The Modi wave

Funny how quickly the political discourse changes when it’s election time. Some months ago, the consensus amongst the Delhi intelligentsia was that Narendra Modi has no chance. They said it so often you couldn’t miss the what-if anxiety. Increasingly, a lot of people have begun to feel that Modi has a good chance.

Similarly, the Aam Aadmi Party, progeny of the Anna Hazare-led Lokpal movement, has seen a rise in fortunes. When it became a party, everybody said it would win zero seats even in the Delhi state elections, which is practically all it is trying for at the moment. Some weeks ago, the consensus was that it could win a few seats, in single digit, in an assembly with 72 seats. Now, a lot of people seem to think it will cross double digits. One pre-poll survey even says it could win up to 25 seats, making sure neither the BJP nor the Congress forms the government in Delhi.

The popular perception of how many seats a party is going to win seems to be easily calculable like the daily rise and fall of the stock markets. Just as you can make a lot of money through the stock markets just by speculating over notional wealth, you can win elections simply by creating a ‘hawa’. If you can create a notional wave, you can ride it.

Rahul Gandhi recently told party workers that the 2014 general elections weren’t a matter of life and death for the Congress. In so giving away that he’s okay with losing the election, Rahul Gandhi has made it clear that he’s not even trying to make a hawa out of thin air. He did the same in Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in 2012, when he went around addressing three to four rallies a day just to tell people that even if they don’t vote for him, he’d be there for them. Translation: I know I’m losing. What sort of a politician fights an election by saying he’s losing it?

If the hawa is about creating perceptions to shape reality, this is not to say elections are about vacuous statements parties and candidates issue, or the gibberish that TV news churns out. But even the real issues of elections seem to be something other than what they are. For instance, if you are following the Delhi media discourse and the hand-wringing of the intelligentsia, you’d think the main issue in this election is whether Modi is a good guy or a bad guy. You’d be forgiven to think that Modi’s rise is a sign that India is tilting to the right.

But if you look at it from the voter’s vantage point, the Indian voter has been voting largely on the basis of the economic performance of the government. This voter voted out a fairly popular Vajpayee government when it said India was Shining and rewarded the Manmohan Singh government with a second term when it did things like initiating a rural employment programme. Today, the common man’s biggest issue is inflation. The disposable incomes that came with rising wages have been wiped away.

Supposing a good liberal-secularist intellectual were to go to the voter and say please don’t vote for Modi, he’s a bad guy, he kills Muslims, the voter might turn around and ask: who do I vote for? This shameless Congress? Again? So that food inflation goes from 18 to 80 per cent?

The dilemma doesn’t end there. The liberal-left is banking on the presumption that if Modi does become prime minister, he’ll be a failure. What if Modi becomes prime minister, doesn’t kill Muslims, turns the economy around, builds roads and ports, sends air-kisses to Islamabad, Beijing and Washington alike? What will we, the liberal-secularists, be left with to say? Bring back the Congress? The danger in that sort of a situation is that Modi could become a Rajapakse-like strongman. His coalition allies could become timid, the media pliant and nobody will hear the dissenters.

The scary thought is not that Modi could ride the hawa, but that he could sustain it. Rahul Gandhi will get more time to holiday in London.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 1^st, 2013.

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