A week may be a long time in politics but a year, it seems, is an exceedingly short time. The Karnataka poll has officially flagged the “let the games begin” moment for the country and over the next six to 12 months we can expect electoral politics to zoom into our lives in all its obstreperous, murky, power-saturated glory as four major state elections and one general election play out.
What was most striking about the Karnataka poll was the way in which the election process extended itself interminably, with pre-poll preparations beginning almost a year ago. In August 2017, BJP president Amit Shah was already shouting out the slogan, “Ab ki baar BJP sarkar” from a public platform in Karnataka during his visit to the Vokkaliga dominated Adichunchanagiri Mutt. Striking too was the abnormally extended post-poll period with its nasty, brutish transactions and loud, high-carb celebrations (anyone who watched the Union minister of law Ravi Shankar Prasad feed Union minister of defence Nirmala Sitharaman with a celebratory, but premature, laddu would seriously worry about their blood sugar profiles).
The ‘Before’ and ‘After’ sequences of this election story then seem to rob the centrepiece – the actual casting of ballots by ordinary voters, which is after all what this was about – of any meaning. No matter who wins, the voter is invariably the loser, run over repeatedly by the humungous white SUVs rolling in their netas to swearing-in or swearing-out ceremonies. Almost every MLA elected to the Karnataka assembly this time, bar a handful, is a crorepati – and some are crorepatis several times over (‘77 out of the 221 Newly-Elected Karnataka MLAs Have a Criminal Background’, March 16).
What then are the trends that emerged from the Karnataka election? Here are four of the more significant ones. The first and most significant, BJP’s ambitious ‘Congress mukt Bharat‘ agenda is racing towards a Bharat mukt Bharat scenario. We need to be grateful perhaps that by hacking open the underbelly of the Indian electoral process, the party has revealed a spreading carcinoma within, which now threatens almost every organ of the state. In BJP’s dystopian world view, democracy has been shrunk to a point where the “demos” (people) have been disappeared, and where the “kratos” (rule) is about the naked command over people and resources exercised by those with power, money and insatiable ambition.
Two, the communal knife continues to be constantly sharpened. In Karnataka, free floating, WhatsApped hate floated in the air like winged seeds finding hospitable sites for germination in a wide swathe of the state’s coastal periphery. If in the Uttar Pradesh election of 2017, it was love jihad, cow slaughter, shamshan ghat/kabristan; in Karnataka, Tipu Sultan and Jinnah also made an appearance (‘Karnataka Is Proof Only a United Opposition Can Stop BJP’s Juggernaut’, May 15).
Three, this election has seen the further disintegration of the moral universe. Money did not merely talk, it also stemmed talk. Justice J Chelamaswar, at a farewell organised for him on his last day as a Supreme Court judge, spoke about the “one crore a day lawyers”, who he felt “hardly open their mouth” and “hardly take a stand”. There are similarly well-reimbursed journalists who too “hardly take a stand” believing that their future is closely enmeshed with the existing political dispensation.
But Karnataka also showed that the little voter is alive and well able to withstand the perpetually mobile BJP election onslaught and that bring us to the fourth and final point. The fact that the BJP’s total number of seats came to rest at 104 in a state that famously votes out incumbent governments indicates the very real limits of limitless reserves of cash and cunning. While it may be premature to pronounce that the Modi wave is over (‘Karnataka Verdict Indicates the Modi Wave Is All but Over’, May 18), it’s certainly true that the capacity of regional parties like the Janata Dal (Secular) to stand their ground against it indicates that the peaks of the wave that swallowed up the summer of 2014 have receded into the realm of history.
Every election could be a repository of experience from which the media could draw a better understanding on how to respond to the next more effectively. But this cannot happen if there is a general embracing of what one commentator in The Wire termed as “new political morality – that the winner is always right” (‘Karnataka: The Art of Stealing Mandates’, May 16). The ability to buy over MLAs through blandishments and hard cash, once met with wide disgust and condemnation from reporters and commentators alike, are now the subject of great admiration, even respect. If the now-resigned BJP’s chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa asks, apparently without irony, MLAs to vote according to their conscience (which he didn’t have to add would serve them well), television reporters ask, again apparently without irony, what the BJP “action plan” is in terms of poaching MLAs from the Congress and JD(S). They work hard to create a popular consensus that bribery, pay-offs, ransoms are all part of the BJP’s search for a “stable government”, even as the Congress/JD(S) are excoriated for “locking up” their MLAs. What the media demonstrated this time was the power that Malcolm X spoke of many years ago to “make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent”. If during the Emergency, journalists crawled when asked to bend, today many a news anchor and correspondent is willing to prostrate when asked to crawl.
The Wire’s coverage of the Karnataka election was exhaustive and there are many aspects about it that need to be noted and honed for the general election to come. The ability of its in-house talent to comment on a constantly changing scenario, whether through commentary and reports (‘Karnataka Governor Duty Bound to Invite Post-Poll Partners With Majority: Experts’, May 15; ‘Amid Karnataka Drama, a Reminder That One BJP MLA in Manipur Never Quit Congress’, May 17; ‘BJP Places Confidence Vote in RSS Man As Karnataka Speaker’, May 19), or through video conversations (‘Watch Karnataka Government Formation: What’s Next?’), is commendable. The explainers too were welcome, given the generally incomplete popular understanding of new contexts. Features like ‘From Karnataka to Goa, Court Rulings on Floor Tests Leave Unanswered Questions’ and ‘Karnataka Confidence Vote: What We Know, What We Don’t Know’ (May 19) are richly deserving of reader gratitude.
Two features introduced on counting day indicate the ambitions of this news portal – the first was ‘The Wire Live’ tabular update on the seats counted; the other the continuing news analysis of the results as they came in, through a chat show format. Both features may appear that The Wire is trying to punch above its weight in order to keep up with the big news channels, but they are extremely important additions I would say in building audience loyalty on counting day.
Women, the lost voters of the Karnataka election, didn’t get a shoe-in amidst the testosterone-laced political action and, finally, only seven women could enter the 224-member assembly. The Wire too did poorly on the gender score. More pieces like ‘Karnataka Poll Express: Women Demand Freedom, Water and Toilets’ (May 7) could have helped fill this gap, but a perceived lack of traction for such features may have discouraged more writing along these lines. A pity this, given that more consistent gender coverage may have helped build a constituency of readers/viewers that other platforms have almost overlooked.
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A reader writes in to highlight the “shabby state of medical education in this country”. Among the issues he highlights are the misuse of reservations, the exorbitant fees charged through NRI quotas, and misleading information posted on official sites with regard to fees and stipends. “The fees charged by private colleges in India, which are supposed to run on non-profit basis, is very high. For e.g., D Y Patil Medical College, Navi Mumbai, is Rs 45 lakh per year for management seats and $100,000/ year for NRI seats. To put this into perspective, annual fees for PG in Harvard Medical School (which is by the way a for-profit institution) is $53,000. Such fees should be regulated. Also the government should abolish the NRI quota as it allows private institutions to loot and torture students.”
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A Wire reader, Ram Krishnaswamy, worries about the decline in reading, with even “oldies stuck to Facebook and WhatsApp”. He has a suggestion: The Wire should make effective use of social media platforms to get its deep and thoughtful messages across to people. He ends his note with three important quotes. Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Mahatma Gandhi: “In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.” Unattributed: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”
Thank you for this gift of wisdom!
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This is from Anjan Basu: “A young reader, Saloni Verma, presently doing her second year at Delhi University in English literature, somehow liked my little piece on Karl Marx ( ‘Karl Marx: The Passing of a Colossus’, March 14), and asked for some suggestions about further reading. In one of her replies to me, she spoke glowingly of The Wire and how it is being run. I have, of course, let her know that I am no part of the editorial (or any other) team and that I only write here once in a while. But I also promised to convey her greetings and good wishes to the team that runs The Wire, and that is what I am doing now. This is a line from her mail: “The Wire is one of my favourite things on the internet. Often, I find myself raving about the quality of journalism it espouses.”
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The Modi government seems to have taken its cue on how to censor tweets without actually seeming to, from its experience of managing fuel price hikes. In an earlier era, oil consumers would be confronted by periodic increases and express their annoyance loudly. These were always large enough to get them to rush to the nearest petrol pump and fill up before the new rate kicked in (usually at midnight). Now that the government has switched to minute, incremental rises (or declines) from day to day depending on the global index (except when the Karnataka election is on!), most consumers don’t even realise the price difference. Similarly, as the piece ‘After September Blocks, Modi Govt’s Twitter Removal Requests Become a Steady Trickle’ (May 18), reports, instead of sending out large requests to Twitter to have certain tweets and accounts blocked, the government appears to have adopted a “piece-meal approach of sending more frequent request letters but with fewer listed takedowns…” Incidentally, the report goes on to point out that the last four year have “seen a jump in Twitter censorship requests.”
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A three-year-old raring to go…
I liked one line particularly from the note to readers that the three founder editors of The Wire put out while celebrating the third anniversary of this news portal: “One measure of our journalistic impact is that The Wire is facing 11 frivolous but time- and money-consuming defamation/censorship suits stemming from stories we have broken.”
This is one three-year-old that is willing to test the times!
The questions posed to the editors during their ‘Ask Me Anything’ interaction with readers on Reddit were varied, ranging from the hostile, to the frivolous, to the earnest. Quite a few focused on the prime minister. One question in Hindi, thick with irony, went: “Modi ke khilaf bolne ke ilava aur kyo kaam hain kya?” (apart from speaking against Modi do you have any work?).
Another questioner wanted the editors to prophesy the results of the 2019 general election: We don’t have an alternative candidate to fight against Narendra Modi. Maybe little or by far, Rahul is politically immature and can’t take big decisions. It is evident that Modi is invincible in next Lok Sabha. Who do you think, collectively, will be the opposition candidate in 2024? Any prophecy?”
The response: Politics works in a non-linear way. Until 2012, there was no inkling that Modi would emerge as a PM candidate. There can be many alternative candidates from among regional leaders who have proven track record of running states like Modi had in Gujarat. Currently, people like Naveen Patnaik, Chandrababu Naidu, Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav all have some proven track record.
Write to publiceditor@cms.thewire.in