https://telegram.me/TheHindu_Zone

12

http://www.ias4india.com

COMFORTING THE AFFLICTED

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult WINSTON CHURCHILL

This is BJP’s unipolar moment, but the party must make the best use of it ith the BJP landslide in UP, seen as a bastion for regional parties such as SP and BSP, the tectonic plates of Indian politics have shifted. Of the other four state elections BJP also swept Uttarakhand, made creditable progress in Manipur and suffered from anti-incumbency in Punjab – where it was junior partner to Akali Dal – and in Goa. If one combines these results with the recent victory in Assam and Maharashtra civic elections – where too the party did well – BJP has established its ascendancy in national politics where it is more powerful than ever before. In UP, India’s pivotal state, BJP has performed the phenomenal feat of taking its vote share upto 40% from 15% in the last assembly election, close to three years after it came to power in the Centre. Among other things, this could mean BJP is cruising smoothly on the expressway towards victory in Lok Sabha elections two years hence. With BJP dwarfing other national parties one could even call it the new Congress. This is BJP’s unipolar moment, recalling the days of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi when Congress dominated national politics. Above all this UP election witnessed a de-Mandalisation of Indian politics – upending many of its traditional postulates – as BJP attracted a fair number of non-Yadav OBC votes as well as non-Jatav Dalit votes to achieve its sweeping victory. Moreover, parties calling themselves ‘secular’ often take it as an article of faith that the path to election victory is by cultivating the minority vote, and this is best done by appealing to clerics or otherwise conservative minority ‘leaders’. With too many parties playing the same game the minority vote tends to split, while BJP is left alone to reap the benefits of majority consolidation. That Prime Minister Narendra Modi campaigned successfully in UP on the strength of his own persona rather than local leaders or CM candidates has drawn comparison to Indira Gandhi’s leadership style. Indeed, Modi’s demonetisation drive has paralleled Indira Gandhi’s ‘garibi hatao’ and bank nationalisation drives in terms of achieving a ‘pro-poor’ positioning for the PM, cutting across caste or sectional appeals. However, Modi must now use the enhanced space and trust he has earned from Indians to different ends than Indira Gandhi. This means ‘no’ to economic populism and ‘no’ to autocracy or majoritarianism. That is how the Congress empire crumbled, there are important lessons to be learnt there.

W

Silver Lining Old war horse Amarinder Singh provides cheer for Congress in Punjab

W

hile the drubbing in UP polls should force Congress into serious introspection, the party can take some heart from its performance in Punjab. Winning a commanding 77 out of 117 seats, Punjab marks the biggest Congress electoral victory in recent years. And the lion’s share of the credit has to go to veteran Punjab Congress leader – and now chief-minister-in-waiting – Amarinder Singh. The 75-year-old declared that he was fighting his last election and worked extra hard to cover all bases. He quelled internal friction, accommodated rebels from other parties, and boldly fronted the Congress campaign. Singh was helped by substantial antiincumbency against the Akali Dal-BJP regime. The ruling dispensation was resented for the drug menace in the state and the Badal first family indulging in monopolistic business practices through their money power. However, Singh still had to capitalise on this groundswell of anger and fend off the challenge from new entrant AAP. But AAP wasn’t able to build on its 2014 Lok Sabha debut when it had won four seats in Punjab and 24.5% of the votes. Many of its candidates this time didn’t have local connect and the party flirted with Khalistani hardliners. As a result, AAP ended up a distant second with 20 seats. Meanwhile, Congress picked up the majority of seats in all three regions of Malwa, Majha and Doaba. It offered the right mix of experience and change that Punjab’s electorate was looking for. Star campaigners like Navjot Singh Sidhu provided the cherry on the cake. While it’s too early to say whether Punjab can be a turning point for Congress’s national prospects, the party should focus on providing a stable state government and making Punjab a role model for the country.

THE TIMES OF INDIA, AHMEDABAD MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2017

Modi Wave Defines Election

A thought for today

Saffron Storm

AFFLICTING THE COMFORTABLE

The PM has mastered disruptive innovation to sweep the carpet from under opponents Arati R Jerath

BJP’s stunning victory in Uttar Pradesh reaffirms that its 2014 sweep was more than just a backlash to fatigue and anger with 10 years of scam-tainted UPA rule. If the Lok Sabha election three years ago heralded the emergence of a phenomenon called Narendra Modi, the 2017 state polls have pole vaulted him into an unassailable position as the country’s predominant political leader. Like it or not he is, and will remain till 2019 and probably beyond, the pivot around which national and state politics revolve, much like Indira Gandhi in her time. It is no mean feat that more than halfway into his term Modi successfully recreated the 2014 wave to storm UP as comprehensively as he did three years ago. The ripples reached two other states, neighbouring Uttarakhand which gave BJP a decisive majority, and faraway Manipur which has seen a saffron surge for the first time. With this Modi has washed away the opprobrium of the twin defeats he suffered in 2015 when he was bested by rookie Aam Aadmi Party in the Delhi state poll and the grand alliance of Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad and Rahul Gandhi in the Bihar assembly election. It would be gross underestimation of Modi’s political skills to attribute the UP sweep simply to communal polarisation through his invocation of the kabristan versus shamshan ghat paradigm. Modi has never hesitated to flaunt his Hindu hriday samrat credentials. But as he proved first in Gujarat and now on the national stage, he has also mastered the art of disruptive innovation as a political tool to capture the imagination of a rapidly changing polity. Disruptive innovation is a phenomenon analysed by American scholar Clayton Christensen to explain the creation of new markets and value networks by disrupting existing ones. While his opponents and analysts of the liberal variety remain trapped in old

political models that have little currency with today’s voters, Modi revels in disturbing the status quo to enlarge his support base and attract new supporters. He is the “outsider’’ in the charmed Lutyens’ Delhi circle, the chaiwala who dares to challenge the privileged set born with a silver spoon in its mouth. Demonetisation was his most daring gambit yet, dropped on an unsuspecting public as a surgical strike against black money and corruption. It was widely criticised by renowned economists here and abroad as bad policy. But Modi made it work for him politically, using his wizardry with words to cast himself as a Robin Hood-like figure who took from the “wicked’’ rich to help the poor. Voters in UP clearly bought this narrative even as they complained about the disruption in their lives because for those stuck near the bottom of the ladder, any change is better than status quo. The significance of the UP verdict is twofold. It upturns the widespread

It is evident after this round of polls that there is no serious challenge to Modi on his journey to the 2019 general election belief that BJP is growing at the cost of a declining Congress but is no match for regional parties, especially in state elections. The verdicts in Delhi and Bihar fed this theory. But in UP, the BJP fought and demolished two regional behemoths, SP and BSP. It did so by demonising them as casteist and communal. Their crude appeal for minority votes this time and their past record of pandering to the castes they represent netted for the BJP a vast swathe of voters on an anti-Muslim, anti-Jatav, anti-Yadav sentiment. It marks the end of Mandal politics as we know it. The second import of BJP’s

astounding victory is that Modi has swept the carpet from under Congress by taking away two of its key planks: pro-poor and secularism. His demonetisation narrative has made him the sole claimant of the pro-poor plank. The Congress party’s failure to frame a counter-narrative landed it on the wrong side of the fence as a “defender’’ of the corrupt and rich. More worrying is the decimation of secularism as a foundational political philosophy. By not giving a single ticket to Muslims in UP where the community is around 19% of the state’s population, the Modi-Shah duo proved that BJP can win without them. This is a faultline that Modi will have to address to create the social stability necessary for sustained and even growth. It is evident after this round of polls that there is no serious challenge to Modi on his journey to the 2019 general election. The Punjab verdict underlines this. Although Congress won the state with a huge margin, it does not represent a revival of the party. The credit belongs entirely to Amarinder Singh who crafted the victory despite Rahul Gandhi’s little games behind the scenes. More importantly, the collapse of the AAP balloon in Punjab removes the only thorn, if there was one, from Modi’s path. Had Kejriwal won, it would have given him a national footprint. His next stop was Gujarat where assembly polls are due at the end of the year and BJP is facing trouble from the Patidar community which has been its core vote base. That challenge is over. Opposition parties will have to draw lessons from history to take on Modi. Indira Gandhi was defeated at the height of her power when a divided opposition was galvanised by the imposition of Emergency to join hands and fight the 1977 election as the Janata Party. But mere electoral arithmetic may not be enough to challenge an unconventional politician like Modi who revels in taking enormous risks. The opposition will also have to throw up a leader who can beat Modi at his own game. The writer is a political commentator

‘It is a hegemonic moment for BJP … non-BJP politics needs a fundamental reorientation’ After BJP’s historic sweep in Uttar Pradesh and electoral inroads into Manipur, eminent psephologist and president of Swaraj India Yogendra Yadav spoke to Nalin Mehta about the national impact of BJP’s electoral triumph and the challenge for opposition parties: ■ How do you understand the unprecedented mandate for BJP in Uttar Pradesh? This is a hegemonic moment for BJP. Hegemony is not just about crude and simple power: it means power with legitimacy. The NDA government has enjoyed and exercised brute state power, more than usual central governments do. With this electoral victory, the BJP has managed to extend its electoral dominance to most parts of the country. This verdict also signals something else: the PM enjoys popular legitimacy that extends well beyond the usual ‘honeymoon’ period. ■ What are its national political implications, going forward to 2019? Let us not underestimate what this mandate has done. This is not just about UP and Uttarakhand. Let us not forget that BJP has done better than it should have done in the remaining three states. In UP and Uttarakhand there was no strong anti-incumbency sentiment to assist the BJP. And as in Haryana and Maharashtra, it did not have local leaders to project. This is something only Indira Gandhi could have done: a national leader winning a state election without a local face. Such a big shift

cannot be explained merely by factors like smart election management or social engineering or tactical mistakes by opponents. The fact is that Modi has captured the national political imagination and has become the pole around which national politics is conducted. There are two serious caveats to Modi’s widespread legitimacy. One, it is not spontaneous. A lot of media management has gone into manufacturing this consent. Two, it is not truly cross-sectional: it firmly excludes minorities, especially Muslims. By not giving a single ticket to a Muslim candidate in UP, BJP sent a loud signal to delimit its electoral universe. ■ But BJP does have Muslim ministers and gave tickets to Christians in Goa and Manipur. BJP has always had some token Muslim faces going all the way back to the late Sikandar Bakht. The crucial point is that Modi’s BJP does not even want to win Muslim votes. It wants everyone to notice that it couldn’t care less. This attitude

doesn’t extend to Sikhs, because RSS has never regarded Sikhs and Jains as minorities distinct from Hindus. ■ Why is the opposition failing to provide a credible counternarrative? This verdict has again exposed the political bankruptcy of non-BJP parties. ‘Social justice’, espoused by SP and BSP, is shown to be nothing but casteism. ‘Secularism’ is shown to be either pandering to Muslims or keeping them hostage. ‘Socialism’ has failed to meet the needs and touch the aspirations of the poor. The opposition is playing a simple-minded anti-Modi politics, which does not click with voters. Modi is positive, proactive and aggressive. The opposition is defensive, reactive and negative. ■ Is the political clock running out on Rahul Gandhi? Congress’s problem is that it is an organisation where political lightweights float and heavyweights sink. Thus from top to bottom, the leadership needs an overhaul. Even more,

dilbert

Congress faces a crisis of vision. It needs a plot, a narrative. ■ So how does the opposition reboot itself to face the BJP hegemony? This is the principal political challenge of our times. Not just because a democracy needs an opposition but because Modi’s hegemony may be used to dismantle the fundamentals of our republic. A hegemonic power cannot be challenged by headlong confrontation. Non-BJP politics needs a fundamental reorientation. Secular politics needs to connect to our traditions, cultures and languages. Politics of social justice must move beyond caste-based reservations. Egalitarian politics must find intelligent economics. And we all must recover the legacy of Indian nationalism. ■ Has AAP’s failure in Punjab knocked out Arvind Kejriwal’s national challenge? How badly has it hurt AAP? I feel truly sad about it. Not much was expected in Goa, but Punjab is a serious setback. While AAP’s leadership got the rude message they deserved, this defeat must have disheartened the volunteers who worked tirelessly in Punjab and Goa. The lesson is that you cannot take on the corrupt political establishment with help of leaders borrowed from Akalis and Congress, by selling your own tickets and by controlling everything from Delhi Durbar. Alternative politics has to be truly alternative.

Sacredspace Inner Revolution

Exit polls, enter astrology

To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.

The election horror-scope brings fortune for the tellers [email protected]

India, the land of the great astrologers. Will we pass our exams? The stars and moon can tell us. Will we get that new car we want? Rahu and Ketu have the answers. From fortunetellers to palmistry and chiromancy, to crystal ball gazing and tarot cards, our present is in the future and we always want to know what lies are ahead. Astrology is a recession proof industry because future stocks are always high even if the past shows diminishing returns. No wonder the business of political forecasting is to us as exciting as fortunetelling. Come election time and out come the palmists of polls, that endangered species known as the psephologists. TV studios are suddenly dominated by these jyotishis of the election zodiac: is Mercury in Venus for Congress? Has BJP been blessed by Venus in the House of Jupiter? Are Mars and Saturn aligned for AAP? The faceless palmists of polls are called by suitably mysterious names. For every Axis there is an Oxus, there’s Today’s Chanakya and C Voter, there’s MCR and VMR. If the Arthashastra remains the book of political strategy then the pollsters are the readers of the hastarekha of the hustings. Exit polls provide such a flurry of numbers that even numerologists would be dazed. It’s the ultimate hit and miss game, if you get it right you don’t get the credit, if you get it wrong netas will call you bazaaru and bikau. Exit poll fever shows that we’re a demo-crazy but sometimes can also be a demockery of the real thing. Forget the actual votes locked in the counting machines, with exit polls we swing with the imagined swing factor, rise and fall with the hypothetical index of opposition disunity and gasp when a 3% differential magically brings a 100 seat majority. This is statistics without mathematics, jugglery without a magician, all of which is geared to the ultimate alphabet of TV known as the TRP. If you don’t believe exit polls, you could always bet on the satta bazaar knowing that the netas will have to exit even if you go for broke. We may love the 5 day long Test match or the 3 hour long movie but exit polls are the ultimate T20 match. No wonder as political numerology takes over, exit pollsters are laughing their way to the Electronic Voting Machine. Why is voting like palmistry? Because your future is in your hands.

J Krishnamurti

Holi Is When All Boundaries Vanish Mata Amritanandamayi

oli signifies boundless happiness. Sacred festivities are meant to remind us of the inner bliss and oneness that are our inherent nature, the very essence of life. When everyone’s bodies and faces are smeared with colours, all external differences disappear; everyone looks the same. True happiness and love arise only when all boundaries vanish. Foremost among Holi legends is the story of Prahlada. Even as a little boy, Prahlada was fully devoted and surrendered to the Lord. His father, the egoistic King Hiranyakashipu, declared himself to be a god. Hiranyakashipu issued a decree that no one other than himself could be worshiped; everyone should chant only his name. Regardless, Prahlada continued his invocation of Vishnu. Infuriated, Hiranyakashipu devised many plans to kill the devout boy, including

H

boiling him in oil, trapping him in a room full of venomous snakes, having him trampled by elephants – even having his own mother poison him. Prahlada miraculously escaped all these plots unharmed, and his devotion only grew. At one point, Hiranyakashipu asked his sister Holika – who had a boon that made her fireproof – to enter a blazing fire with Prahlada in her lap. But Prahlada remained unscathed. Holika, on the other hand, was reduced to ashes. This is re-enacted as Holika dahanam. The story tells us that when a leader becomes selfish, selfcentred and drunk with ego, he forgets that he is, in fact, only a limited human being. The story reminds us that when we lose our humility, the law of karma will come into operation and correct us. This holds true for everyone. Always remember that we are all interconnected; the ripples of

the

each of our actions – good or bad, selfless or selfish – will spread far and wide and go on to affect our family, village, state, nation and the entire world. Prahlada demonstrates the power of unshakeable faith and determination. Although a little boy, Prahlada had to undergo many ordeals before God finally appeared before him. This shows us that – not only in spirituality but in all spheres of life – if we want to attain great heights, we need great love, faith, dedication and surrender. Above all, we need to invoke the grace of the Supreme power. On Holi, you can lovingly smear colours on anyone – your parents, elders, neighbours, strangers, foreigners, friend or foe. Whoever you are, whatever your status, this act of “colouring” is accepted in a spirit of celebration and friendship. In today’s world, where human

speaking tree

beings and nature are besieged by problems, threats and conflict, celebrations such as Holi bring the much-needed message of equality, unity, unconditional love, happiness, compassion, universal friendship and enthusiasm. Due to his firm anchoring in devotion and faith Prahlada continues to be a source of tremendous inspiration. We need more such people to inspire us and lead us – people whose pure love and fearless dharmic actions can help free our world from the grip of darkness and sorrow. We need more people who are selfless and who are full of compassion and love. The joyful participation we feel during festivals and celebrations transcends the mind and intellect. It is wholehearted. There is a deep feeling of love in it. We need to put in effort to sustain this celebratory spirit in all of our activities throughout our lives. Follow Mata Amritanandamayi at speakingtree.in