The most agonising moments for candidates, political parties and their supporters are on counting day. Despite all the claims of psephologists and pollsters, voters have a habit of administering nasty shocks — and some pleasant surprises. One has only to look back at counting day in 2004. The Bharatiya Janata Party was cock-a-hoop, confident of winning another term for the Vajpayee government after unveiling its “India Shining” theme. Party strategists were already planning their policies for the new term.
It took the BJP years to get over the shock of defeat, with the Congress being able to cobble together a coalition. Perhaps the most abiding image of that time was BJP leader Sushma Swaraj’s theatricals in suggesting that she would shave off her head if the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi became Prime Minister. For the media, it was a great story, harking back as it did to the Hindu tradition of grieving widows.
Sometimes, of course, opinion polls get it almost right, and for the next five years their promoters have bragging rights on how good they were. But psephology is by its nature an inexact science extrapolating sample numbers and a time frame to what might occur on the actual voting day.
Astrologers and pundits welcome the period leading to counting day. It is their manna from heaven. Most Indian politicians, including a surprising number of men with a reputation for a modern outlook, become avid fans of soothsayers. They have invested so much in their election that their world falls apart if they lose, although the wilier ones find other routes to the ladder of success, through the Rajya Sabha or positions that are tailor-made for losing candidates still useful to their party.
I learnt the lesson of the power astrologers exercise over politicians the hard way. As a young staff reporter with the Statesman, I was mightily pleased to have landed an interview with the astrologer of T.T. Krishnamachari, the then finance minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet. Unlike his less well-placed confreres, he was staying at Claridges hotel.
Proudly, I presented my interview to the news editor hoping to win encomiums. Later that evening I discovered that I was celebrating my scoop too soon. Krishnamachari got wind of the interview, perhaps aware of his soothsayer’s propensity for seeking publicity. He moved heaven and earth to have the interview spiked, knowing full well how allergic Nehru was to the tribe of astrologers. The interview never saw the light of day.
The most memorable counting day for Indians old enough to remember was of the first post-Emergency election in 1977. I was then editing the Statesman, which has its headquarters in Calcutta, as it was then called. Sitting in the newsroom monitoring the results as they came in, our excitement grew as the scale of Indira Gandhi’s defeat became clear. She herself lost her supposedly iron-clad seat. Well past midnight, after writing the editorial giving her some credit for what she had done for the country, I, together with some colleagues, adjourned to the lawns of the Calcutta Press Club to give our salute to the mighty little man, the voter.
No one who has spent time as a political reporter in the capital can be immune from the politicians’ predilections come counting day. There is first of all an entire mythology on “waves” — hawa in the local idiom: how the phenomenon waxes and wanes in favour of or against a party or a candidate. Waves come and waves go.
There was such a wave that returned Indira Gandhi to power after the successor Janata Party government collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions followed by a parade of disparate Prime Ministers of “third front” combinations propped up mostly by the Congress. There was an even bigger wave after Indira’s assassination that brought her son Rajiv Gandhi to power in a landslide.
In the lead up to counting this time around, BJP strategists sought some of the bounty of the famous waves of old by propagating a “Modi wave” that would make the difference between the party emerging as the largest single party or being in a more dominant position to lay down the law. In any event, the “wave” idea is tailor-made for the BJP’s plan of action because the entire campaign has, for the first time in the party’s electoral history, been centred on one man’s persona, even the coined jingles exalting the superman status given to Mr Modi.
For a party and its mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, conscious of the organisation’s credo of being greater than any individual, it represented a startling change. Imagine how BJP strategists must be biting their nails as the fateful counting day begins. “Waves” have their own ethereal logic which requires scores of years of political wisdom to divine and often gives the wisest strategist a black eye.
It is, of course, a given that the BJP’s party planners have promoted the concept of a “wave” in favour of Mr Modi as part of the lavish choreography of their campaign to present one man as the country’s saviour. It is also par for the course for the Congress to pooh-pooh the idea, describing the “Modi wave” as a media creation, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has suggested.
Despite all predictions about the Congress’ bleak prospects this time around, a party stalwart of the old school pronounced with great authority one recent evening to a group sitting around a tea table that thanks to Priyanka Gandhi’s chutzpah, the configuration of results had changed dramatically, that the Congress would do well in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and Arun Jaitley would lose to the former Maharaja of Patiala in Amritsar.
We shall know soon enough whether the party stalwart spoke out of turn and whether the bulk of opinion polls were nearer the mark.
