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 | Frailty, thy name political analysis Our Correspondent How fickle is conventional wisdom! And how pliable are the views of our political analysts and commentators! Till 8 o’clock on the morning of May 16, everybody said and believed that, in this era of coalition politics, the small and regional parties set the agenda; their interests (and caprices) have to be taken into account; that the Big Two—the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—have to somehow accommodate the Jayalalithaas and the Mulayam Singh Yadavs and the Chandrababu Naidus. Within hours, the high and mighty experts started pontificating about bipolar polity. And, with bickering and blame-game beginning in the BJP, they may start talking about the unipolar political system, a return to the bygone era of single party dominance. Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s emphasis on the youth was often viewed with skepticism. After victory, he said, “My job as I see it now is changing the politics of the country through the youngsters,” who comprise 70 per cent of India’s 120 crore population. This is being lapped up by the newspapers and news channels. Now, media Brahmins are lauding him for his perspicacity and his focused approach. Indian politics is all about castes, communities, the whims and fancies of regional satraps, we were told. What matters in elections are ‘emotive’ issues and not reasoned political debates, we were informed by political pundits. We were asked to look at Lalu Prasad Yadav: his success is due to finding the winning caste-communal formula of MY or Muslim-Yadav combine. So long as he can maintain that, nobody could dislodge him, howsoever ruinous his rule may have been for Bihar. Similarly, Ram Vilas Paswan will always be in government, because he is a popular Dalit leader. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati—despite her squandering the impressive mandate she got in the country’s biggest state and her perverse obsession of building memorials to install her own statues—will always be in the reckoning. Mulayam Singh Yadav and his Man Friday Amar Singh, despite the latter’s buffoonery, will be ‘kingmakers.’ These are the people who cannot be wished away. Nor the petty agendas of small parties could be ignored any longer. Or so we were told. And now we are told, by the same set of pundits, that… well, what really matters is development. People are fed up with identity politics, with the political discourse revolving around permanent victimhood, with the idiosyncrasies of minor politicians, with the parochialism of regional parties. And every intellectual is genuflecting to the infinite wisdom of the voter who redeemed the nation from small parties. Would anybody bother to question why did the voter catapult them to prominence in the first place? Posted on : 5/17/2009 Mail this article to your friend |