Mind your spin

Suddenly Delhi’s know-all cocktail party pundits were singing a different tune and proclaiming Singh as a media tiger. Meanwhile, Singh’s counterpart in Rajasthan, the low key but down-to-earth Ashok Gehlot, did a remarkable job in convincing everyone that his administration has performed very well and would therefore reap rewards. It was forgotten that just six months earlier Gehlot had been dismissed as a bumbler about to be axed by Sonia Gandhi. The good monsoons had, the media argued, given Gehlot a new lease of life. Since the BJP spin masters in Rajasthan were not up to the mark, the impression that Gehlot was bound to win continued right until the ballot boxes were opened.

While it makes for a pat story line that the electorate voted for good governance the results could just as easily be interpreted as the voters’ desire for a change. Vasundhara Raje and Uma Bharati were fresh faces. Shiela Dikshit may have retained her position not on the basis of her government’s good work but the fact that Delhi’s voters were rather weary of the alternative, Madan Lal Khurana, who has been a familiar presence on the capital’s political scene for half a century.

If good governance was the criteria, then the Karunanidhi administration, which had possibly the best overall record of governance in the country, should not have been swept out of power by Jayalalithaa in the last Tamil Nadu assembly elections. The Dhumal government in Himachal and the Badal regime in Punjab both lost ignominiously, though the former was fairly progressive, while the latter was nepotistic and corrupt. In Gujarat, the Congress tried to counter Modi’s saffron rhetoric by highlighting his failures on the development front. At that time the BJP campaign managers had scoffed that development could never be a poll issue and recalled Indira Gandhi’s failure to move the voters with her ‘‘roti kapda aur makan’’ slogan.

In fact, from one perspective the results of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan far from being a heartening sign for the BJP could actually be viewed as an ominous portent. The voters were looking for a change and it was anti-incumbency that prevailed. If the voter is in fact looking for new faces then the BJP’s septuagenarian leadership could be in for a shock.

An interesting aspect of spin specialists is that their assessments of people change dramatically depending on whether their fortunes are up or down. Sonia Gandhi, for instance, gets periodically reassessed in keeping with the current status of her political fortunes. After she lost the general elections there were unkind cracks about leaders who were mere readers of other people’s lines. There were jokes about her accent, her isolation, her stiffness and her unfamiliarity with Parliament. After Congress victories in a series of assembly polls the pundits discovered a new Sonia. She was described as decisive and firm in the style of Indira Gandhi, her Italian accent had mysteriously disappeared, she was said to be spouting Hindi extempore and had blossomed into a brilliant parliamentarian. Now that the Congress has lost badly at the recent elections, already some have started writing her political obituary.

Vajpayee’s image, on the other hand, has undergone a sea change for the better. Once he was considered old, ailing, indecisive, given to embarrassingly long pauses when he spoke and helpless in preventing the machinations of the RSS and Advani. Now we are presented the picture of an old fox who has outwitted his opponents both within and outside his party. A man with a Teflon coat which cannot be dented, a statesman and a visionary who hopes to solve both the Ayodhya issue and the Kashmir impasse in the next few months as he leads the NDA successfully to the polls.

BJP President Venkaiah Naidu asserts triumphantly that there is not a mere feel good factor in the air, people are feeling great, what with a package of economic benefits announced by the finance ministry. (It is a different matter that in the past election eve bonanzas of waiving off dues did not benefit any chief minister from Parkash Singh Badal and Devi Lal to Digvijay Singh.) Perhaps one reason why the NDA leadership is feeling so euphoric at the moment is because it sees Sonia Gandhi as the main challenger. But apart from the BJP workers, the share market investor and the city yuppie, it is debatable whether the common man realises that things are quite as rosy as the spin masters would have us believe!