Cyclones leave a trail of destruction. That’s how they are. Political storms during elections are no different. Preps with confidence sometimes end up in horrible miscalculations, leaving you at the receiving end of enormous angst and fury.
Cyclones are adept at doing the dance of destruction on the ground, and they vanquish almost everything in their wake. Like Michaung, the tropical cyclone that was born in the Bay of Bengal last week that thundered along the Chennai coast. One ought to be constantly alert to those deep depressions that originate from zilch. Even a wily Gehlot can be caught off guard. You may be blamed for wilfully squandering an absolute winning position. With a reason, that is. And the guilt of being underprepared will haunt you for years.
When overconfident opposition parties fail to consolidate their votes and are steamrolled into insignificance by the BJP, some prefer to call it the Modi magic. In a polarised world, you can misjudge the BJP’s ground force at your own peril. Even the sway of social welfare schemes seems to have paled into irrelevance.
While Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh voted for anti-incumbency, MP voted for pro-incumbency. It is no rocket science. In the farmers’ belt, where the ‘mahaul’ was clearly anti-Delhi, opposition parties floundered. Bhadra in Rajasthan is a classic case. Both the BJP and CPM polled over 1 lakh votes, but the former won by 1,132 votes while Congress polled 3,771 votes and the AAP, another 2,252 votes.
Even at the risk of being branded a ‘tukde-tukde’ gang member, I believe that the North-South divide is getting deeper. On prime time, Noida’s overzealous nationalist brigade may decipher it as a call to break the country, and hence anti-national. The fact is that the two sides of Vindhyas are so vastly different from each other and stick to two diagonally opposite narratives. It’s much beyond politics.
There are many triggers: higher political awareness, better per-capita income and socio-economic well-being, higher literacy, so on and so forth. All proved beyond doubt by government data. But above all, communal polarisation has undeniably taken a deep root in the northern part of India. Not that the South is completely devoid of such machinations. Just that it may be inadequate to trounce rivals in state elections. Of course, forces are at work, and producing patchy success. Is the once-endorsed UP’isation of Karnataka in reverse gear? Wasn’t it called an irreversible process, then? Or was the last election result just an aberration? There are no quick answers.
‘Gaumutra’ is sacrosanct, but calling the North ‘Gaumutra states’ is indeed abhorrent. Everyone denounced the DMK parliamentarian’s outburst. The Telangana governor said the northern states represent ‘Gaumudra’ (loosely translated as a sacred symbol of cow), adding that Kashi is in the North while there is Tenkasi in the South, and elucidating how the two sides of Vindhyas are so much similar. On the flip side, southern states may continue to face the music of governors unless the Supreme Court brings the curtain down on the ongoing political theatre, once and for all.
The delimitation process, whenever it happens after the national census, is likely to shrink the South in numbers, letting the North bloat further. The accusations by the South of feeding the North through higher tax outgo while going lean themselves may get louder. Communal polarisation can continue unabated. But one day, when political parties realise that the ‘Mohabbat ki dukaan’ is a waste of a lifetime and that communalism is an easy way out, one-eyed man will be the king in the land of the blind.
Anto T Joseph
Resident Editor, Tamil Nadu
anto@newindianexpress.com
@AntoJoseph