Gujaratification of India

 From The Economist

Agashiye, a popular restaurant in Ahmedabad, serves only one thing: Gujarati thali. But the dish contains multitudes: curries, pulses, veggies and sweets, along with flatbreads, rice, salad, pickles, poppadums and more. Its fans say the thali strikes the perfect balance. But that depends how it is consumed. Presented with a plate featuring greens next to fried delights and thick, sweet cream, few diners choose to gorge on cabbage.

So it is with Gujarat’s strangely uneven development record. Ruled by Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) since 1998, India’s westernmost state is a great success story overall. It is the sixth-richest state and accounts for 30% of exports. Its economy grew at an average annual rate of 11% between 2011 and 2021, the fastest in the country.

It is this record that Mr Modi, after 13 years running Gujarat, stressed when he sought India’s top job in 2014. Just as the thali contains a balance of fibre, protein and carbohydrates, his “Gujarat model” was said to be a perfect mix of good education, jobs, higher incomes and a “better life”. After a decade of welfarism, state meddling and graft under the Congress party, many Indians were hungry for it.

Critics of Mr Modi pointed to communal riots on his watch in 2002 that left over 1,000 Gujaratis dead, most of them Muslims. They also noted that the state was pro-business long before he showed up. And that Gujarat’s social indicators, which track changes in the lives of the poor, were far from perfect—indeed much worse than its economic ones. That seemed like a bad lookout for a country with more than twice as many very poor people as any other. Sure enough, eight years and two crushing election victories later, the hopes and fears for Mr Modi’s economic stewardship have largely been realised. He and his party have taken the Gujarat model India-wide.

In the state of 62m people, where the bjp won its seventh straight election this week, social indicators still trail economic ones. On a development index that accounts for life expectancy, education and income, Gujarat ranks 21st out of 36 states and territories. It is in the bottom half of states for underage marriage, child stunting, infant mortality, and school and college enrolment. Last year its gdp per head matched Tamil Nadu’s, but its share of people living in poverty, at 14%, was nearly four times bigger (see chart 1).

This reflects the Hindu nationalists’ priorities. Gujarat’s social spending is the lowest of all Indian states. It also directs a smaller share of its total expenditure to rural development and a larger portion to cities than the state average. Many of its rural districts lack basics such as secondary schools as a result. Meanwhile, its cities are thriving, as they like to illustrate with shiny new building projects. When the national government solicited proposals for urban-renewal plans in the early 2000s, most cities in Gujarat wanted funds for flyovers, says Himani Baxi of Pandit Deendayal Energy University in Gandhinagar, the state capital. Just one city proposed building an unglamorous but necessary sewage-treatment plant.

After a number of false starts, India’s economy is also booming. On December 6th the World Bank upgraded its forecast for growth this year from 6.5% to 6.9%. If that is not as fast as Gujarat tends to grow, it is faster than any other big economy. Mr Modi’s highly publicised new mantra is “Together, for everyone’s growth, with everyone’s trust”. And ambitious infrastructure projects such as highways and digitisation are, as in Gujarat, a prominent part of his plan. Most large cities now have metro lines; over 10,000km of highways are being added each year, twice the rate the previous Congress-led government managed. The infrastructure push is helping households, too. Many more now have access to bank accounts and clean fuel. Internet penetration is rising rapidly.

bjp rule has been much less successful at improving Indians’ poor health and woeful education. Child-mortality rates are falling, but patchily. More than a third of children under five are stunted, a higher rate than in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In 2018 around half of all rural children in fifth grade could not read to second-grade levels. And after two years of school closures during the pandemic, the situation is unlikely to have improved.

These failures, again, reflect the bjp’s choices. It has been more generous to India’s poor than its government in Gujarat; the percentage of spending given to welfare schemes such as food and cooking-fuel subsidies is in line with the long-term average. Yet the Modi government is devoting a much smaller portion of India’s bumper tax revenues to social spending, including health care and education, than its predecessor (see chart 2). In 2018-19 government spending on health represented 3.2% of gdp, down from 3.9% the year before it came to power. Spending on education, at 3.1%, is far below its target of 6%.

The poorest bits of the country are missing out most, largely because India’s growth is so unequally distributed. According to official figures, unemployment in Gujarat is 2.9%; in Uttar Pradesh (up), a poor northern state of 240m people, it is 7.1%. Yet the bjp has suffered little or no blowback in such places. This year it became the first party to win a second consecutive majority in up since 1985. Why?

A lot of the answer is its Hindu chauvinism. In Gujarat, up and elsewhere, the bjp has successfully presented itself as a defender of high-caste Hindus, while mollifying the populous lower castes with hate speech against Muslims and just enough welfare. Yet it also seems that Indians like its spending priorities far more than would once have been imagined.

The long-abysmal state of public services—and proliferation of private alternatives—have downgraded Indians’ expectations of them. Less than a third rely on public health care. In an international survey in 2016, just 46% of Indians agreed that “the primary responsibility for providing school education rested with government”, the lowest of any country polled. Meanwhile, the bjp’s infrastructure projects, and relentless efforts to put Mr Modi’s imprimatur on them, have made the projects and prime minister alike powerful symbols of national progress.

As anyone who has tackled a thali knows, to eat is to choose. And so it is to govern. Not every element of the Hindu-nationalist development policy is good for Indians. But it is fuelling their growth and keeping them coming back for more. Mr Modi’s approval rating, at around 77%, may be the highest of any major world leader. His prospects of winning a third parliamentary majority in 2024 appear exceptionally strong.

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Understanding the Agnipath protest

--- Another view

Shekhar Gupta in The Print

The opposition to the Modi government’s ‘Agnipath’ scheme is being led by the articulate community of senior veterans on social and mainstream media, and by India’s dangerously burgeoning population of jobless youth. Especially in the Hindi heartland.

Counterintuitive though it is, we have to also note that these young people understand the nub of the ‘problem’ with Agnipath way better than the senior veterans do.

Most of the veterans are outraged because — among many things that they see as wrong with Agnipath — they think the Modi government is using the armed forces for employment generation.

The young see Agnipath as the opposite. They see it as an armed forces jobs destroyer, not generator. How, we will explain now. And why the very reason they are primarily angry makes a scheme like Agnipath good, we will explain as this argument unfolds.

First, the jobless young. They understand better not only because they know their politics better than venerable, well-meaning seniors with decades in uniform. They do as they come from the hyper-politicised and polarised heartland. They also know the hopelessness of the job market.

They see the absence of opportunity where they live and feel their own lack of skills needed for jobs in distant, booming growth zones. A government appointment whether in the railways, state government, police, anywhere is the only lifetime guarantee of a safe, well-paying job. The armed forces are by some distance the best.

We must not judge them because they “look like lumpen”, burn trains and battle with police. They are every bit as virtuous and deserving of our understanding as the millions of the best-educated who slog year after year paying enormous sums financing the booming ‘competition academy’ industry for those few UPSC jobs.

For the less resourceful or educated, for mere matriculates, an Army recruitment rally means the same thing as the big UPSC for those whose pictures you see in the full front-page advertisements in leading dailies from Unacademy, Byju’s, Vision IAS etc etc. They prepare just as assiduously for Army recruitment. How, ThePrint reporter Jyoti Yadav told us in this report from the rural heartland. 

The less privileged now see Agnipath as their own version of the UPSC being taken away. See it this way. Presume that UPSC exams weren’t held for two years because of Covid while millions prepared in hope. Now you announce that the recruitment for the All India Services will only be for four years and only one-fourth will get the full tenure.

Further, for like-to-like comparison, suppose you also set a new, lower maximum age limit to ensure our civil services remain youthful, and tough luck for those who grew too old in the past two years waiting. By the way, this is precisely why the government has now made its first Agnipath rollback and given this “one-time” maximum age relaxation to 23 years from 21.

Much bigger riots might break out in the same zones of the heartland if UPSC were disrupted like this. And you know what, our middle-/upper middle-class/elite public opinion will be entirely sympathetic to them. Even more than they might have been to the anti-Mandal protests and self-immolations in 1990. The “debates” on prime time and social media (which the Modi government takes much more seriously than people like us) would sound very different from what they do at this point.

I am not supporting the ongoing Agnipath protests or dismissing concerns over these as mindlessly elitist. These are a distressing, dangerous alarm for India. That our demographic dividend is becoming a wasteful disaster with crores of unemployed young seeing a government job as the holy grail.

No government can produce this many jobs. And certainly not in the armed forces, whose balance sheets and budgets are already an HR disaster. However flawed Agnipath might be, our armed forces need radical reform. But we need to understand these angry young people’s concerns.

Senior veterans erred instinctively into seeing this as a job-creating extravaganza exploiting the armed forces. It’s the opposite. Since India hasn’t held any recruitment rallies for more than two years, a “shortfall backlog” of at least 1.3 lakh has built up. It’s a cut of about 10 per cent from the pre-pandemic strength of the armed forces.

Here’s the math. Since only about 45,000 ‘Agniveers’ will be recruited now per year (compared to the usual 60,000 at full-tenure recruitment rallies), and only one-fourth will be retained after four years, this supposed shortfall will only rise. The most elementary calculation shows that at the current rate of 50,000-60,000 retirements each year, by 2030 the armed forces will field about 25 per cent fewer personnel than they did before the Covid break.

This will be a deliberate, substantive downsizing and a desirable outcome fully in tune with the global trend. The US military heavily cut its manpower and is reducing further, diverting dollars to standoff weapons and artificial intelligence. The Chinese PLA has been similarly downsizing. Agnipath can be fine-tuned, reinvented, renamed and relaunched. But something like it is needed.

Contrary to being a wasteful job-generating extravaganza, a tour of duty approach is to cut jobs, wages and pensions. The same money can go into drones, missiles, long-range artillery and electronics and minimising casualties in battles of the future. Even proper assault rifles in a resource-starved military machine. 

As respected former Army commander Lt. Gen. H.S. Panag pointed out in this article, an idea like Agnipath is well-intended, necessary and could do with improvements. But it is yet another rude reminder to the Modi government that however overwhelming, electoral popularity doesn’t empower them to enforce shock-and-awe change, no matter how virtuous. They’ve seen it with the now repealed farm laws, stalled labour codes and withdrawn land acquisition bill.

A big change has to be reasoned out, public opinion prepared. People respond to abrupt change in their hundreds of millions, have anonymity and safety in numbers unlike the few hundred fawning ruling party MPs, a few score of ministers or a dozen chief ministers.

Whether it’s land acquisition for job-creating industry and infrastructure, labour and farm reform to unleash new forces of entrepreneurship, or modernising the armed forces, you have to evangelise your ideas to people patiently. Allow a robust debate in public and Parliament instead of dismissing anyone disagreeing as anti-national or bought out by some evil force. It’s an ordinary, normal and inevitable exercise in the same democracy that gifts you extraordinary electoral power.

Finally, we need to look at the geography and politics — or shall we be cheeky and say geopolitics — of these protests. Geography first.

If you map the nearly 45 places where rioting has broken out, there will be a hornet’s nest of sorts in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bundelkhand, southern Haryana and Rajasthan.

We can safely classify these as India’s primary low-wage migrant labour exporting zones. Check out, for example, where the mostly poorly paid and security guards doing daily double shifts in your neighbourhood come from.

At least so far, this spark mostly hasn’t travelled South barring Secunderabad-Hyderabad. Let’s hope and pray it stays that way. Unlike the heartland, the south-of-Vindhyas states have their birth rates, education levels, investment and job creation much more sorted. It doesn’t mean that Indians there are any less patriotic.

And now the politics. With the farmers’ protests the epicentre was Punjab, the state least impressed with the Modi phenomenon in all of India as repeated elections from 2014 onwards have shown. This current anger comes almost entirely from BJP/NDA-run states, from the very core of the Modi-BJP base. It’s safe to presume that a vast majority of these angry young people are loyal Modi voters.

The lesson is, there is more to democracy than electoral popularity. You need to keep reasoning with your constituents all the time. Especially on why some drastic change they fear might be good for them. People have an immune system that detests and fears sudden change plonked on their heads.

The Modi government’s biggest flaw over these eight years has been its disinclination to accept the limitations of electoral majorities. This has already ruined land acquisition and farm reform and stalled the labour codes, and it will be tragic if the armed forces’ downsizing and modernisation is derailed too.

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The state of Pakistan: Isn't the support for BJP similar?

Fahd Hussain in The Dawn

Imran Khan’s supporters can see no wrong in what he says or does. We have witnessed this phenomenon unfurl itself like a lazy python these last few years, but more so with greater intensity during Khan’s pre- and post-ouster days. On display is a textbook case of blind devotion. Such devotion entails a deliberate — or perhaps subconscious — suspension of critical thinking. Only mass hysteria can explain absolute rejection of facts and a willing embrace of free-flying rhetoric untethered by verifiable information.

And yet, does this really make sense?

Bounce this explanation off actual people around you — friends, families, acquaintances — and you start to feel uncomfortable with the laziness of the explanation.

On your left, for instance, is the professor with a doctorate in natural sciences from one of the top universities in the world, someone whose entire educational foundation and career is based on the power of empirical evidence and scientific rationalism — and here he is hysterically arguing why the PTI deputy speaker’s violation of the constitution is no big deal. On your right is the top executive of a multinational company with an MBA from an Ivy League school, someone whose training and practice of craft is based on hard data crunched with power of sharp logic — and here he is frothing at the mouth in delirium while yelling that the Joe Biden administration actually conspired with the entire top leadership of the PDM to topple Imran Khan. 

These are rational people, you remind yourself. You have known them for years, and admired them for their academic and professional achievements — perhaps even been motivated by their pursuit of success — and yet you see them experiencing a strange quasi-psychedelic meltdown in full public glare. It just does not add up.

It is not just these metaphorical persons — resembling many real ones in all our lives, as it so happens — but hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis from all walks of life locked inside a massive groupthink spurred by sweeping generalisations dressed up as political narrative. No argument, no logic and no rationale — no, nothing makes sense, and nothing is acceptable or even worth considering if it does not gel perfectly with their preconceived notions.

What we are witnessing is a seminal moment in our political evolution — progressive or regressive is a matter of personal perspective — and this moment is situated bang in the centre of a social and political transformation so impactful that it could define the shape of our society for the years ahead.

In an acutely polarised environment, it is easy to pass judgement on those sitting across the fence. Most of us yield to this temptation. When we do, we help reinforce caricatures that have little resemblance to people around us, and these fail to explain why people believe what they believe.

So why do such a large number of people believe what they believe even when overwhelming evidence points towards the opposite conclusion? In our context, this may be due in part to the visceral politicisation of the national discourse and the deep personal loathing of rivals that the PTI has injected into what should otherwise be a contest of ideas and ideologies. At the heart of this is the revulsion against the system because it has not really delivered what it exists to deliver: improving the lives of citizens through protection of rights and provision of services. It is therefore easy and convenient to blame the system, and in turn all those institutions that constitute the system as a whole.

Imran Khan has modelled himself well as the anti-system crusader. He insists very persuasively that he has neither been co-opted nor corrupted by the system; that when he says he wants to change this system, it implies that there is nothing sacrosanct about the system, or for that matter, about the exalted institutions that make up the system. He has been able to establish this narrative successfully because the central theme of his narrative is, in fact, true: the system has not delivered.

But the argument is only half done here. The other half is perhaps even more crucial — diagnosing why it has not delivered. It is here that Imran Khan goes off tangent. And he does so not just in terms of his solutions, but his own shockingly weak performance as the prime minister who had it all but could not do much with it. In fact, after nearly four years in power, and having precious little to show for them, Imran has for all practical purposes joined the long line of those who are, in fact, responsible for the sad reality that the system has not delivered.

But someone forgot to break this news to the PTI supporters.

In essence then, if Pakistani society wants to row itself back from this stage where the electorate is at war with itself on a battlefield littered with semi-truths, partial facts and outright lies, it will need to face up to a bitter fact: what we see unfolding in front of us is the contamination of decades of social and educational decay injected with deadly and potent steroids of propaganda, brainwashing and ‘otherisation’ of anyone who looks, speaks, acts or believes differently.

Those social studies books you read in school and thought you would outgrow — well, now you know how wrong you were?

In this cesspool, everyone points fingers at everyone else when no one really has the right to do so. Seven decades of wrong governance laced with wrong priorities and fuelled by wrong policies have led us to a stage today where traditional parties cannot stomach the aspirations of a new generation, and new parties cannot digest the requirements of what constitutes governance, statecraft and institutional equilibrium within a democratic society.

And you thought holding elections was our biggest problem today. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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The Kashmir Files holds no ‘grand truth’ to ‘open your third eye’. It exploits cinema’s flaws

Anurag Minus Verma in The Print



PM Narendra Modi with the crew of The Kashmir Files | Twitter
The Kashmir Files has given major FOMO to many people who believe the film contains some grand truth that they are missing out on. Many Indian audiences made a pilgrimage to the theatres to open their ‘third eye’ and witness ‘the truth’ in its pure and organic form. Passions and emotions ran high in theatres and there were many videos circulating on social media where audiences were seen delivering long speeches as the end title rolled on the screen. Cinema halls are known to give ‘audiences to the filmmaker’ but this film is unique because it gave ‘audiences to audiences’.

A few days ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, with regards to the film, that the entire ‘ecosystem’ worked to hide the truth, and that “a truth suppressed for so long is coming out.” In a Roger Ebert-ian fashion, he gave ‘two thumbs up’ to the film and recommended the film to his MPs. This is a significant recommendation from the head of the country. This creates more suspense about the ‘truth’ that this film claims to possess.

There is now a growing debate where the Right-wingers are saying that ‘propaganda’ of the Left and the liberals (whom they have nicknamed ‘Urban Naxal’) is ‘busted’ and the ‘truth’ is finally being told through cinema. On the other hand, people from opposing ideologies believe that The Kashmir Files is nothing but State-sponsored propaganda. This itself leads to the question: what is the meaning of propaganda in cinema and can we distinguish between ‘good propaganda’ and ‘bad propaganda’?

To answer this question, we need to turn to the history of cinema. 
Montage films of Soviet Cinema

The Russian Revolution of 1917 created a political environment that pushed the role of propaganda in cinema. The word ‘propaganda’ at that time didn’t have the negative connotation it has today.

In fact, propaganda was termed as an ‘essential activity’ to spread awareness among the public and ‘stimulate their revolutionary thoughts’. Many great filmmakers emerged in this era who believed in the power of propaganda and they made films that are considered some of the most important artworks in cinematic history. These were filmmakers who gave many film theories that are still taught across the best film schools in the world. Among them, the most prominent is Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein who gave ‘montage theories’ or editing techniques. Most modern editing techniques currently used in Hollywood and Bollywood owe a lot to Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov’s theories of editing.

As such, the base of cinematic editing techniques lies in the idea of propaganda. No wonder famous French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once remarked: “Cinema is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.” There is a medium of psychological manipulation through the use of editing that every filmmaker uses to present their ideas or ‘truth’ to the public.

Now comes the classic question of ‘good propaganda’ and ‘bad propaganda.’ How can we define ‘propaganda’ when it is inherent to cinema? Can ‘good propaganda’ be termed as the transmission of ideas that expand the mind of an individual and thus contribute to society and bad propaganda as something that restricts the thinking of an individual and converts him to a hateful person? Beth Bennett and Sean O’Rourke (2006) thus “contrast ‘good’ rhetoric, which they claim appeals to reason, with ‘bad’ propaganda, which they claim appeals to the emotions,” as noted by researcher Michael Russel in his 2009 thesis. 
Relationship between propaganda and spectators

Any success of propaganda also tells us the relationship between the propaganda-makers and the target audiences. In order for propaganda films to land successfully, a proper launching ground first needs to be created. The Kashmir Files is a classic film for its time and place — in a hyper-nationalistic era, where the Right-wing machinery is working overtime to seize the ‘means of communication’ (whether it’s news channels, social media, or Internet memes); in today’s time when there is unadulterated hate against JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and intellectuals; in this era when bigotry is on free display even by the heads of the states. This is the perfect time for such a film to arrive — the audiences are already in a trance of misinformation and they just want to go to theatres to stamp their prejudices rather than seeking ‘truths’.

This is the reason why one sees the video of people shouting slogans in theatres and openly making hate speeches against Muslims. This is, in fact, the kind of social-political film where you’ll gain more insight about society if you move your gaze away from the white screen of the cinema hall and observe the audience.

A film professor from my alma mater Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) used to say: “The meaning of the film is already in the mind of the public and as a filmmaker, you just need to tap into that subconscious area.” This is the reason people interpret films based on their own realities and truths that they have constructed. In the case of The Kashmir files, Kashmiri Hindus are rightfully ‘relating’ to the film because this is a rare occasion when the stories of unimaginable, horrific tragedies are presented on celluloid. On the other side, some people are ‘relating’ to the film because it confirms their biases against those they hate. This is the kind of film that doesn’t ‘tell’ but rather ‘sells’ the idea of truth to you.

American writer Susan Sontag once remarked: “If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too… No matter how many movies, even very good ones, go on being made. If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.”

The Kashmir Files also got released post-lockdown, where the intimate experience of individual watching shifted once again to collective viewing in cinema halls. Here, the cinema hall itself became a space for a national experiment, where ‘we’, the people, flocked together to experience the moving images. In the cinema hall, Kashmiri Pandits became emotional watching the film and hugged each other as an act of shared trauma, whereas many collective haters shouted angry slogans to show that, as a nation, we are together in shared anger against people who allegedly hid the truth for long.

Cinema as a truth-telling medium

This trend of bringing out the ‘truth’ of any historical event through the cinematic medium is a complicated thing to do. Cinema can only bring out one version of the truth, which itself is deeply marinated in the biases of the person telling the story or people sponsoring the film. In cinema, every frame is political by default because by choosing what’s inside the frame, you are, automatically, hiding what’s outside of it. The very frame that your camera chose tells something about the ‘gaze’ and mind of the person who conceptualised it. This is why rather than the accuracy of events presented in the film, what matters the most is how these events are presented to create a psychological effect. How does the film play with the emotion of pre-radicalised society through the usage of cinematic mediums?

There is also a difference between political cinema and politically motivated cinema. The Kashmir Files is the latter, using propaganda to shut minds off rather than stimulate any useful cinematic or social thoughts.

However, an unexpected, and probably undesired, byproduct happens to be the catharsis for Kashmiri Pandits who feel they have ‘witnessed’ their truth being told, ironically through fiction, for we, as a society, talk more about Kashmiri Pandits than talking to them or humanely understanding their plight.

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Despite all the punditry, the BJP's "likely" to win UP

Yogendra Yadav in The Print





I thought of Philip da as I watched the exit polls for the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly election. The forecast of another term for the Bharatiya Janata Party was distressing, but it did not surprise me. The margin of the BJP’s victory projected by some – 300 plus seats and double digit lead in vote share – was and still is shocking. But I was not surprised by the broad direction and the operational conclusion of most of the exit polls. An article by Philip Oldenburg three decades ago had prepared me for such shocks.

This is not how my friends see it. Most of my friends, fellow travellers and comrades have been expecting nothing short of a rout for the BJP. For the last two months they have shared stories about how the BJP was wiped out in Western UP, seat-by-seat analysis of the decimation of the BJP in Poorvanchal and videos of how Akhilesh Yadav is drawing big crowds all over the state. I understand their sense of shock over the exit polls now. If a mediocre government with a cardboard of a leader manages to win popular approval, and that too within a year of one of the worst public health disasters followed by a powerful anti-government farmers’ movement, it should surprise anyone.

I was cured of this surprise over the last six weeks, as I travelled through Uttar Pradesh. I had heard about popular discontent against the Yogi Adityanath government. I had expected anger against its poor record on development, welfare and law-and-order. I thought people would never forget the hardship faced by migrant workers during the lockdown or at least the callousness they suffered during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. We had documented how the BJP reneged on its entire manifesto promises to the farmers of UP. I had seen the power of the farmers’ movement in the Western UP.

Yet, on the ground, I did not find an anti-incumbency mood in the state. Not because everyone was happy. I encountered a vast range of deep disappointments, complaints against the officials and political leaders and intense anxieties about their life and livelihood. But this did not translate into popular anger against the BJP government. There was a “commonsense” shared by ordinary voters, everyone except Yadavs, Jatavs and Muslims.

Capturing the ‘commonsense’

This commonsense would come out in a typical conversation in rural UP. You ask the people about their conditions, and you hear a litany of complaints (which the unsuspecting journalist mistakes for intense anti-incumbency): ‘Things are really bad. Our family income has fallen over the last two years. There is no work for the educated youth. So many of us lost the jobs we had. Children could not study during the pandemic. Many old people in our village died without any medical support. We could not sell our crops for the official (MSP) price.’ Any mention of stray cattle invites a tirade: Naak me dam kar diya hai (bane of our existence). And mehngai (price rise)? Don’t even start talking about it.

Now you expect them to blame it all on the rulers. But a question about the performance of the Adityanath government gets a surprisingly positive response: “Achhi sarkar hai, theek kaam kiya hai (It’s a decent government, has done good work).” Before you can ask, they recount two benefits. Everyone got additional foodgrain, over and above the standard quota, plus cooking oil and chana. And almost everyone, including many Samajwadi Party (SP) voters, mentions improved law and order. “Hamari behen betiyan surakshit hain (our women are safe)” is a standard refrain.

But what about all the problems they just recounted? You ask this question and they get into rationalising on the BJP’s behalf. ‘What can the government do about these things? Coronavirus was global, so was inflation. Things would have been worse but for Modiji. Is he responsible for not feeding cows once they get old?’ While every small achievement of the BJP, real or imagined, was known to every voter, the SP could not make some of the biggest pain points into election issues. I hardly met any voter who would know some of the main poll planks of Akhilesh Yadav’s party.

It would be a mistake to place this commonsense in the standard register of pro- or anti-incumbency. This is not about a routine assessment of the work done by a government. The voters seem to have made up their mind before they start reasoning. They are not judges, but advocates. They know which side of the argument they stand, who stands with them. The BJP has set up an emotional bond with a vast segment of the voters. They are willing to suspend disbelief, condone misgovernance, undergo material suffering and still stay with their ‘own’ side. They do not mention Ayodhya or Kashi temple on their own, but the Hindu-Muslim divide is very much a subtext of this shared commonsense.

What about caste? Needless to say, this commonsense does not fully cut across all castes and communities. Yet the caste arithmetic does not work to the SP’s advantage. No doubt, the Yadavs were fully mobilised behind the SP, “110 per cent” as they say in Hindi. The Muslims had virtually no choice except the SP, notwithstanding the attractive rhetoric of Asaduddin Owaisi. The SP played smart by giving fewer tickets to Yadavs and Muslims. The Muslim voters in turn played wise by keeping a low profile, though Yadav support for SP was visible and aggressive. The Yadavs and Muslims refused to share the pro-incumbent commonsense. They would pick holes in every pro-government rationalisation. Their polarisation no doubt helped the SP, but that was never going to be enough.

Illusory SP wave?

I discovered that my friends had seriously over-estimated support for the SP among non-Yadav, non-Muslim voters. The famed disaffection of the Brahmins from the Thakur rule of CM Adityanath did not translate into anything on the ground. The so-called ‘upper’ castes continue to be the strongest caste vote bank for the BJP. There was some erosion among the farming communities like Jats, Kurmis and Mauryas, but much less than my friends imagined. With a few exceptions – Nishads at certain places, for example — the lower Other Backward Classes (OBCs) stayed solidly with the BJP. Every SP supporter counted on the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)’s disaffected voters going to the SP. I found little evidence of that, except among a few Pasis. If anything, the former BSP voters and the ex-Congress supporters turned more towards the BJP than the SP.

So, was this impression of a wave in favour of Akhilesh Yadav and his party completely illusory? Not quite. There was, undoubtedly, a surge for the SP everywhere. The massive crowds for Akhilesh’s public meetings were for real. Exit polls suggest that the SP will better its best ever performance of 29 per cent in terms of votes. It needed to improve its 2017 performance by around 15 percentage points and bring the BJP down by at least 5 points to win this election. That was always a Herculean ask. While everyone noted, rightly, that the SP was gaining, not many asked the real question: how much and wide were its gains?

In a bipolar election, the threshold of victory goes up. The SP’s best was not going to be good enough. Also, the SP’s gains were not automatically the BJP’s losses. Exit polls confirm that a shift from multi-cornered contests to a two-horse race meant that while the SP has gained, the BJP has managed to retain or better its vote share. While those who shifted away from the BJP were visible and voluble, those who stayed with or shifted towards the BJP remained silent. The India Today-Axis My India exit poll reports a massive advantage to the BJP among women voters. Most observers, including this writer, missed this major factor.

Talk to voters

While I continue to believe and hope that the race is closer than predicted by the exit polls, I have one piece of advice for my friends. If the BJP wins this election, please don’t jump to conclusions about poll rigging. Not that the BJP is above such manipulation or that the Election Commission is in any position to withstand it. But in this instance, it is not about EVM rigging; it is about rigging the screen of our TV and smartphones. It is not booth capturing, but mindscape capturing, an effective capture of the moral and political commonsense.

This brings me to Philip Oldenburg, or Philip da as I call him, one of the most insightful though less celebrated scholars of Indian politics. In 1988 he wrote an article why most ‘political pundits’ and political activists failed to anticipate the Congress wave in the 1984 Lok Sabha election. His argument is very simple: a triad of political leaders, journalists and local informants keep speaking to one another about election trends and manufacture a consensus about the likely electoral outcome. The problem is that none of them deigns to speak to ordinary voters. This is what pollsters do and that is why they tend to get it right.

As I travelled through Uttar Pradesh across the last few weeks, this lesson came back to me again and again. I wish my friends would stop speaking to one another, stop listening to media noise and simply go out to speak to ordinary citizens. Our political challenge is to connect to and intervene into the shared moral and political commonsense of the voters. It is not too late to learn this lesson. We are still two years from 2024.

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