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An Election Lost For The Flimsiest Of Reasons

The first article I ever wrote for the editor of these sentences came to mind last week. That effort was prompted by something a man called Bal Thackeray said before the 1995 Maharashtra assembly elections: that Hindutva would not be his party's main plank for those elections.

Oh? And what would be its other planks? "Roti, kapda aur makaan," said Bal Thackeray. Food, clothing and shelter. That is, we ignorant voters were to understand, Hindutva is a completely separate issue. Hundreds of millions of Indians must scrabble every day for one or all three of those essentials. But "roti, kapda aur makaan" are not part of Thackeray's Hindutva.

Yes, I remembered that last week. On November 25, in fact: the day voters elected new assemblies in Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Mizoram. That day, I read a bit of email Rediff received from a frequent letter-writer, an always fervent supporter of the BJP and brothers. Reading it, I reacted in a number of ways. Here they are, in order.

First, I was simply incensed at the attitude in his smug words. Second, I was glad he displayed his true colours for all to see. That satisfaction blew away the earlier anger. Third, I realised that on November 25, the electorate may have put its finger squarely on this very attitude, reacting against it at the polling booth.

"[W]hat counts at election time," wrote this man as he tried to explain away the imminent BJP fall in Rajasthan, "is the capability to rake up flimsy issues like price rise."

"Flimsy"? I wonder how the man who collects my old paper would react to that. "I don't know how I am going to manage," he said when he turned up a few days ago. "All vegetables have become so expensive." That's flimsy? There are masses of Indians, like him, for whom the rise in food prices is a serious concern. All year round, but more so in the last few weeks, they must think about how to put the next meal on the table. To much of India, even if we now have Iridium phones and private ISPs, life is food. So the rise in prices of the most basic foods is a matter of life itself.

That's true of the poor; but if the poor are just an unwashed lot not worth much thought, as many in the middle class seem to believe, the price rise is also worrying the middle class itself. Conversations in living rooms and suburban trains, innumerable interviews in the press, the very coverage in the press -- all these tell the tale: Nothing is more fundamental to much of India than getting food enough to live on. Every day.

Yet our smug -- mush-brained, but smug -- letter-writer thinks this is a "flimsy issue."

It's not that surprising, actually. From mush-brained supporter to full-time minister, few BJP faithful showed any appreciation of the impact rising prices were having on Indians. Kailash Joshi in MP, while making the meaningless claim that "we have been fighting for the people for five years", pronounced that rising prices "did not affect the [villagers] so much." Rajasthan's Bhairon Singh Shekhawat said something I'm glad I don't accurately remember, an airy "if people can't afford onions they'll eat something else" kind of dismissal.

And I read a report from Khetolai, the Rajasthan village closest to where the May nuclear bombs were exploded, which says: "The staple diet of the impoverished villagers is onions and potatoes with bajra roti. But given the current rate of the two vegetables ... life is pretty grim." I look back to the few years I spent in Rajasthan, when it didn't take much more than being awake to see people making meals of those basics and no more.

I wonder: are the Shekhawats and Joshis of this world asleep or what?

But that's just the point, isn't it? The BJP faithful don't really give a damn about what The Times of India calls, in a post-election editorial, "subjects that affect the common people." (I'm not persuaded that the faithful of any other parties really give a damn about them either, but I'll return to that). For as long as I've been conscious of the BJP and its family, the issues they have pumped themselves up about have been a laundry-list of the absolute lowest priorities that face India.

Don't believe me? Here's the list, make your own decision. Destroying a mosque. Agitating for a temple. Nuclear bombs. Preventing Pakistan's cricket team from playing in Bombay. Singing songs. Making the singing of those songs, along with an endless supply of other things, a test of patriotism. Wanting to "reform" education by making students learn a language that nobody speaks. Renaming things.

Nowhere in that list, nowhere in the passions of these camp-followers over the last decade or more, will you find things like: Education. Sanitation. Crime. Health care. Prices. Water. Housing. Food. Things that a whole lot of Indians worry about every day.

Really, are those BJP Big Bananas asleep? Are BJP faithful simply uninterested in these issues? Or are they unaware that they are daily concerns to Indians? Indifference or ignorance, which is it?

Not that it matters, for at least among the leaders, both are equally inexcusable. And that, as far as I can tell, is just what the voters in these last elections set out to tell the BJP. They said to the party: "We put you in power because we thought you would concentrate on issues we care about, issues every previous government has not bothered to tackle. You have shown that you are no different from them, no more interested in those issues than they were. Just as they did, you give us nonsense -- in your case, bombs and songs. So wherever we can manage it, we're going to throw you out on your smug nuclear-happy behinds."

The faithful can pull out whatever scapegoats they like, put whatever spin they like on the electoral debacle: but the evidence of the votes won't go away. High prices bothered people; what also bothered them was that the BJP is uninterested. The party got a beating because too many of the faithful pretend, like this letter-writer did, that what people worry about every day is "flimsy." No party with an attitude like that deserves a chance to govern.

The alternatives to the BJP would do well to remember that. Without being quite as volubly dismissive of everyday concerns as to call them "flimsy", they have been as supremely indifferent to them in their stints in power. No, they don't deserve to govern either. It is dismaying that we have to lurch from one set of indifferent louts to another. The only silver lining, and a tarnished one it is, is that they pay for their indifference come election time. It never seems to teach them much, but we can always hope.

So in the end, I am glad mush-brains sent in that note, as I am glad Thackeray emphasised the distinction between Hindutva and "roti, kapda aur makaan." We need to see these family attitudes for ourselves, explicitly. What's more, perhaps the way voters reacted to them will be a lesson to those who beat the BJP in these elections. As I said, we can always hope.

Amid all that happened last week, I was also startled. On two different days, two different men, strangers to each other, asked me more or less the same rhetorical question. One is a tribal activist from Latur district in Maharashtra. The other, a man from a village near Varanasi who teaches Hindi at a Bombay college.

"They collected bricks and money from all over the world to build a temple," they began. "But would they have done the same to build houses for the poor? The lower castes?"

Neither man expected an answer. But I think I will give them one anyway. I am going to send them a copy of mush-brain's letter to Rediff.

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