Opinion | These assembly elections are superficial and surreal, with little politics in it

Shiv Visvanathan

The ongoing state elections cannot claim the excitement or the anticipation of the previous battles. Democracy and the ritual of the elections was once seen as the soul of India, the rhythm which controlled the seasons of the political and made voting and citizenship meaningful activities. However, today the clamour, noise and meaning of elections is a subdued phenomenon. Something has changed, and one needs to examine the undercurrents of meaning that underlie it.

There is a certainty about the results that is almost predictable. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will retain Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh but may lose Rajasthan. The narrative is simplistic with voters still idolising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and citing his achievements in governance. Despite unease, there is no real sense of the drama of anti-incumbency. Modi and BJP president Amit Shah play the current Mughals while the Opposition seems coy about politics. Even in Rajasthan, the struggle seems to be more an internal problem of the BJP than a loss for extraneous reasons. One has to move beyond the logic of results and examine the currents of the political shaping a future beyond the electoral.

Watch | All you need to know as Chhattisgarh goes to polls

Today, the middle class is uneasy with Modi, but Modi stands immaculate and imperious. Bofors was a scandal that could bring down the Congress regime and taint it with the stigma of corruption. However, the Rafale deal hardly creates a tremor. Allegations of bias while awarding the contract is out in the public and yet corruption does not seem to matter.

It is not just a middle-class indifference to its own unease with current politics. Even the poor have become instrumental about elections. They see elections as bonanza time, what one politician called “the Jayalalithaa effect”. It is a process where the dole and the gift become more empowering than the vote. It is not voting and results that matter but how one milks the electoral process to get as gifts what should have been entitlements in any Welfare State.

As one astute observer of the elections confessed sadly, “Yojana is no longer about plans and economics, but a way of milking politics. Yojana in its many incarnations has become a way of creating pre-electoral entitlements to make up for post electoral indifference”. One sees skepticism about politics which now sees it not as a value but as an instrument, one way of milking the electoral machine.

Another observer told this author that this is a surreal election, a contest with little politics in it. It is not so much a battle between parties but within parties to stabilise the structure of leadership. What psephologists and media began, the voter and the parties have added to. Elections is no longer the drama of opinions it once was. It is almost as if politics has shifted to other domains of governance and development. Politics is being consumed in other ways that we still have to decipher. The Congress still plays Rip Van Winkle allowing Modi to run away with the electoral game.

Let us look at the semantics of political performance of Shah, Mamata Banerjee, N Chandrababu Naidu. What looks like a Punch and Judy show between the regime and Opposition, now sounds like a jugalbandhi, an acceptance of status quo. In fact, I cannot think of one major debate around these elections. A sense of interlude, of interval, a request that it not be intruded on pervades the South. It is as if the South is digesting its own problems indifferent to Shah and Modi. It is not elections but the absence of real politics that haunts the South. Each leader sounds both narcissistic and absentminded as if this election is an intrusion into the remaking of politics in the South. Civil society has almost been silenced to make electoral politics look legitimate and official.

Thus, sadly to a sociologist, this election feels superficial, a score without deep meaning adding to the emptiness of politics and the electoral smugness of the BJP. The election appears to be an empty ritual India is rushing through.

Note: Reliance Defence has denied any wrongdoing in the Rafale deal.

(Shiv Visvanathan is professor, Jindal Global Law School and director, Centre for Study of Knowledge Systems, OP Jindal Global University. Views are personal)

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