat to bring in Mevani. But Mevani may pump and dump them. The trouble is there isn't much left to pump.
and, indeed, Congress’ Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu in Himachal Pradesh.
Sukhu is a solid organization man aged 58. Mevani is 42.
You don’t necessarily need to be in a cadre-based party to breach the zealously guarded citadels of power.
Sukhu rose within the Congress cadre. Mevani was a journalist turned activist and then an independent candidate in 2017.
To be sure, Modi continues to wield all the powers associated with his personality and as a distinct form of leadership of our times. His carefully curated
orchestrated maybe. A road show can't be curated.
road shows in Gujarat ensured more than just the big mandate for his party. Whether it is a Lok Sabha election or his home state, Modi manages to overwhelm any concern with governance and accountability.
Only if they are irrelevant or imaginary. The fact is, Himachal showed that poor governance is punished. Agnihotri and Sukhu went on the offensive by charging CM Thakur with massive corruption- selling jobs was the most telling criticism. Both have been rewarded.
Despite the recent preventable deaths due to the Morbi bridge collapse, or even the long-drawn-out and brutal fallout of the global Covid-19 pandemic, Modi remains popular. Policy-work and the running of a good government now appear too dull and all too ordinary for his persona. To my mind, Modi is not Indira Gandhi. He is the new Amitabh Bachchan.
Sadly, Shruti's mind is full of shit. Rahul may want to be the 'angry young man'. Modi concentrates on looking professional.
Modi has transformed himself into a superhero figure today.
but only in the mind of a cretin
He switches between a statesman-like persona with street appeal to project himself as greater than the electoral process, party, and even government.
No. He campaigns hard for his party. But, Himachal showed that this won't make any difference if governance is poor. The fact is BJP had rebels in 21 seats. Anurag Thakur, son of the 2017 BJP candidate, appeared to be conspiring against the CM. God alone knows who Nadda was supporting. Maybe he doesn't know himself. The one thing everybody agreed on was that Jairam Thakur was useless.
Little wonder then that he dresses for the occasion.
Shruti wears bikini when giving lectures. However, she showers wearing a satin ball-gown.
Modi, after all, is showered with rose petals wherever his carriage goes.
Also the carriage horses shoot out rainbows from their butts.
It is pure spectacle. In strictly political terms, this should worry his party as, despite holograms, Modi can’t be everywhere.
Amit Shah may kindly invent teleportation and body duplication.
And this much is already clear from the Himachal Pradesh election results.
So clear, it takes a Shruti level cretin to comment on it.
Many analysts and academics have eloquently and justifiably decried that Indian democracy is now reduced to mere electioneering.
as opposed to what? Which democracy doesn't have electioneering and nothing but electioneering during elections?
There is plenty that is wrong and even alarming about Indian democracy today. I won’t enlist
she means 'I won't list all the things that wrong'. Enlist doesn't mean listing things. It means joining the Army or asking for and getting help and support.
that now, but unlike many analysts, I take elections as a major touchstone and not just a mere process of democracy.
If there are free and fair elections which determine who gets to rule then you have Democracy. That's the 'touchstone'- i.e. the standard or criteria that must be met.
And if elections are the main and only game in town,
the only game by which political power is acquired
the gamers might just be adapting, if not changing.
Adapting means changing. What on earth is this cretin getting at?
Modi’s script of change from a humble chaiwallah to a powerhouse is no longer unique.
She means 'Modi's narrative of rising from humble chaiwallah to the most powerful man in India...' A script of change is a prescription by which that change can be affected. But we have no such thing. It remains true that Modi is unique in rising from poverty- his folks couldn't afford to send him to College- to being a two term PM.
Others are charting the same script
charting the same course. Why is Shruti's English so bad? The answer, I suppose, is that Oxford only hired her so they could snigger at her behind her back.
even if the scale and success seem small by comparison. Mevani’s spirited and crowd-funded campaign in Vadgam was easily the toughest fight in Gujarat, which bodes well for India’s competitive democracy.
Does she mean in 2017, when Mevani ran as an independent? But Congress forced their guy to step aside for Mevani. That's why he later joined the BJP.
His backstory of consistent fightback from below bestows dignity on democracy.
Mevani's parents were Government employees. He is middle class. He was interested in Theater and Cinema and did an MA in Mass Communications. After working as a journalist in Bombay, he became an activist. Eventually, he trained as a lawyer and joined AAP in 2014. Congress, prodded by Rahul, vacated the seat for him in 2017 because of the publicity he'd received for his campaigning on the Una flogging issue.
This was not a 'fight back from below'. It was a journalist turned lawyer-activist jumping on the AAP bandwagon before resigning from that party to concentrate on his 'non-political' Una agitation which, it turned out, was about as non-political as Arvind Kejriwal's Lokpal agitation.
Student leader, activist, journalist and now in office for the second term, Mevani fought off money, muscle, and cynicism for principles to count in politics.
He received plenty of money and credulous support. What was important, however, was that Vadgam was one third Muslim. The complete marginalization of Muslims in Gujarat is what keeps Mevani safe. But it also means Dalits won't take him seriously. He is just a proxy Muslim.
It speaks quietly, if assuredly, to the power of politics as transformation.
There has been no transformation in Vadgam. There has been corruption.
Mevani may be an outlier because he has bucked a dominant trend in Indian politics.
No. Mevani was part of the same trend which lifted up Kejriwal. But Kejriwal is now a National level politician ruling two States. Congress rules 3 states. But it may lose Rajasthan without gaining Karnataka next year.
As recent academic writing attests, political leadership in India is becoming exclusive even as more socially diverse groups engage in the electoral process.
No. Leadership is becoming more inclusive. Chief Minister Sukhu's father drove a bus. Punjab's CM dropped out of College. His father was the headmaster of a three room village School.
In short, personality power combined with a lack of diversity is making Indian democracy less representative, even as voter participation remains robust. With his modest background as the son of a bus driver, Sukhu has also prevailed over the political aristocracy in Himachal Pradesh. Even if they are outliers, they have become exemplars as both have emerged in an overly expensive electoral system that is all too competitive and entirely prohibitive in every respect.
No. AAP has shown that money doesn't matter. But then the BJP too had shown that.
Mevani’s win also indicates that a perceptible shakedown is afoot on the social basis of India’s party politics.
In 2017, maybe. Not now.
His win comes at a crucial point as Dalit power has all but lost its main party of representation, which is the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
Even in 2017, the BSP made a poor showing. We are waiting to see who will be the next Mayawati. Mevani will have to develop an all-India presence if he is to be in the running.
With Mevani, India’s Dalit politics finally has a charismatic young leader who can take on the big fight and win.
Ravan is charismatic but he lost to Yogi. Mevani is more bookish.
At the same time, BJP has gained unprecedented support in Gujarat’s tribal constituencies. Congress has won handsomely in a northern state
which they held till 2017. But then they also had Punjab which is Northern.
and can no longer be blithely dismissed by the media.
In Delhi, it can as the municipal elections showed.
Despite its new official status as a ‘national party,’ AAP remains hidebound to its Delhi-based instincts.
Its instinct is to grow at the expense of Congress. That's a strategy which works because Rahul is a moon-calf. Apparently, Priyanka isn't totally useless. But we may be wrong about that. The Himachal ministry may implode. We'd feel more secure if we knew that Kharge had made the CM pick. That dude is hella smart.
The changing social and regional basis of party politics deserves its own column. And I have not even raised ideology! But if personality is king, then it may no longer be the sole sovereign.
Personality isn't king. Governance is what matters. Does Bhupendrabhai Patel have a personality? I don't know. But Gujaratis seem to think he is good at governance. I believe the guy is a builder by profession. Good for him.
Modi may or may not have fashioned himself on Indira Gandhi.
Especially his hairstyle and taste in sarees.
The reaction to her outsized persona was the emergence of multi-party democracy in India,
Nonsense! Congress was on the ropes from the mid-Sixties onwards. It split and kept splitting. There was an Indira cult but it didn't last. The only thing one could say about her was that she didn't have a penis. Indian politicians with penises were shit because the Mahatma had told them that using your dick for sex would cause impotence. By contrast, Nehru had arranged for a handsome 'Brahmacharee' to improve Indu's health with his dick. That's the sort of 'alternative medicine' which actually works.
and the response to Amitabh Bachchan’s superstardom was the inauguration of the multi-star blockbuster.
Nonsense! Waqt was the first multi-starrer. That was in 1965. Its producer, Yash Chopra made Bacchan a star. But he was junior to Dharmendra in Sholay. Rajesh Khanna is considered the first true super-star. Bacchan's role in 'Anand' helped his rise.
If elections are the new mass entertainment, then the latest elections clearly show that picture abh baki hai.
Yes. This is only the intermission. Modi will continue into a third term. Mevani will have to find some new ally- Owaisi?- to keep the Muslim vote in his Assembly seat. Congress is no longer of use to Muslims. Rahul will lose Wayanad because as Owaisi hinted, there's no point sacrificing a Muslim seat just to help a retard keep going to Temples.
What about Kejriwal? What is his next move? Karnataka? Is that even possible? Kharge will put up stiff resistance. Still, if Kejriwal can establish a presence in the South, he will be in a strong position in 2029.
No comments:
Post a Comment