India marches to its restless rhythm

The voters of West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala delivered their verdicts in the recent Assembly elections with characteristic Indian unpredictability. Chief ministers were anointed by party high commands, old certainties crumbled, and a new political formation led by a movie star was catapulted to power in Tamil Nadu. The results stunned almost everyone – not least our psephologists.

Celebrity pollsters who floated their own political parties and contested elections have even lost their deposits. Remember the quip? – “I wanted to become an astrologer, but I saw no future in it.” Almost all of them got the elections wrong. In the aftermath, I was reminded of R K Narayan’s unforgettable story, An Astrologer’s Day.

The astrologer sits on a crowded street, his forehead streaked with sacred ash and vermilion. Before him lie cowrie shells, mystic charts, and cryptic signs. His eyes sparkle with what customers mistake for prophetic brilliance, though the gleam comes merely from a relentless hunt for customers. The astrologer knows no more of the future than the men who sit before him. Yet through observation, instinct, and shrewd guesswork, he says precisely what people long to hear.

He studies faces before speaking. He waits for clues. “Most of your troubles are due to your own nature,” he tells one man. “How can you be otherwise with Saturn where he is?” The customer invariably agrees.

One evening, a stranger appears. The man challenges him: if the astrologer fails, he must refund the fee with interest. Stakes rise. The astrologer mutters vague incantations before suddenly saying, “You were left for dead once.” The stranger stiffens. “You were stabbed,” the astrologer continues. The man bares his chest and reveals the scar. “And then you were pushed into a well.” The stranger asks, “When shall I find the man who did it?”

“In the next world,” replies the astrologer calmly. “He died months ago, crushed under a lorry.”

The man leaves satisfied. Only later does the astrologer confess to his wife that the stranger was the very man he himself once attacked and presumed dead in his youth. That night, for the first time in years, he sleeps peacefully.

Much of modern psephology resembles Narayan’s astrologer – part intuition, part theatre, part deduction disguised as prophecy. Beneath the cacophony of Indian elections – their communal undertones, the bluster of ideologues, the promises of paradise delivered from chartered jets criss-crossing the hinterland – ordinary voters quietly arrive at their conclusions. Faced with uninspiring choices, they choose not perfection but what appears, at that moment, the lesser risk.

In West Bengal, the BJP trounced Mamata Banerjee. Hubris corrupts, and absolute arrogance corrupts absolutely. One only hopes Bengal does not leap from the frying pan into the fire.

The BJP prevailed in Assam by mobilising anxieties over demographic imbalance and immigration. Yet electoral victory alone cannot heal a fractured society. Unless Himanta Biswa Sarma governs as a conciliator rather than a conqueror, Assam risks sliding towards strife.

The BJP cannot gloat. In Tamil Nadu, it shrank from four seats to one. Its Hindutva card found few takers. Instead, C Joseph Vijay – a rank outsider and significantly, a Christian – captured the imagination of the masses. Vijay’s rise signalled fatigue with the DMK and AIADMK that had alternated power and patronage for six decades.

In Kerala, Rahul Gandhi – long mocked as a dithering dilettante and reluctant prince in the mould of Hamlet – rode back to political relevance. The BJP’s polarising tactics failed; the party secured only three seats. The Communist government, increasingly authoritarian and tainted by corruption allegations, was swept aside.

One message rings unmistakably through these verdicts: India is in profound churn. Its democratic temperament remains restless, argumentative, and gloriously resistant to prediction.

India has never been still. She moves constantly – sometimes forward, sometimes sideways, sometimes in turbulent circles – but never into silence. Empires have risen and collapsed upon her soil; faiths arrived as pilgrims and departed as rulers; markets seduced, plundered, and reinvented themselves in endless disguises. Through every upheaval, India has absorbed shocks without surrendering its civilisational pulse.

India is neither a chronicle of despair nor a hymn of blind nationalism. It is merely an attempt to listen carefully to a civilisation arguing with itself. Power wrestles with conscience. Faith collides with fear. In the land of Kamasutra, love is often suppressed and even criminalised. Markets surge ahead while the poor remain stoic.

However, India remains – against all odds – a civilisation that refuses to break. And its ordinary people remain the quiet glue holding it together.

The writer builds bridges, sometimes by tearing down walls. He is a soldier, farmer, and entrepreneur.

Capt G R Gopinath (Retd.) builds bridges, sometimes by tearing down walls. He is a soldier, farmer, and entrepreneur

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.