The (mis)use of collective emotion vs public reason in the run-up to elections is rife. Political parties routinely play them against each other, and this cynicality equally often leads to the privileging of irrationality over acumen. This often-subliminal impairing of the public mind becomes increasingly conspicuous and blatant the closer one gets to the elections. In the background are political strategists calculating which emotional triggers—fear, anger, yearning, hope—will best serve the consolidation or expansion of their party.
As Andrew Beatty said in his Emotional Worlds: Beyond an Anthropology of Emotion, feelings are “not merely reactive or motivating, but orientating and informing”—or, by extension, misorientating and misinforming.
This mindgame is unfolding as we speak. Not that the reason vs emotion dynamic is a newfangled one: while it was not a defining feature of the Nehruvian years when the country was busy pulling itself up by its bootstraps, Indira Gandhi was too wily to not exploit a psychological electoral rift that had been tailor-made for democracies in and by the US.
This dynamic went on to characterise her long years in power. Mrs Gandhi was voted out by an unexpected overspilling of popular logic against the anti-democratic desolation of her Emergency. What had led her to hold the elections, in the first place, was, according to her coterie, her misbelief that she would win through a popular mandate: emotionalism.
Over the past few decades, emotionalism has been engineered to become the primum mobile of Indian electoral behaviour. Facts playing second fiddle is a corollary of the near-unstoppable declivity of Aristotelian reason.
Take the controversy centred on multi-portfolio minister Satyendar Jain who, while lodged in Tihar jail as an undertrial after being chargesheeted with money laundering, was caught on CCTV receiving a post-surgery foot-and-head massage by not a physiotherapist but a prisoner. The BJP, aiming to retain both Gujarat against an AAP incursion and the Delhi municipal corporations, wants voters to react with emotive consternation to a cabinet minister receiving a massage from an untrained malishiya, Rinku, chargesheeted for statutory rape under POCSO. Both these jailbirds are undertrials: they have not yet been convicted.
How rational is this discomposure? First, the classist commandeering of haute confort is commonplace in India’s jails: the rich, the political, and the powerful have always managed their luxuries—mobile phones, home food, hot water, fat mattresses, duvets. Second, none of the jail manuals in play—the Delhi Jail Manual, or the Delhi Jail Manual, 2018, or the Delhi Prisons Act, 2000, or even the Model Prison Manual drawn up by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD) in 2016 to bring incarceration in line with international standards—is unambiguous about prisoners fraternising.
Going by the Model Prison Manual, Rinku could be guilty of “Performing any portion of the task allotted to another prisoner”, and Jain of “obtaining unauthorised assistance of another prisoner in the performance of one’s own task”.
Was Jain informed, as he should have been, of CCTV surveillance in his cell? Second, is it possible that he took the permission of the medical officer for his massage? Third, doesn’t the mere act of videoing Jain constitute a defiance of the fundamental Right to Privacy—vide Justice K S Puttaswamy (Retd) vs Union of India (2018)—under Part III of the Indian Constitution? On the face of it, installing security cameras in cells violates the basic principle of not only Article 21, but also of Article 14 (Right to Equality) and Article 19 (Right to Freedom).
The BJP is highlighting that Jain’s food included fruits and nuts. Neither is part of the prison diet—but an undertrial can arrange for “outside food”. Jain’s non-prison clothing has also become a media issue—notwithstanding that undertrials are allowed “usual private clothing”.
Buried by this deliberately overheated mess is a rational fear of every Delhiïte (indeed, every Indian): rampaging, deathly pollution, which, peaking at wintertime, should have preoccupied political psychoengineering. But politicians seem to have realised that the resolution of megalopolitan pollution depends upon the goodwill of a neighbouring state where stubble-burning is a hideously complex agronomic omnishambles unlikely to be rectified for at least a decade.
Meanwhile, another long opera is being played out in the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Rahul Gandhi said that the Great Walk was not meant to garner votes but was his personal tapasya. Difficult as it is to come to rational terms with a personal odyssey that costs hundreds of crores of rupees, its emotive intent is transparent. The yatra is hard-selling unadulterated hope—of a nation undivided by religion, caste, or class; an emotion, while lofty, that our rationally sceptical mind tells us might remain unfruited. Its value was premised on being unbroken by the schismatic exigencies of politics. But reason intruded—and Rahul bent to in-party grousing about unrealism with a campaign break in Gujarat, a state that he had initially pointedly circumvented, indicating its unimportance in his emergent schema of Congress politics.
Will this parachuted intervention by Rahul help turn the tide in Gujarat for the Congress? I would be surprised if fence-sitters viewed it as a tipping point. Could it work in favour of the Congress? Only someone overburdened with weltschmerz would doubt that the yatra could glue together a lately sundered Congress. In contemporary India, the yatra is groundbreaking because it seeks to propagate honesty and altruism as political forces.
The truth, however, is that the first is a reasonable doubt; the second is pure belief. One begs analysis; the other, faith. But we are able, as humans, to juggle the two sides of a dichotomy without being undone by erratic legerdemain that often ends in our dropping the ball of nous.
And so has it come to pass: we are becoming slaves to electoral unreason.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist