And so another clutch of elections is upon us. Even if that elicits a sigh of fatigue from you—yes, elections do seem to come more frequently than T20 cricket series—there’s a wealth of potentially historic moments on offer, and plenty of interesting analogies and dissonances, that promise to make this a riveting affair.
A new flag atop Red Fort? Well, Bengal already saw that a decade ago. But now another dye is getting mixed in the vat. There are stirrings on Kerala’s rainbow palette too.... We have an electoral history with an embarrassment of riches in terms of epoch-making events. But one way or the other, the Spring-Summer Collection of 2021 may also throw in its hat for its share of fame.
Look at them first. Five states. Tamil Nadu and Kerala are adjacent to each other, and arguably closer to each other ethno-linguistically than they are to any other. And yet, barring geographic proximity and other forms of contiguity, they have little in common in terms of electoral politics—or indeed, political culture. Tiny Puducherry, already going through some pre-poll convulsions, has a few overlaps with Tamil Nadu. But that’s about it.
Veer across the map. West Bengal and Assam too are neighbours—but it’s a troubled proximity, a space where political values can get inverted across a chicken’s neck corridor. That history produces a few overarching issues, like questions of ethnicity, especially in the shape of CAA-NRC. But that’s been safely put away, with promises of being opened up ‘only after the polls’ or ‘only after vaccination’. Barring the appearance of phrases related to that controversy, the two states are going to polls in wholly different contexts.
Do we have a common strand here at all? Yes. On two related fronts. One is at the level of the actual contests. One way or the other, in varying degrees of potency, the BJP is a factor in all of these elections. In Assam, it seeks to hold on to a newly acquired regional promontory. In Bengal, perhaps the most riveting and volatile contest, it deigns to breach what was traditionally a no-fly zone for saffron—it would be nothing short of historic if the old Left bastion slips from the hand of its current leaseholder, Mamata Banerjee, a stormy petrel with her own nativist rhetoric. Tamil Nadu politics is by now decidedly saffron-flavoured, even if by proxy.
The obverse part of the coin is a familiar story too: the waning of the Congress, a natural corollary of the BJP’s rise. The voluble V Narayanasamy of Puducherry is not yet (… what’s the French phrase, ah yes… ) hors de combat, but the horoscope is murky. The much keener test for the GOP will come in Kerala, a state where it has retained some of its vitality but where it now makes a wobbly triangle along with an upbeat BJP and a tenacious Pinarayi. The bipolar pendulum politics of old is dead. If that triangle happens to tilt back towards the Left, it would be a loss of face.
And maybe loss of blood too—rumour is afoot of some stalwarts jumping ship to the BJP. True or not, that’s the condition the party has brought itself to. But flowing from this scenario, there may be a deeper current, going unnoticed right now. Yes, it’s only in India that, along with language, culture and food, politics also changes with inter-state boundaries—giving us an eclectic collection that goes on to form an unwieldy whole. But with saffron colouring India’s landscape everywhere, that idea of a ‘whole’ may be getting closer to an institutional sanctification of another sort.
How? Well, the Karnataka Assembly is not up for polls, but it has called a special session that may offer you a clue. Pandemic, a faltering economy, farm crisis … there’s no dearth of topics to be ‘seized with’. But the Yediyurappa regime has chosen to call this session to debate the idea of ‘one nation, one election’ , along with the state Budget. Karnataka may end up offering itself as a willing guinea pig in this experiment in democracy, after pondering the legal and logistical hurdles.
Will that begin something that genetically alters Indian democracy? Maybe not so fast, but the appeal to an underlying demotic psychology will surely be made. Despite the disparate political narrative each state has thrown up in the last 70 years, the idea of having simultaneous elections to India’s state Assemblies and the Lok Sabha will be offered as an answer to a deep urge to go back to a pre-Babel unity, to reclaim some kind of uniformity of purpose. It would be a perfect addition to the BJP’s vocabulary of nationalism, taking it beyond religion, at least nominally.
Would that be good for India? For its people? For its grand experiment in democracy that made it a pioneer in the world? Wasn’t that about the cohabitation of many, made as harmonious as possible, rather than the rainbow being turned into one colour? Anyway, those who do identity politics to affirm difference may soon have occasion to mull over the root meaning of ‘identity’—deriving from the Latin idem, “the same”.
Will these then be a set of Assembly elections to end all Assembly elections? Of course not. India is nothing if not the name of a space for debate. For now, hunker down in your seats to soak in the local frenzy, the quarrels over constituencies, the spectacle of arrivals and departures … even if the end result points to a coming centripetal moment in Indian politics. For, while the streets attempt to tell another story, the formal political realm may be drawing a circle around us.
Santwana Bhattacharya (santwana@ newindianexpress.com)
Resident Editor, Karnataka, The New Indian Express