ON THE AAP VICTORY IN PUNJAB

A WATERSHED MOMENT IN OUR HISTORY

Valson Thampu

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The BJP has retained all but one of the five states that went to polls recently. But that may not prove as significant, in the long run, as the sweeping victory the AAP has registered in Punjab. It is important and instructive to reckon why.

In Delhi a few years ago, and now in Punjab, AAP has proved that the electoral invincibility of the Modi-Shah duo is both contrived and overrated. Given the nation-wide disarray in which almost all opposition parties –in particular the Indian National Congress- find themselves, the dogma of the Modi magic could seem incontestable. But much depends on how we understand invincibility. A person or party is truly invincible, if he/it cannot be resisted or halted by any other, irrespective of circumstances. Invincibility would belong more to the sphere of assumptions, if it is based on the mere absence of resistance. If, for example, Russia wages war against a dozen or so banana republics, and the victory of the aggressor is an assured fact even before conflicts break out, it cannot be said on that basis that Russia is invincible. What can be said, though, is that those nations, either singly or collectively, are no match for Russia. The same logic holds good for the dogma of Modi invincibility as well.

There is yet another aspect to this dogmatic assumption that needs to be examined dispassionately. When it is assumed that a political leader is invincible for any period of time, what is implied thereby is that the political judgment of the people is irrelevant to the outcome of all electoral exercises. If so, victory in elections can be delinked from good or bad governance. A party can win, irrespective of its track-record in governance, provided it has an invincible leader. Else, we should say that a party is invincible for the reason that it is matchless in its commitment to, and competence in, good governance. This is not what is being claimed and aired, at least in terms of what we are being told routinely.

Every society creates its own myths. It looks as if human beings cannot live without myths. Homo sapiens are greedy myth-consumers. Myth-creation is a covert protest against the grain and intractability of reality. The real world cannot be dominated and controlled at will. Nor can it be transformed in real terms. So, what is it that we can do? Create myths that seem to transcend the inherent and ineradicable logic of the real world. This is the essence of hero-making and hero-worship. Heroes are not born, they are created by peoples. And the extent of the psychological need a people experience for hero-crafting and hero-worship depends almost entirely on their under-development and felt insignificance. (This explains why it is imperative for made-up heroes to be distanced from the people and to be image-refurbished continually.) Developed cultures and societies believe in human equality, individual independence and the personal worth as well as human rights of all citizens. People languishing in under-developed societies tend to create heroes often out of the ordinary stuff of reality as a sort of compensatory mechanism for the drabness of their existence.

Myth-making belongs to the sphere of magic. So, it makes sense that ‘magic’ is associated with the invincibility of Modi. The Modi magic is invoked at the drop of a hat. This is not to belittle the merits of the man, which command my admiration. The point here is that ‘magic’ has its limits and its times. The personal charisma of a leader is indeed an invaluable thing, but it is no substitute for the collective power of a people, which needs to be unleashed and directed purposively. If the ‘magic’ of a leader is over-played as a substitute for developing and deploying people-power, it is bound to prove counterproductive sooner than later. At the very least, the voters need to be told as to how ‘voting for Modi’ becomes a vote for tangible and broad-based development. Publicity blitz cannot be the bridge between the two. The problem with magic is that it excludes rational scrutiny and locates electoral traction in who a person is, rather than what he or his government does.

Magic belonged to a worldview that is now obsolete. At least since the dawn of the 18th century the world has been emerging from the world of magic into an outlook of logic. Life today is organized not on the basis of magic, but of logic. Admittedly, vestiges of the magical linger in the individual and collective psyche; but magic, or its religious counterpart of miracle-mongering, is not the decisive force that drives the life of a people in a modern democracy. Logic has displaced magic for the most part. Logic insists on intelligibility. It demands material proof, cogent explanation, as well as the duty to persuade, rather than mesmerise a people, on the basis of what has been, and is being, done for their welfare. Dialogue and debate, resorting to the art of persuasion, rather than bludgeoning the opposition into submission, is the essence of the age of reason. Garnering votes on the basis of a person’s magic represents a pre-modern mode of doing politics. The fact that Nehru and, even more, his daughter Indira resorted to it does not make it legitimate in a democracy.

We must notice this curious thing too. Narendra Modi is, as a person, not magical, but logical. Else, he would not have been as hard-working and efficient as he is. The superhuman control he exercises on every aspect of national governance and political formations would have been impossible to attain or sustain if he were not superbly pragmatic and incomparably industrious. Paradoxically it is only because he is logical and pragmatic that he can be projected as magical. So, the ‘Modi magic’ is the rational capital of his personal energy and enthusiasm projected through the medium of ‘magic’ for public consumption for the reason that the masses in Indian remain stuck somewhere in the age of magic, for which the successive governments before the Modi era have much to answer for. Interestingly, even the means for projecting this magic too is logical! So, what matters in the end is logic, not magic. Development as magic is a prehistoric notion.

This brings us to the epochal significance of the AAP victory in Punjab. While Modi does his politics with enviable success on the basis, shall we say, of his personal magic, Kejriwal takes the opposite route. He projects himself as an ‘aam aadmi’, a commoner, which is a prosaic, work-a-day concept. Modi loves being projected and adored as uncommon as Kejriwal seeks to be common. Kejriwal does not ask for a vote for himself. He asks people to support people-centric governance. While Modi is unapproachable, Kejriwal is the people’s CM par excellence. The people exist for Modi; but Kejriwal lives for the people, at least in theory. So he lives, walks, talks and looks like any one of them. But, for a change, he pulls off the extraordinary now and when in the season of elections.

Ironically, there is a Kejriwal magic too, if you like. If the Modi magic is the magnetism of the extraordinary and the superhuman, the Kejriwal magic stems from the charm of the seemingly ordinary and commonplace. It is the hypnotism of the familiar and the accessible. He reminds us of the words of John Milton in his letter to Cromwell, ‘peace hath her victories no less renowned than war’.

Punjab is one such victory, if you don’t mind. The Kejriwal logic won 92 out of the 117 assembly seats, which is a record unmatched as yet in the history of that state. The Akali-BJP alliance had won 93 seats before. But it is for the first time that a single party is winning 92 assembly seats in Punjab. What, then, is the larger significance of this stunning success?

Put simply and bluntly, the significance is that it marks the liberation of AAP from its Delhi confinement. So far the party has been in fetters, so to speak, in respect of the governance model it is keen to implement. It is common knowledge that the AAP government was kept under bit and bridle by the Modi-Shah dispensation. This could be done ‘legally’, given the quasi-state status of Delhi, which makes the Lt. Governor the de facto ruler of Delhi. The democratically elected government can have, for the most part, only the space conceded to it by the Lt. Governor, who is the appointee of the Central Government. Ironically, the BJP as the self-proclaimed sponsor of good governance felt constrained to choke AAP’s zeal to provide good government to the people of the national capital region!

With its winning Punjab, this situation changes substantially for the AAP. The party is going to enjoy a measure of freedom and autonomy in serving the people of that state that it couldn’t afford in Delhi, where almost every novel idea or initiative of the party was frustrated by the L.G. The governor of Punjab will not be able to play a similar role. The proverbial Albatross will be off the neck of the AAP.

A historic opportunity has come into the hands of the AAP. Let us assume that the party succeeds in implementing its agenda for ensuring the welfare of the people of Punjab and that the state recovers from its deep malaise under the AAP watch. That is bound to be noticed by people, first, in adjoining states and, in due course, in the rest of the country. Publicity-driven euphoria, no matter who creates, is perishable. At any rate, it is no substitute for the actual delivery of good governance to the people. ?The prospect of distant cakes will be readily exchanged by the hungry masses for immediately available chapatis. Logic will eclipse magic.

There is yet another aspect of this scenario that the BJP needs to consider with due seriousness. The Modi magic has had a great deal to do with the logic of history. The logic of modern history, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out two and a half centuries ago, is turning away from the aristocratic. This played a huge role in helping the BJP to pip the Congress at the polls in 2014. The anti-dynastic rhetoric proved deadly not only because of Modi’s oratorical skills but also because history was on his side. But this can’t last long, after a party occupies the seat of power and garners the harvests thereof. The BJP today may not be burdened with the dynastic baggage, but it is certainly getting fattened with the neo-rich adipose. The neo-rich label is as much an object of opprobrium as the hangover of jaded dynastic mustiness. ?It may take a while for this to begin to bite, but bite it will; unless, of course, the party resists the lure of mega wealth, of which there isn’t, as yet, any reassuring evidence.

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