Columns | Byline

Calming the Democracy

The end of surprise and Rahul’s forays into incomprehension

MJ Akbar MJ Akbar | 22 Mar, 2024

(Illustrations: Saurabh Singh)

A GENERAL ELECTION WITHOUT a surprise? That would be surprising.

The last General Election that went its predictable way was in 1962, when our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s dominance was still undimmed by the debacle in the October 1962 invasion by China. The operative adjectives in the elections after that turned colourful; someone became stunned or shocked by the outcome. In 1967, Congress was bewildered by its defeat from Amritsar to Calcutta in the states, and lost its grip on Delhi although it maintained a hold on power at the Centre. Indira Gandhi swept away all predictions in 1971 on the crest of the Garibi Hatao wave. In 1977, Congress was drowned in the anti-Emergency tsunami. It was the turn of the non-Congress parties clubbed under Janata to sink in 1980. Indira Gandhi’s tragic assassination in 1984 unleashed emotions that resulted in the unprecedented scale of Rajiv Gandhi’s victory in the last week of that year; even the victors were astonished by the scale of the triumph.

You could repeat that word for the results of 1989, except that this time Rajiv Gandhi was routed against all odds. The next prime minister, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, looked dazed by defeat in 1991; nor could PV Narasimha Rao quite fathom why Congress collapsed in 1996. The rise of Atal Bihari Vajpayee left other claimants to power in a flux, while BJP took a decade to come to terms with the catastrophe of 2004. Congress, confident of a third coalition government in 2014, was rolled over by Narendra Modi in 2014; and in 2019 you could plainly watch Congress laddoos turning into ash on counting day. Electoral politics till then often reminds me of what the murder-mystery filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock once said: Revenge is sweet and not fattening.

So here we are in 2024. Has it taken 67 years to restore calm to the turbulence of Indian democracy?

MAYBE THE SURPRISE factor has slipped into the margins this election season. In Kochi recently, I picked up a whisper which could shift seats in a state which is less volatile than its reputation. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has been telling Kerala Muslims, who voted largely for the Congress- IUML alliance in 2019, that Congress is no longer strong enough to confront BJP and they should trust the Marxists instead. On March 10, he said in Thiruvananthapuram: “Left is the only force that will not yield to any pressure….” If he succeeds in instigating a partial tremor, there could be a seismic shift in results. We will know on June 4.

In most states, Congress has been abandoned by allies who no longer believe it can play a central role in any non-BJP coalition. Count the prominent among them: Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar, Arvind Kejriwal, Mayawati, Naveen Patnaik, Chandrababu Naidu. Naidu’s bête noire Jagan Mohan Reddy did not seek an alliance with Congress to counter Naidu’s deal with BJP. The Marxists stand valiantly beside Rahul Gandhi in any group photograph taken in Delhi, and go their own way in Kerala, the only state where they have some strength left.

THERE WAS A SURPRISE, however, in the verbal skirmishes that precede the decisive battle of the ballot. What on earth or indeed heaven did Rahul Gandhi mean when he said in Mumbai that his fight was not against any individual (translation: Modi) or party (translation: BJP) but against a “Hindu word” (shakti). He clearly meant something by “Hindu”. Without that adjective there is no controversy. Is there an adviser who puts these phrases together, or is such ingenuity sui generis? As his aides began to mop up the inevitable consequences, Rahul Gandhi accused Prime Minister Modi of misquoting and misunderstanding what he had said. But you can see the audiovisual record yourself. It says what it says. The most charitable interpretation is that Rahul Gandhi did not understand what he was saying. Maybe we should no longer be surprised by the Congress leader’s periodic forays into incomprehension.

SINCE STREET HUMOUR is the finest commentary on politics, one waits for the jokes of this campaign to emerge. Nothing good yet. But there was something brilliant from the recently concluded Russian election. This story that went viral after President Vladimir Putin gave the American journalist Tucker Carlson an interview.

Carlson reaches Moscow, gets into a cab, and instructs the driver to take him to the Red Square. On the way, the chatty cabbie wants to know what the American is doing in Moscow. Carlson replies that he wants to go to the Kremlin because he wants to ask Putin some questions. The taxi driver is astounded: “You have come from America to Russia to ask Putin questions?!!! Here, people go to America when they want to ask Putin questions!”

In the old Soviet Union, vodka and literature were described as the two religions of the atheist state. Humour was the third faith, in the avatar of heresy. Humour runs like a sardonic beam through Russian society. The Russian mind has more sunlight than the Russian winter. Russians had the chutzpah to laugh at both themselves and the other even when the idealism preached by Lenin had been wrecked on the rocks of a brittle delivery. The much-repeated story about the American and Russian space programmes cuts both ways. NASA spent yet another fortune trying to develop a ballpoint pen which could work in space, and failed. Russians gave their cosmonauts a pencil.

We often fail to recognise that Russia lives as much in the East as the West. It is obvious that the Russian word for emperor, Tsar, is a derivative of Caesar. Less known is the word for an heir, naslednik. The Persian word for lineage is nasl; a paternal line is nasl-e-pidari. Pidar and the Latin ‘pater’ give us father.

THE ESTEEMED BRITISH press does not necessarily wait for the results of a general election to describe a political funeral. This week a columnist of the venerable The Times, Tom Peck, checked the pulse of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: “Has Rishi Sunak been photoshopped? Can we be sure he’s even real? Yes, we probably can, but something strange is going on….” The once chirpy prime minister had aged five years in a matter of weeks, even as he clutched vague straws in a desperate bid for revival. It was a devastating portrait of ambition derailed: “But behind the usual quiet, calm, reasonable façade, the incessant rage hormones are targeting the usual telltale spots. When he tells, for the roughly ten thousandth time, the same folksy stories about helping out in his mum’s pharmacy as a little boy, the fake smile comes with a flash of teeth that lasts for a moment too long. The prime minister is an angry man stuck in angry doom loop….”

AS THE ANNIVERSARY of the horrific and unforgettable massacre of innocents at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 comes around, it may be pertinent to recall that the British colonial press in India was full-throated in its support for the chief barbarian, Brigadier General Dyer. When Dyer was sacked, a London newspaper, Morning Post, launched a fund to finance his retirement. Among the Indian papers which helped collect donations were The Statesman, the Civil and Military Gazette, the Englishman, and the Madras Mail. They sent £9,860 for Dyer, out of the total of £26,317, 1 shilling, and 10 pence.