Writhing on The Wall (24 May 2009)

It felt very strange indeed, as if all the gawkers at the zoo were inside the cages, looking expectantly at the monkeys prancing outside. It did not take very long for the chemical rush to the brains of millions of Indian voters after the election results came in on the 16th to subside. Yes, the Congress party had won its best victory since 1991, and yes, it could finally cock a snook at the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav. And yes, it really rubbed the Communists’ noses in the dust kicked up by the nuclear deal with the U.S.

How edifying it was to watch endless footage of India’s first truly Breaking News government’s birth pangs. What prolonged agony – you almost felt like planting a foot on the table, plunging in your forceps, and yanking out the creature -- deformities be damned. Despite those impressive numbers, Congress still needed the tripod of Mamata Banerjee, Sharad Pawar and Muthuvel Karunanidhi to get it to the magic majority figure. How interesting, that both the forever feisty Banerjee, who quit the Congress in 1997 to form Trinamool Congress, and Pawar, who quit the Congress in 1999 because of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin, should now happily sup at the same table as the Gandhis because they want more than anything else to keep the red and saffron hordes at bay.

Mamata has been implacable in her crusade against the Communists, who have fallen to a humiliating 24 nationally, and a crushing 16 in West Bengal from 35 in 2004; in Kerala, of course, the Communists have been wiped out. But is the CPI(M) fazed? Is there going to be a politburo purge? “Those anti-Communist quarters who have been rejoicing at the setbacks suffered by the Left and have written the epitaph of the CPI (M) will be proved completely wrong,” writes Prakash Karat. Indeed, so long as India continues to be home to one-third of our planet’s poor, Karat and his comrades will always see a glow on the horizon.

It will be interesting to watch how Banerjee and her motley crew of 18 MPs rub shoulders with the Treasury benches as economic reform is debated. She has already served notice that – railway minister or not – she will spend a lot of time in West Bengal targeting the Communists. She has said she wants rules for Special Economic Zones reviewed. And Tata Motors, which is fighting with its back to the wall on its ill-advised acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover, will certainly remember Mamatadi fondly for driving its Nano dreams out of Singur.

But to return to the zoo allegory, it is Karunanidhi’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam that did some wonderfully torturous wall-sitting after the election results. Last week in Chennai, the average Tamilian watched, subdued and disembodied, while television screens broadcast numbing and repeated shots of what was purported to be Velupillai Prabhakaran’s corpse on display, and numbing and repeated shots of Karunanidhi and his confidants haggling. It can’t be easy being the paterfamilias if you have three wives, numerous offspring, numerous grand-nephews, and numerous favourites of sundry wives jostling for a piece of the pie in a state that is the same size as Greece. Yes, sometimes you wonder why the Athenians invented democracy.

It was political drama at its most garish and vulgar, complete with endless marigold garlands, sirens, stormy entries and exits, early-morning flights – everything that Chennai’s cardboard cutout culture can teach Delhi.

Here are some facts:

- The DMK and Congress have together won 26 seats, exactly the same number in 2009 as in 2004
- Despite the final battle between the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam raging right through the Indian election, and despite Jayalalithaa playing a last-minute and desperate Eelam card, voters decisively turned their backs on Eelam as an issue. The Pattali Makkal Katchi, in particular, was obliterated.
- Driven by a political machine built over four decades by Kalaignar Karunanidhi, the DMK has put down very deep roots across Tamil Nadu’s countryside, something both the Congress and the AIADMK cannot match.
- Observers noted that the voting percentage shot up dramatically in the final hour of polling, when no-shows will very likely not show up at all. They also noted that the DMK was the only party to set up tables at every polling station to monitor voters. Why is this significant? The DMK knows which buttons to press (see above).
- Everybody – including Comrade Karat – agrees that the money spent on the elections this time was exponential, and unimaginable. Particularly in Tamil Nadu, a very observant foreign diplomat told me, it was a question of the DMK out-spending the AIADMK.
- Why is there such a to-do over the DMK bagging the Communications, IT and Surface Transport portfolios? Why was Manmohan Singh very reluctant at first to re-induct T.R. Baalu and A. Raja? Think mobile phones, think 3G licences, and think the Ram Sethu project where there are mammoth dredging contracts to be loaved and fished. Hopefully you will get your arithmetic right.

By now most of us know that Congress’s huge jump in seats occurred because of a very small two-percentage-point jump in its vote share. If it had not been for Uttar Pradesh, where the party made its most impressive new gains, or Rajasthan, where the Congress flipped the Bharatiya Janata Party on its back, or Andhra Pradesh, where its 33 seats trumped the 29 it won in 2004, there would have been a hung parliament. The BJP has also built on its grassroots success in Karnataka, rising to 19. The Congress numbers in Kerala could be put down to growing rage against the long-incumbent Left parties. It has a job on its hands in rebuilding credibility in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Indeed, Congress would have continued to be eclipsed even in the Hindi heartland -- it did very poorly in Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh, winning only 4 of 64 seats, and struggled to win 12 in Madhya Pradesh – if it had not been for Uttar Pradesh.

This is no consolation for poor Mulayam and Amar Singh, who barely got seats at the oath-taking ceremony at the presidential palace on the 22nd. The best thing that Mulayam, the Main Man from Mainpuri can do at this point is to be nice to the dozens of senior civil servants, police officers and other factotums who have been very rudely turfed out because Mayawati’s grandeur became truly delusional.
(This piece appeared in Covert magazine of June 1-14, 2009)