Bijli, sadak, paani

In the expectant lull after the campaign drumbeats die out today, there’s a question: what is the leit motif, if any, of the contestant...

In the expectant lull after the campaign drumbeats die out today, there’s a question: what is the leit motif, if any, of the contestants’ face-off for these assembly polls? And perhaps the answer is this: notwithstanding the local idiom and flavour in which it was articulated, the campaigns for the four northern states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Chhattisgarh were threaded through by a common theme: development. Whatever the individual outcomes may be, it is safe to say that elections in these four states will turn on separate issues that have little to do with the grand and emotive call to arms that characterised the Gujarat poll for instance.

In fact, now the old acronym insists on new explication. BSP was much bandied about in poll-speak this time, but it stood for bijli-sadak-paani (electricity-roads-water), not Behenji’s obedient footsoldiers. And in its new incarnation, BSP has been used to drive some welcome holes in the supposed immutability of that trite invocation of the friendly neighbourhood psephologist: the Anti Incumbency Factor. Traditional wisdom has it that this factor routinely fells incumbent governments, almost by rote, and that there is very little that the concerned governments can do about it. This time, this piety has been insistently pricked, notably in Delhi and in another sense, also in Madhya Pradesh. In Delhi, if popular predictions give a large mandate to Sheila Dikshit, if she is allegedly poised to make a comeback, it is because of incumbency, not despite it. Incumbency, in Delhi, is said to be made of things like cleaner air due to CNG, availability of power, more flyovers, better roads. It is made, in Madhya Pradesh, of mostly absent electricity and bad roads. Here, it is not the mechanical law of incumbency that is being held responsible for Diggy Raja’s precarious footing, but his administration’s inability to deliver on these two. In MP, in fact, development is being debated in an especially nuanced manner: while most admit that the chief minister has notched some success in social indices like literacy and decentralisation, they predict that the relative neglect on the economic front may do him in.

Of course, all the usual suspects also ran. There was caste and community and the extra large personality. But on the whole, in these elections, we can be grateful for a very welcome break from the Gujarat model and the politics of hoary grievance.