India Decided

After a month long frenzy and days of devising strategies and endless speculation the verdict is finally out. Contrary to what everybody thought Congress has taken the polls by storm. Even the party men considered such result as a figment of imagination before 16th of May, but to their surprise the common man has been kind to them and hopeful too.

This election has been important from a lot of perspectives. Some I will discuss in this post and some in the coming ones.

To start with, strangely enough parties which were in power or supported the power are in danger of an existential crisis. The BJP and the Left have suffered serious humiliation.

The total tally of BJP has come down from 138 in 2004 election to 116 this time. The total tally of NDA which was neck to neck with UPA in 2004 (NDA-174, UPA-179) has come down to 158. And a stark fact is that NDA once winning 57 seats in 1999 has come down to a mere 8 this time in the most important and the largest number of seats state, Uttar Pradesh. This is the issue which should bother the party most. UP with 80 seats has always remained the most important state and any party hoping to make it to the centre must get this state right. Many thought Mayawati will be the king maker or the king (queen) herself just because of her clout in UP. It’s another thing that Mayawati won only 20 seats in UP, higher by 1 seat against 2004.

BJP after the land slide win in 1999 in UP, somehow floundered and could not capture the common man’s faith. Whereas Congress with Rahul Gandhi as their new face capitalised heavily. Mayawati’s pro-Muslim agenda and imposing NSA against Varun Gandhi too failed to capture the Muslim votes. The Muslim community were wary of Mayawati since she was the BJP ally. Mulayam committed a mistake of not fighting the election with Congress (SP came down drastically from its 2004 tally of 36 to 23 in UP). A mistake he now rues in his hindsight much like Lalu and his RJD (winning just 4 out of 40 seats in Bihar). Congress deliberately or not will not complain to have gone for the polls alone. Who would have hoped that they would jump from a mere tally of 8 seats to 21 in UP? Rahul along with Priyanka captured the imagination and hopes of common man it seems.

From the beginning of the campaign itself I somehow felt the BJP campaign strategy is not going to work. They were completely negative. Advani based his entire campaign on the agenda of “Weak Prime Minister”. He projected himself as the ‘Iron Man’ and the leader who actually leads, but the public did not take into his bait. Rather than squabbling on weakness of the PM or not what they really wanted was development and stability. The society here is not like US, Advani who wanted a bi-party system, and a debate like the presidential debate there failed to understand that. When a society is majorly uneducated people do not seem to understand these debates. How many of us would have really understood the debate over the Nuclear Deal with US if it took place on national TV? Most of the common men would not have. Narendra Modi, another stalwart in the party ranks also failed to charm. He took part in the most number of rallies, (300 to mention but BJP won 37 of them only whereas Rahul Gandhi rallied in 127 and Congress won 75 of them). Modi too inclined his campaign towards the negative side. The ‘gudhiya’ and ‘budhiya’ rhetoric was such a low in the entire campaign. It seems Modi’s charm is limited to Gujarat only. Whether BJP is going to project him as the next Prime Ministerial candidate is to be seen though. BJP would have done better to project its development agenda I believe. The Golden Quadrilateral and other infrastructural development initiated and implemented by the party when in power should have been projected better. True Congress had the NREGA and the farm loan waver which were pro-poor, but BJP rather than feeling unequipped to fight these points should have focussed more on agendas like development and price rise. That way it would not have been a negative campaign. All said and done the party now will have to seriously consider where they were wrong and will have to work upon areas where once they were strong but now almost non-existential.

Another giant failure was the Left. The plight of the Left is tragic to put it most euphemistically. They ended up winning only 23 seats as against last year’s tally of 59 when they played the role of a king maker. The Left bastion i.e. West Bengal gave them only 15 seats out of 42, against 35 in 2004, humbled by the rash Mamata Banerjee, their worst performance in 35 years. Kerala’s decision was expected since it was Congress’ turn this time (Kerala votes alternatively for Left and Congress). Questions now are rising against Prakash Karat’s leadership but where were they earlier? There is no point accusing a single person for the failure. Everybody in the party must collectively take the responsibility and find out where they went wrong.

What people really voted for this time was development. The massive victory of Nitish Kumar (JDU winning a massive 32 seats of the 40) and Naveen Patnaik (BJD winning 14 of the 21 seats) only seconds this point of view. The inability of Patnaik to speak Oriya doesn’t seem to bother the local voters because its development that matters. It seems the electorate is maturing day by day. If development drives politics and not caste and religion, what more can we ask for. Nothing can be better for the country if the people vote for development rather than narrow petty issues of caste, creed and religion. But it remains to be seen whether the people continues to vote like this or fall in trap to old narrow vote bank politics when the assembly elections come up in the next few years.

All in all I am happy with the results as it will bring stability which is much needed to tackle the ongoing crisis, and also when the neighbouring countries are in turmoil. Also the country could not have hoped better than to have three renowned economists to ride over the crisis. But again, Congress who has been entrusted with power, faith and hope must be responsible enough not to misuse them. If they do, they must be ready to be in the opposition next time around because if the voters were prudent enough to vote for development they will also be prudent enough to oust the party that misuses power.