[nukkad] The Gujarat poll results

[zaverirm <>]

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So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law 
for the whole world. -Immanuel Kant, philosopher (1724-1804)
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Friends,
Read the following if you have an appetite for the analysis of Gujarat
election. The author has made a perfect presentation.

Rohit Zaveri.
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Title: The Gujarat poll results
Author: Cho S. Ramaswamy
Publication: The Hindu
Date: December 20, 2002
URL: http://www.hinduonnet.com/stories/2002122005291100.htm

Everything is lost; tragedy has struck; the heavens have fallen;
after this it could only be the deluge; God - if there be one -
save the country; the BJP under Narendra Modi has won a thumping
two-thirds majority in the elections to the Gujarat Assembly. The
major English newspapers and the Star TV, which had adopted the
Congress under Sonia Gandhi as the only possible saviour of the
pride of this nation from the clutches of menials - to borrow a
description from the Election Commission - are still trying to
recover from the shock delivered by the people of Gujarat. How
could this happen? The media is still analysing the results of
the Gujarat elections to discover what went wrong.

Actually, nothing went wrong and that is the problem of the
media. Caste-wise division of Hindus, as hoped for by the
Congress and the media, did not happen. The ten- month interval
managed by the Election Commission, between the Godhra incident
and the elections, did not erase the horrendous affair, as hoped
for by the media, from public memory. Opinion polls, cheaper by
the dozen, did not influence the voters. The Sonia magic, which
is supposed to inspire and unite secular Indians against the
communal and hardcore Hindus, did not work. The voters did not
buy the Congress propaganda that it was the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
which had torched the train in Godhra. Nor did they eat out of
the hands of a section of the media which accused Mr. Modi of
having engineered the ghastly post-Godhra riots.

It was the media which went wrong by attempting to suit its
reports to its wishes. The Congress had to be shown to have
gained substantially since the last Assembly elections, and what
better way of doing it than by harping everyday on the fact that
the party now had Shankersinh Waghela, who had polled 11.7 per
cent in the last elections? Some 34.9 per cent of the voters had
voted for the Congress in 1998 and Waghela would be importing
11.7 per cent of his own spurious Hindutva vote, making in all a
grand total of 46.6 per cent which was higher than the BJP's vote
share by about 2 per cent. The expectation of the media was
arithmetically correct, but politically naïve. Turncoats do not
carry their voters with them wherever they go; much of the
baggage gets confiscated at the hustings, if the defector heads
for a destination not liked by his supporters. And this is what
happened to Waghela's vote; while his followers in the last
elections might have liked the BJP less than him, their hostility
towards the Congress has obviously been more intense than their
disappointment with the BJP. His votes were repossessed by the
voters to be cast in favour of the BJP, which anyway was more
near to them than the Congress.

It was not only the arithmetic of the media which went wrong. Its
chemistry went awry too. The expected blending of three powerful
groups - the Kshatriyas, the Harijans, and the Adivasis - and
their mixing with the minorities to produce a winning position
for the Congress just did not occur; nor did the stand-off
between Keshubhai Patel and Narendra Modi filter out the Patels,
for use by the Congress. The media's physics was erroneous too;
the energy generated by the Election Commission did not, as
anticipated, light up the fortunes of the Congress.

So, instead of staring at Gujarat to find out what went wrong,
the media would do well to look inwards and realise that it
missed to notice the obvious. The Congress refuses to even
acknowledge the enormity of the threat of terrorism. In Kashmir,
the first thing that the Congress - PDP Government did after
getting sworn in was to disband the Special Operations Group and
release several militants. This would not have inspired the
confidence of the people of Gujarat, who had experienced the
havoc that terrorism could wreak at Godhra and in the Akshardham
temple. The fact of being a border State with Pakistan could only
have intensified their concern.

The BJP was seen as the only party which at least had the mind to
tackle terrorism with determination. Add to this the fact that
the BJP has been winning the last two elections in the State, and
that Narendra Modi was seen as a person who would deliver - the
people could not have been expected to support the Congress.

But then, the media could have an excuse; it laid great store by
the Election Commission. Had not the EC ensured that there was a
sufficient time lapse between the sight of the burning train and
the polling date? And did not the Commission wait before
announcing elections, till the Supreme Court gave the opinion
that elections cannot be postponed indefinitely? Had not the
Commission, targeting an individual leader as had never been done
before, announced that it would videograph the meetings and
speeches of Narendra Modi, thereby delivering the message to the
electorate that here was an undesirable leader fit only for
single-minded surveillance by the Commission? Did not the
Commission outlaw all references to Godhra in the election
campaign barely eight months after the incident though it had
never objected to the exploitation of the demolition of Babri
Masjid in campaign after campaign even years after its
occurrence? Had not, two months after the electoral rolls were
revised, another revision done by the EC, again breaking new
ground? And by way of providing that little bit of delicious
extras, had not the Election Commissioner heaped on the officials
of Gujarat and the BJP men such sweet epithets as menials, jokers
and mad men?

In all fairness to the media, one has to concede that this
inspired animation of the EC, along with the beloved KHAM factor,
might have benumbed the best of minds, disabling them from
noticing the ground realities. And the media has, albeit with
more than a tinge of obstinacy, at least reacted to the result.
Two did not. Sonia Gandhi, who rushed with her comments about the
Kashmir election, took four days to react to the Gujarat results;
the Election Commission, which did not lose much time before
praising the people, and patting itself on the back for the
Kashmir polls, has not come out with any comment on the
completion of the Gujarat elections. The two appear to be
comrades in distress, and perhaps are entitled to their period of
mourning.

(The writer is a Member of Parliament and Editor, Thuglak
magazine)







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