2019 Polls Busted 6 Myths That Congress Must Remember: Tharoor

Dr Shashi Tharoor debunks six myths, including the one about the Congress being the ‘bastion of dynastic politics’.

Image used for representational purposes.

(Illustration: Arnica Kala / The Quint)

It’s been less than a week since the results of the General Elections were declared and the barrage of opinion pieces and post-poll dissections have been relentless—ranging from the those with gravitas and reasonable postulation, to plenty of others that flit between simplistic diagnoses and melodramatic recommendations, and of course many devoted to mindless speculative thinking.

You’ve seen them all and heard everything there is to say about the big picture – so rather than add my own beatitudes to this pile, perhaps it would be wiser to share some specific insights about the myths busted by these elections:

Myth #1: This Election Was a Repudiation of Dynastic Politics

Much has been made in the last few days (and indeed for most of the five preceding years) on the failures of ‘dynasty’, a thinly-veiled allusion to the Gandhi-Nehru family, which has been admonished for practically anything that has gone wrong in the country since its Independence. The Modi-Shah combine has been particularly relentless in their frequent deployment of the ‘naamdar- kaamdar’ dichotomy, or in referring to Rahul Gandhi as a ‘shehzada’, compared to their own humble ‘self-made’ story. The current election was even marketed by the BJP as a fight to ‘rid’ the country of ‘dynastic politics’.

But the BJP’s slick publicity machine does well to conceal that their own leadership is filled with a generous sprinkling of these political ‘dynasts’ including sitting ministers and parliamentarians.

In fact, an analysis by IndiaSpend that has looked at the background of all MPs since the first Parliament in 1952 points out that since 1999, the BJP has had a comparable number of dynasts among its lawmakers to the Congress.

In 2009, these constituted 11 percent for the Congress and 12 percent for the BJP. In the last Lok Sabha, the BJP accounted for 44.4 percent of all heirs elected to the house, including 15 percent of their total lawmakers and 24 percent of the Modi Cabinet.

This is not restricted to any one party. Recent analysis from the Triveni Centre for Political Data and CERI has pointed out that out of the new crop of MPs, a record 30 percent (162 parliamentarians) come from backgrounds of some familial political pedigree, including 25 percent of lawmakers from the BJP (Dushyant, Thakur, Mahajan, two Gandhis) and even more from the NDA (two Badals, two Paswans, etc)—a clear show of how ‘winnability’ trumps their own party’s professed disdain for dynasticism. Non-BJP non-Congress parties had their own dynastic success stories – Jagan Mohan Reddy, MK Stalin, Uddhav Thackeray, to name a few.

Dynasty is alive and kicking in Indian politics.

Myth #2: Voters Vote in Their Own Economic Self-Interest

There is a well-recognised political dictum that voters tend to cast their ballots keeping in mind their economic self-interest. The key economic issues of the BJP rule have been well-documented – unemployment levels touching a 45-year high, widespread agrarian distress forcing many of our farmers to contemplate committing suicide, the collateral damage of Modi’s decisions on our micro, small and medium enterprises that are the engine of our economy – and which collapsed in record numbers because of demonetisation, falling consumption rates, the taxes on petrol that kept fuel costs artificially high while they were falling around the world—and there was plenty to suggest that voters would act on these economic concerns and the failures of the government under whose watch these took place.

After all, why would a young man who, five years ago, voted for Mr Modi because he expected to get a job, vote for Modi again five years later when he still doesn’t have a job?

And yet he does seem to have done so. 1-0 for BJP campaigners versus political scientists.

Myth #3: Development – ‘Vikas’ – Is The Key Issue In Indian Election Campaigns

This was true in 2014, but it disappeared from Mr Modi’s speeches in 2019. It was only after his victory that he resurrected the now-hoary ‘sab ka saath, sab ka vikas’ line, adding a catch, ‘sab ka vishwas’. Having failed to fulfil any of his campaign promises of 2014 or deliver meaningful development, knowing full well that the hollowness of his own promises (and his abject failure to fulfil any of them) would come back to haunt him, Mr Modi cheerfully moved the goalposts and scored big goals in a totally different game from the one he had declared five years ago he would play.

The BJP campaign was about everything but vikas – from the marketing of ‘Brand Modi’ to the jingoistic hyper-nationalism unleashed after Pulwama and Balakot.

True, the government spent Rs 5,600 crore of taxpayers’ money over the last five years highlighting the (largely illusory) triumphs of its schemes to provide homes, toilets, gas cylinders and the like to the rural poor. But a recent Oxford University study argues that development concerns in India are often superseded by cultural and social concerns—so political scientists may have to rework their definitions of what voters consider their core interests.

Myth #4: State Election Results are a Harbinger of National Electoral Results

In Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where the Congress defeated the BJP in the assembly elections in December, the latter has actually improved its vote share from its 2014 performance (3.4 percent, 4.2 percent, 0.5 percent). In Karnataka, where the Congress-JD(S) coalition government took over in May 2018, the BJP improved its vote share by 8.38 percent.

In the states held by regional powerhouses, the BJP’s vote share increase was even more substantial: West Bengal (+23 percent), Odisha (+17.07 percent), Telangana (+8.25 percent) and even Kerala (+2.63 percent). The Indian voter has demonstrated conclusively that she chooses state governments on different grounds than national governments. Which also means that the BJP cannot afford any complacency as it embarks on a fresh round of state elections in less than four months. Mr Modi is not a candidate in those, after all.

Myth #5: Mass Rallies & Roadshows Are A ‘Must-Have’ Staple of Indian Elections

The highlight of the conventional Indian election campaign rests on mass rallies aimed at influencing large gatherings of voters. In the 2019 elections, both Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi conducted a significant number of mass rallies, with the former holding 145 and the latter 142.

But do they really end up producing gains that justify the costs involved?

A recent analysis shows an interesting mismatch between mass functions like rallies and road shows and the electoral gains from them.

Findings from a Lokniti-CSDS survey of randomly-selected rallies in Uttar Pradesh have pointed out that 1 out of every 3 people at a Congress rally may not have ended up voting for the party in the end. At the same time, 1 in 3 people at rallies for both parties, when asked if they would attend a rally of the other party, replied in the affirmative. In an astonishing number of cases there was no correlation between successful rallies and election victories in most constituencies.

Myth #6: The Congress Has Been Wiped Out in These Elections

Despite winning only 52 seats in the Lok Sabha, the Congress in fact put up a far better fight than it has been credited for. It came second in 210 constituencies. In these, the BJP came first in 176, the TRS came first in 8, the Shiv Sena came first in 7, and the JD(U) came first in 5. Every one of these seats is winnable the next time around. The converse is not true: of the 52 seats that the INC won, BJP came second in only 15 seats. Hard work and effective organisation could turn the tables for the Congress party before the nation votes again. Watch this space!

(Former UN under-secretary-general, Shashi Tharoor is a Congress MP and an author. He can be reached @ShashiTharoor. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)