Kejriwal's 'development agenda' may win Delhi for him

Elections to the Delhi assembly, thanks to psephology, are almost over. Psephology sanctions post-mortem before the patient is officially pronounced dead.

But the affected common man, even more than the accredited doctor, knows the outcome when the patient begins to gasp.

We must reckon, first, what the projected outcome of the Delhi elections does not mean. It does not mean the decline, or the inefficacy, of the developmental agenda in electoral politics.

Modi lost, not because he continued to do a Modi, but because he did not; and allowed, instead, the communal cacophony to distort his authentic voice. If the Congress were done to death by the bandicoots of corruption in 2014, the Modi juggernaut has been halted by the regressive peddlers of communalism in his own Parivar.

The de facto campaign managers for the Aam Aadmi Party were the likes of Yogi Adityanath, Sakshi Maharaj and specimens of their ilk. In the eyes of the voters of today, the unleashing of hounds of communalism belies the unfurling of a developmental heaven.

She has just enough common sense to know that you don’t go forward by sliding backwards. Development is the promise of a better tomorrow. Communalism is the return of the spectres of the past. Ghosts belong to haunted houses. They are the dramatis personae of eerie lives. It is a theatre nobody wants to visit.

Delhi signals the dead-end of politics as ‘performing art’. Politics-as-development belongs to the genre of politics as ‘creating art’ like, say, pottery or a piece sculpture. Creating art generates something that survives its performance part. Performing art, in contrast, leaves nothing behind.

An actor, for example, may play the role of a king; but only for as long as the play lasts. After the curtain comes down he is free, without the risk of being alleged hypocrisy, to resume his true colours or roles.

At the time when the Modi rhetoric was unleashed –with an alluring touch of freshness in an electrifying atmosphere of unprecedented public disenchantment – the citizens had no means to know to which genius of politics the heady cocktail belonged.

But the distinction was bound to surface with a vengeance. It did. That it has done so in such a telling fashion – and so soon – in the capital city of the country, the seat of politics and power, is at once appropriate and affirmative.

While proclamation and declamation, promising and posturing, are germane to politics, it is risky to assume that political utterances can be separated from the track record of governance-delivery.

Modi’s proffered paradise of good governance was mocked not by his political detractors but his own clever-by-half cabinet colleagues. Consider, for example, the brain-child of Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani.

Good governance has to be, according to her ministry, celebrated strictly on the Christmas day. That it coincides with the birth anniversary of A B Vajpayee was only a convenient alibi. Vajpayee is conspicuous by his absence in the BJP pantheon.

As on today, BJP is a Modi juggernaut navigated by Amit Shah. Neither Vajpayee nor his political Chanakya, L K Advani, has any leg room in it. But good governance has to be pitted against Christmas for a significant reason.

That reason underlies Article 25 of the Constitution, which cradles a citizenship right. This right confers on every “citizen” the “fundamental right” to practice, preach and propagate his religion.

The diktat that Christmas be treated as a working day was a cunning interference with the right of Christians to “practice” their faith. Such a ploy could be born only from the Hindutva vision according to which members of religious communities whose punyabhoomi (holy land) lies outside the Indian soil, cannot be citizens of India. So, Article 25 does not apply to them. Seen in this light, “Good Governance Day” was “Hindutva Day” masquerading itself as something else.

Orchestrated attacks

This apprehension was, thereafter, underlined by the orchestrated attacks on churches in Delhi. Five churches were vandalised. The police treated it with cynical nonchalance. They were discounted as burglaries or pieces of casual mischief.

Why mischief should have a tell-tale pattern, why it should target a specific community and erupt in an otherwise peaceful city dreaming of ‘acche din’ under the Modi sarkar, were pressing questions that were simply swept under the carpet.

But let us return to the rhetoric of development, if only to take note of the irony it generated. In the Delhi elections, it was not Modi who accosted the voters with the developmental palliative. It was the AAP.

Kejriwal’s broom was poised over corruption. Modi, despite the promise to end corruption and to bring black money back, ‘converted’ the broom into a tool for cleanliness, thereby disowning the corruption agenda completely. Kejriwal, who is more creative than most people give him credit for, would not be outdone by Modi. So he did a Modi.

The humongous irony of Delhi elections was that it was still the developmental agenda that won the day. But this time around, the boot was on the other foot. To the electorate of Delhi, Kejriwal, not Modi, was the mascot of a people-friendly, issues-based paradigm of development. This problem inheres in “politics-as-performing-arts”. Roles can be assumed and reversed at will.

The foremost take-away for Modi from Delhi elections is that rhetoric must be conjoined with sincerity and accountability. Also, the rhetoric of attack – legitimate ammunition in a quest for power – is not quite the same as the art of persuasion, which is germane to good governance.

Citizens are not persuaded by decibels but by integrity, which rests on matching deeds with words. They are waiting eagerly for the ‘acche din” promised: hoping against hope.

(The writer is Principal, St Stephen’s College, Delhi)