Next time, it’ll be Dara Singh vs Veerappan

Half the voters thought the only valid option was not to vote. If you count out some 5 to 10 per cent votes that accrue from electoral malpractice, the voting percentage across the country would be 50 per cent. One had thought it was the government that needed to be downsized, not the electorate.

Kerala, as always, led the country in this electoral irrelevance. Imagine Mohun Bagan and East Bengal playing marbles in a football stadium. In a classic non-election, CPI(M) and Congress-led fronts mock-fought to pick 20 winners who will go to Delhi and vote en bloc against the BJP. Fine, but how political is this opposition to the BJP? Close to the ground, leaders of both fronts struck deals with the sangh family and friends to tilt the saffron votes.

Forget the Congress, the cadre-based CPI(M)’s relatively younger leaders seemed keener on trans-party deals than to build up their own party. The rising red stars flaunt their personal or familial influence over all and sundry, from culture vultures to godmen and godwomen. Secularism is equated with the minority vote, which affords further scope to wheel and deal with the 40-odd denominations of the church and the various Islamic factions.

The self-fulfilling assumption is that everyone born to Christian or Muslim parents will vote like Pavlovian dogs. While the RSS opposes religious conversion, in post-EMS Namboodiripad Kerala the left seems to be set against political conversion.

Sadly, the too-clever-by-half networking hasn’t even yielded a low-level social equilibrium in the state. The northern districts saw unusual poll violence followed by even stranger political reactions. The local Congressmen threatened to walk across to the BJP for protection from the militant CPI(M). Is the left driving the lesser evil (Congress) into the arms of the greater evil (BJP)? Or does the Congress recognise that the only on-the-ground alternative to the CPI(M) is the BJP? In which case, what was this election all about?

The regional media plays a major mainstream role here. The print medium has carpet-bombed Kerala and cable TV is fast catching up. But they are merely reactive and are often one up on the national media in trivialising and sensationalising.

All over the nation, the voter confronted such electoral absurdities. You can’t expect parties to consult the electorate on candidate selection or tie-ups. But is there any debate within the parties? Not a single party has a democratic structure. Every one of them prides itself on decision-making systems and sub-systems which are famously bypassed or overruled by a top person or his or her coterie. Even Cyber Babu runs his TDP like a fiefdom.

These are not overnight developments. So what’s new? Bad politics cannot remain just bad for ever. At some point it turns apolitical and self-destructs. Political promiscuity ultimately leads to political AIDS. What is at stake is the residual identity that a party needs to ensure its own preservation. What kind of identity does the BJP or the Congress have? From a two-member presence in the Eighth Lok Sabha, the BJP rode a Toyota Rath to national prominence. Almost every issue that went with this Hindu nationalist identity-building exercise has now been swept under the magic carpet called Vajpayee. At the same time, the party cannot claim to have reinvented itself as a moderate, centrist force because that would hurt its core support. So here is a case of schizophrenic identity.

The 100-plus Congress looks straight out of the Asterix comics — Geriatrix devoted to a 27-year-old Priyanka. Like upmarket 555 cigarettes and the downmarket 501 detergent cake, the party is a numerical brand — Number 10. The only difference is that you can’t make out whether 10′ is up, down, pro or anti-market. Known for pioneering liberalisation during a rare non-dynastic interlude, the party’s current economic agenda combines half-hearted reforms with scatter-brained views on socialism, subsidies, licenses, permits and the public sector.

As it happened with V.P. Singh’s Mandal, the entire political spectrum has come to internalise this suitably vague package. Everybody is committed to the single window with a back door or two left half-open. No party wants to carve out a distinct identity even on matters economic.

If this is how consensually our parties commit, see how single-mindedly they omit. No ruling party or front is likely to free and professionalise Doordarshan and AIR. No initiative is in in sight on the National Police Commission Report. And in a large and pluralistic society such as ours, not even an eccentric non-conformist political noise was heard against the Bomb. You can’t find a better-behaved back-scratching crowd at a diplomatic cocktail party.

It is naive to hope for any redemption. Our new group of leaders owe their position to a certain ability to deal; not lead. They play the unregulated political stock market and make statistical gains and losses. They don’t see their parties as instruments for making a difference.

In fact, they have a perverse interest in their own parties not growing beyond a certain threshold because that would make them redundant as fixers. Next time round, they will ask us with a straight face to choose between Dara Singh and Veerappan.