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Business News/ Opinion / Mandate 2014: Triumph of the spin
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Mandate 2014: Triumph of the spin

The BJP has done best in those states which have seen a conjunction of 2 critical factors: the highest number of young voters, and a high degree of voter polarization

Modi’s victory is a majoritarian mandate also because, as a lifelong member of the RSS, his ideology as well as his appeal is premised on Hindu supremacy. Photo: MintPremium
Modi’s victory is a majoritarian mandate also because, as a lifelong member of the RSS, his ideology as well as his appeal is premised on Hindu supremacy. Photo: Mint

Over the past few days, there has been no shortage of grand narratives purporting to explain the hundreds of millions of micro-decisions that collectively yielded the electoral verdict of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

Much of the commentary has been predictable in its faithful regurgitation of the poll rhetoric of India’s Prime Minister-elect, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi.

These purveyors of wishful thinking masquerading as analysis would have you believe, for instance, that India has delivered a massive mandate for development—the magic mantra that Modi has been chanting right through his campaign, and which was again in evidence in his two victory speeches in Vadodara and Ahmedabad on 16 May.

They would have you believe that Modi’s ascension represents the empowerment of the lower caste Hindu hitherto marginalized by the liberal-secular elite that has entrenched itself in Lutyens Delhi through the mechanism of a Congress party in collaboration with the Muslim minority — a phenomenon that they have condemned as appeasement politics, pseudo-secularism, etc.

They would have you believe that mandate 2014 is a vote against the venality and corruption of the Congress—never mind the well-documented venality and corruption of the political formation that is now set to replace the Congress.

They would also have you believe that Modi won because he was able to establish an emotional connect with the aspirations of what he himself has referred to as the youthful, neo-middle class — a section of the population that is neither so poor as to seek to benefit from the United Progressive Alliance’s welfare schemes such as the rural jobs guarantee scheme, nor middle class enough to be able to partake of the fruits of economic growth.

Finally, in what seems to be the foundational myth of the spin-doctoring that has facilitated Modi’s move from Gandhinagar to New Delhi, they would have you believe that the 10 years the Congress-led coalition was in power was a period of unmitigated disaster for the Indian economy, characterized by a gross neglect of growth and profligate, redistributive welfare schemes. Relentless propagation of various elements of this myth through channels of the mass media has proved successful in fostering a collective amnesia about the economic achievements of the UPA years.

Foundational myth

As several scholars have demonstrated time and again, 2004-13 witnessed, on average, faster growth, higher savings, greater volume of foreign direct investment (FDI) and higher private investment in infrastructure compared with the National Democratic Alliance’s rule from 1998-2004. To take just the one parameter that is bandied about the most, real gross domestic product grew at nearly 7.6% per annum under the UPA as opposed to 6% under the NDA. Yet today, the notion that the UPA has been bad for economic growth carries the ring of certitude.

If one half of the spin-doctoring project was to paint the UPA years as disastrous for economic growth, the other half was to present the so-called Gujarat model—equally a mythical construct —as the alternative that would fulfill the thwarted dreams of aspirational India.

Besides, there is no point in constructing mythologies if you do not have the power to disseminate them to every corner of the country. That power duly materialized — let us not wonder from where — and the Modi campaign expended around Rs5,000 crore and more on flogging the Modi mythology until all the elements of it congealed into common sense, so much so that, for TV-watching India, way before 16 May arrived, the idea of Modi’s prime ministership had acquired an aura of inevitability.

If there is one thing that future historians studying the mass of verbiage around this election would be most amused by, it would be the delicious irony of spin doctors beginning to mistake their own spin for the truth. There is a parallel here between the success of the propagandists and that of one of their major subjects, the UPA regime.

The UPA essentially became a victim of its own success. It presided over a decade that saw the highest ever annual GDP growth, and the fastest ever reduction in poverty in the history of independent India. But it was unable to manage the painful byproducts of this particular kind of fast economic growth: corruption, inflation, rising unemployment, and heightened aspirations and expectations.

It was essentially the frustrations generated by these four issues that were harvested by Modi’s campaign managers. Of these, corruption had become a hot-button issue, as its impact cut across classes and every possible identitarian divide. Apart from the global economic slowdown, it was corruption that fatally blunted the effectiveness of UPA-II’s welfare measures — measures that had served UPA-I rather well — as a result of which the Congress ended up betraying its covenant with its core voter base.

This is also where the events leading up to the formation of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) played a decisive role. The anti-corruption movement that coalesced around Anna Hazare was instrumental in stripping the UPA of any and every shred of moral credibility. Thanks to intense and sustained media coverage — of the kind that sundry other people’s movements can only dream of —the delegitimization of the UPA unfolded as a national reality show, a public spectacle broadcast live.

If the anti-corruption movement gathered the kind of traction it did, it was by virtue of its provenance as an apolitical people’s movement, as opposed to being yet another agitation organized by some political party. And yet, its apolitical origin swiftly assumed a distinctly political force — a force that was virulently anti-Congress. It impelled the large mass of status-quoist Congress voters to rethink their choice, and eventually, desert the party. As we all know now, it was not the AAP or other non-Congress parties that would benefit from this mass desertion.

The unending public discourse about the UPA’s economic failures, in combination with all the talk about the frustrated aspirations of young India — this election saw a major influx of first time voters — has led the commentariat, with some exceptions to read Modi’s victory as a mandate for economic revival.

Majoritarian mandate

But the data, however, say something else. The BJP has done the best in those states which have seen a conjunction of two critical factors: the highest number of young voters, and a high degree of voter polarization. Some commentators have sought to interpret the BJP’s extraordinary gains in the Hindi heartland, especially in Uttar Pradesh, to mean that there has been a sizeable Muslim vote for Modi. But the reverse has been the case.

As this report reveals, in the last six elections, the Congress’s average share of the Muslim vote has been 33%. But in this year’s election, it shot up to 44% — a huge jump. And “in bipolar states like Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, where the Muslim vote for the Congress goes even higher into the 70s, it rose above 90% in this election."

That Modi is a polarizing figure is a truism. That he has led the BJP to a majority of 282 votes without there being a single parliamentarian from the country’s largest minority is a fact. That the total vote share of the BJP — at 31% — is historically the lowest of any party that has secured a majority at the Centre is also a fact. That in a representative democracy, the consolidation of the majority will always trump the consolidation of the minority is simple arithmetic logic. Lastly, that calculated polarization along identity lines is a proven strategy for inducing such consolidations is also well-known.

Taking all this into account, two things become blindingly obvious. One, all talk of wave or tsunami as a descriptor of this electoral outcome is nothing but an extension of the spin that preceded the polls — which, by the way, have witnessed the most intensive, most personality-centric TV coverage ever, much of it to Modi’s benefit.

Two, the numerical minority that has voted for the BJP — 31% of those who voted (66.38% of the electorate), and 21% of the total electorate — is a minority that is either an active supporter of, or has no problem with, the Hindutva project. It is because they are so clearly a numerical minority that they cannot be said to truly represent the will of the Indian people. Additionally, it is also because they are so clearly a numerical minority even among Hindus that Hindutva is so clearly a project and not a reality.

One should therefore not shy away from naming the mandate for what it is – a minority vote share that, in our deeply flawed first past the post system (FPTP), has translated itself into a majority seat share. True, in the past, the Congress and other parties have also benefited from the FPTP system. So, one might ask, why bring up the FPTP only now?

Well, because in the past, at the national level, the FPTP distortions did not produce a manifestly majoritarian mandate. Apart from the other factors discussed above, Modi’s victory is a majoritarian mandate also because, as a lifelong member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), his ideology as well as his appeal is premised on Hindu supremacy.

It is no accident that every one of the seven Muslim candidates fielded by the BJP lost. Even the so-called Modi tsunami could not save them — not even in Uttar Pradesh. Simply put, it was voter polarization, and a consolidation of Hindu votes — cutting across class and caste divides — around Modi that has converted a 31% vote share into not just a Parliamentary majority, but a Hindu majoritarian verdict.

So it would be a gross misreading to regard verdict 2014 as the electoral expression of aspirational India alone. More important than the aspirational dimension is the fact that it is a fractured mandate. In the past, similarly fractured mandates had yielded coalition governments which, as a matter of fact, were a reasonably fair representation of the pluralism and diversity of India. Not this time.

What does the future hold?

Will Modi’s India remain faithful to the idea of India as enshrined in the constitution — a constitution which still uses the words secular to define our democracy? Or does his ascent mark the official supersession of constitutional secularism by a Hindu rashtra? The answer to this lies in what answer we give to the question of what the 21% that voted for him want.

Modi’s freshly minted acolytes claim that he has evolved, that he deserves a chance to prove himself as a national leader, that we should not judge him by his past alone, and that his economic pragmatism will keep his Hindutva instincts in check. They may well be proved right, and one hopes that they are. But so far, all the signs seem to indicate otherwise, at least for those interested in reading them.

To take just one example from the present (and not the past), the same man for whom wearing a skull cap is the kind of symbolic tokenism best avoided sees nothing untoward in the symbolism of doing a Ganga aarti as India’s new Prime Minister-elect. On the contrary, such gestures are likely to become the new normal. In other words, if Modi has indeed evolved as a leader, it is into someone who no longer feels the need to define who he is to his mass of followers; he is who they know him to be.

In the ultimate analysis, the onus is not on those who fear Modi to abandon their fears. As Prime Minister-elect and representative of the entire nation and every one of its 1.2 billion citizens, the onus is on Modi to allay the fears of those who may look upon him with apprehension. But so far, Modi has not done so, letting go of every opportunity for even the tiniest gesture in that direction.

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Published: 20 May 2014, 03:25 PM IST
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