Usually, one hears of chief ministers being changed just before an election. The list goes back to the famous Sushma Swaraj-Sahib Singh Verma switch hit in Delhi, 1998. Way before it happened, your columnist, then an unduly intrepid reporter, had put her career on the line, sticking her neck out and predicting it would happen. As in, certainly happen. In a bylined, front-page news article. Predictive journalism isn’t really a thing, but the newspaper too was foolhardy enough to go with my conviction and bet big on it happening. Well, it did happen, 52 days before the election, though Sushma’s valiant sixers in the final overs didn’t work and the Sheila Dikshit era began.
In the years since, all parties have resorted to this last-minute call-up of a firefighter. At least 13 times. Sometimes it works, sometimes it flops, sometimes—like in Gujarat—it doesn’t seem to matter who the CM is.
Predictive journalism still isn’t a thing, and, as Dali said, one roll of the dice doesn’t abolish chance. Predictions can be wrong because they’re just verbal expressions of probability-based forecasting, like the weather department does. And you know how fickle the weather is.
Jiang Xeuqin, the Chinese ‘Nostradamus’, is gaining virality on his Predictive History channel on YouTube because, apparently using game theory, he said the following back in 2024: “I am making three big predictions: first, Trump will win in November. Second is that the United States will go to war against Iran, and the third prediction is that the US will lose this war, which will forever change the global order.”
Since he got it right on the first two, everyone’s looking at global order right now. Well, it is indeed wobbling like a Bumrah beamer, even to the naked eye, isn’t it? (And may our good boys defeat the evil Anglo settler colonialists at the T20 final today.)
But like Ghalib, we have other pressing domestic concerns too to fret about. A couple of events would have broken the internet with traffic surge if half our attention wasn’t on live maritime traffic maps from the Strait of Hormuz and satellite images of the Prince Sultan airbase in the Saudi desert, where two excellent AN/TPY-2 radars lie crossed out. The “eyes” of the vaunted missile defence system called ‘THAAD’ (did someone from the Indrajal Comics team migrate to the US?), these radars come at only $190 million a pop. Two of those toys, for us, equals Rs 3,200 crore. That would have run 5,000 rural schools in UP for a year. In all, the US has lost $2 billion… and counting. That’s already UP’s entire primary education budget for 2025-26.
But we digress. Back to chief ministers. We have broken tradition in Bihar by replacing a chief minister not before but after an election, that too one where the incumbent won with a record-breaking performance. Nitish Kumar’s long sunset has been the subject of barbs and political invective. One does not wish to participate in that, except to note that there was no dearth of crystal ball gazers who had seen this coming. Unlike the bad old days before social media, when predicting a Sahib Singh Verma-Sushma Swaraj replacement was a high-risk stunt that could only be performed by professionals, the drift of events these days has considerably mitigated the risk entailed in making dire prophecies. Freelance prophets happily peddle their trade without fear: ‘Imagine the most extreme event, and be sure it will be more extreme than that’ is their SOP, and Nitish’s exit after he fulfilled his responsibility was a relatively safe one to make.
The riskier one involves the state that you can reach to Bihar’s immediate east, crossing over from Kishanganj. From the Chicken’s Neck, all the way down its succulent body, West Bengal is all agog. It has broken tradition too. Here, it’s not the chief minister who has gone—at least, not yet. The feisty Mamata Banerjee was very much there when the last reports came in, like a feminine version of the indomitable Gaul. It’s the Governor who has been changed weeks before an election.
But wait. What, pray, could that august office have to do with anything concerning politics at all? It’s just a ceremonial constitutional post, even if the gubernatorial bungalow in this case used to serve as the Viceregal Lodge back in the days of Empire. Well, going by how the Trinamool Congress’s enviable posse of sharpshooting spokespersons are popping about like panch phoron on a high flame in mustard oil, something could be afoot.
The right honourable Jagdeep Dhankhar (remember him?) used to occupy this bungalow not too long ago. He set a high bar. The present ‘outcumbent’ did his best during his tenure to fill those big spiked boots, but seems to have had a milder version of the Dhankhar mantra read out to him. In his stead, there has come rippling across the blue waters, like the USS Abraham Lincoln, a more formidable, battle-hardened frigate.
We are no longer in the business of predictions. The markets are too volatile for that. But anyone can see a dark storm building up in the Bay of Bengal. The sea temperature and wind patterns are conducive to cyclogenesis, as the weatherman might say. Even the Supreme Court has acknowledged how messy and incomplete this whole SIR process has been. Let’s just say: chances of thunder.
Read all columns by Santwana Bhattacharya
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor