“T-shirt slogan for the obese: ‘More guts than glory’” From Bachchoo’s Cruelties
A second editor texts this week to say, not I hastily add in these rude words, that she doesn’t want my usual nonsense, she only wants something on the GIE, the Great Indian Election 2014! In column inches it’s the most written about political election in history, one of the reasons being it lasts for over a month, which even the election of a President in the US, which stretches over four time zones if we count Hawaii, doesn’t.
I don’t live in India, don’t have a vote and so can’t write the sort of confessional piece that great and egotistic editors write about how they’ve changed their minds and are going to vote for Narendra Modi after all.
Neither do I want to gather the statistics from the Internet and bore everyone to death with the number of voters, polling booths, officials, accompanying urinals etc that the election boasted. I am convinced that the Indian reading public has been statisticked out.
Most of the coverage I have read reported on rallies or disputes at particular constituencies. Sitting in London, reading articles on the Internet or in the Indian papers or magazines to which I subscribe (the British papers have been startlingly indifferent to this election), I was intrigued and bewildered. There were too many names of politicians and movers and shakers I had not come across before; too many abbreviations without explanation that I couldn’t find the meaning of. Too many issues of caste and local turmoil which would, I concluded, only make sense to a very local reader. What for instance did one writer mean when he said that Nitish Kumar tried to institute his material reforms in Bihar with regard to extreme Left and extreme Right factions which he attempted to bring together? Or what would I, a hapless Londoner, make of a passage such as this: “The absence of Vijay Goel and Sudhanshu Mittal from the campaign will stymie the BJP’s prospects in the prestigious NCR.
The BJP is banking on Baniya, Punjabi and a section of the Jat voters. However it will have a tough time with AAP taking away Muslim votes along with those of JJ colonies.”
All the commentaries assume that the Indian electorate is naturally divided into groups — caste, sub-caste, sub-sub-caste, religious and sub-regional. They make assessments as to which of the groups is inclined which way.
My naïve view of democracies is that classes vote for parties which by and large represent their material self-interests. So, for instance, the Tory Party of the UK will draw its support from large and small capitalists to whom they promise and deliver lower corporation tax, from property owners to whom they may grant changes in the inheritance laws, from the rural populations to whom they give European Union money and to whom they promise a break from European regulations and, of course, from the working classes who feel the Tories will help them to better themselves. Labour has traditionally drawn on wage-earners and their families and communities.
Of course, things have gotten more sophisticated and complex. Labour has to keep the corporations and even bankers happy. The Tories have to spend money on “socialist” projects such as the National Health Service and in government, despite campaigning on a programme to cut waste and come down hard on scroungers, they have found it very difficult if not impossible to cut the money the state hands out to the poor and the unemployed in welfare benefits.
Nevertheless, in Britain one can still see the connection between a political party’s material promises and the votes they hope to get.
Commentators on the Indian elections fail to make this connection for me. I read that the bhumiyars, pasis or dhobis will or will not favour such a party, but I am rarely told why. I don’t know what bhumiyars or pasis actually do, though I can trace the etymology. But are the contending parties offering dhobis cheaper washing powder, statutory charges for servicing a kurta-pyjama, free ganja or what?
Then there has been a tsunami of reports about the Modi wave. Every time I hear the phrase I picture Sonia Gandhi, Rahul and Priyanka sitting on thrones like King Canute on a beach and ordering their party members to whip the waves back. It didn’t work for King Canute, but one never knows.
May I also observe that apart from policies, of which I have only retained the idea that Mr Modi has cut back on Hindutva and promises something called development, what’s missing from Indian elections is wives and husbands.
Mr Modi, I believe, has a wife but she is not prominent in the elections as say Michelle Obama of the US or Samantha Cameron of the UK were. In France, François Hollande, before he became President, prominently displayed Ms Treweiller on his arm as First Lady designate. That all went wrong when Mr Hollande was exposed as having an affair with a young actress and Ms Treweiller fled the Elysee Palace in what she referred to as a fit of blues.
Rahul Gandhi is as yet unmarried but I am sure if he had a wife she would be more Michelle Obama than Mrs Modi and could perhaps have been the first lady to play such a role in Indian politics.
Or perhaps not. The tradition militates against it. Is Ms Mayawati married? Is there a Mr ‘Mamata’ Banerjee or for that matter a Mr Jayalalithaa? I suppose there was Rabri Devi but then there were the circumstances of her husband resigning which brought her out of the shadows.
There is speculation that the Congress will suffer a heavy defeat and then will regroup around Priyanka rather than her brother. The world knows that she has a husband called Robert Vadra, but from what I read he will not be much of an asset when she attempts next time to overthrow the Moditva coalition.
