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The true verdict

Here’s a stat: We have had, since 1990, 50 elections in the states and Centre both. And 40 – count them, 40 – sitting governments have been voted out.

You don’t need to be a "political analyst" to read that message – very clearly, the electorate in this country is not as foolish, or naïve, as its leaders would have us believe. Equally clearly, the electorate is no respecter of persons or governments that do not pay heed to their particular concerns.

And yet, it would seem, no one is listening to the voice of the people. Dissociation is complete, and frightening – as you notice when you actually trek through the dusty byways of the villages of Uttar Pradesh and listen to the speeches of various politicians, and then listen to the people themselves.

The Bharatiya Janata Party is, its leaders assure us, "studying the results" to "understand the reasons" for its failure in the politically crucial state. Think back – how often have you heard leaders of defeated parties mouth those words? And how often has this "study" led to anything other than the most facile of explanations?

A couple of senior BJP leaders, short-circuiting this "study," have already rushed to tell us that it was the "anti-incumbency" factor at work. Put that way, it all seems so simple, so easy to understand. Ah, anti-incumbency, we think, nodding our heads in sympathy – like we would do if our neighbor informed us that his little son had chicken pox. Acts of God, anti-incumbency and chicken pox both, nothing we can do about it but sympathise with the victim. Poor neighbour. Poor BJP. Right?

That is the nice thing about jargon – it effectively desensitises, distances. Sort of like saying I participate in the recycling process with a manually operated eco-recreational implement, when what I am actually doing is shoveling shit.

But what exactly is "anti-incumbency?" It means that a voter tells his government, his elected representative, that he feels let down, betrayed. In other words, the voter turns to the man or group he had favoured just five years ago and says, 'You suck!'

The BJP has just been given that unambiguous message. In Uttar Pradesh, which just a decade ago witnessed its (BJP's) political birth. And in Uttaranchal, where it positioned itself cleverly at the forefront of the movement for a separate state, and swept to power on the wave of euphoria over the creation of that state.

The message, however, does not appear to have gotten across. Nor will it – until the leadership stops "studying the results," gets its collective feet dirty tramping through the back alleys, and listens to the people it supposedly represents, and rules.

A line-up of Rediff correspondents – Tara Shankar Sahay, Josy Joseph, Sheela Bhatt, Basharat Peer, R Swaminathan, Pankaj Upadhyaya, and self – did just that, for the duration of the campaign. And what we found was a political tower of Babel, with the electorate talking in one voice and the candidates and campaigners talking in another.

Having, well before filing of nominations, dubbed this election a referendum on the performance of the Central government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP leadership focused on the "national issues." In little towns and littler villages, the party’s all-star campaigners talked terrorism, bilateral relations with Pakistan, POTO, national security, of the need to have courts decide whether there should be a Ram temple at the Janambhoomi.

If you were assigned to take one photograph that summed up the BJP defeat in this election, it would be a close-up of the face of a villager in the heart of UP as he listened to that spiel – blank, untouched, unconnected, empty.

Having strutted his stuff, the campaigner meanwhile hopped into his helicopter while the party faithful struggled to keep little children from dancing too close to the contraption and accidentally decapitating themselves. And he flew off, to the next ersatz helipad, for an encore.

Meanwhile, his audience wandered off, stumbling along “roads” that were little more than rutted footpaths, to a home unwarmed by electricity. There, he took the weight off his feet, sipping brackish water. At one such village hut, I was offered a glass of water – and if the Oscar committee was watching, it would have handed me one of those statuettes for my ability to keep an absolutely impassive face, for not gagging as I sipped, the water was that bad.

And then he talks, of his own concerns. Such as an MLA whose face he had last seen five years ago when that worthy came asking for his vote and assuring him that Ram Rajya was a ballot away. Of how the women in the household were being forced to go further and further afield to fetch a pot or two of water. Of how he had no hospital or doctor nearby to go to when he fell sick. Of how he had no school to send his children to – and do remember that when he says 'school,' he is not referring to one of those fancy convents but to a little clearing in a field, with a rickety chair for 'masterji' and a blackboard turned grey with the passage of time.

It is this voter who is the real majority – not Brahmins-and-Thakurs or Backwards-and-Muslims or whatever other combination the "social engineers" of various parties cobble together as their preferred vote-bank.

He is a simple guy, with simple needs. A man who supports a family on less than one dollar a day. Who, once the dust raised by the helicopter has subsided, hawks deep in his throat, spits the dust out, and says, 'My MLA, who I haven’t seen in five years, who I wouldn't be able to identify if I saw him in a lineup, he gets Rs 50 lakh every year to look after me. And my MP gets Rs 2 crore. That is Rs 12.5 crore in five years. And yet I have no roads, no water, no power, no medicines, nothing.'

How much does a chair and a blackboard and a teacher with the most rudimentary of qualifications cost?

It would have been easy to address such simple needs. And earn that man's eternal gratitude – for that is the other thing you need to understand about such people, they never forget the slightest good you do for them. And they express their gratitude by voting for you, again and again and yet again.

Instead of recognising this simple fact, the politician goes to this chap and he talks of POTO. And of how international relations have changed since the bombing of the Pentagon, and how India is now treated with respect by America, Russia, China, Israel. And of why the courts should be asked to decide whether he needs a rupees one thousand crore temple which, in all probability, he will never be able to visit anyway because who can afford the fares?

And then, as his party slips repeatedly on the electoral banana peel – this latest performance is worse than 1996, which was worse than 1993 – the politician looks up at the heavens and mutters "anti-incumbency."

It is this complete dissociation with reality that is costing the BJP. And time is running out – there is just over two years to go before the country goes to the polls en masse to elect a new Lok Sabha. Two years, tops, to undo years worth of damage.

Which is why the politician needs to scrawl 'You suck!' in large letters on his bathroom mirror, where he will see it first thing every morning. It will remind him of what the electorate thinks of him today – and that reminder could be the spur he needs to try and turn things around.

Photograph: Uttam Ghosh

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