BJP should read US polls right

Analysts have narrowed the components of the ‘‘values’’ theory to the stand on terrorism, the right to abortion, gun control laws and gay marriages. Opinion polls on each of these issues have produced finely-tuned answers. For instance, many who voted Republican also opposed unlicenced weapons, but favoured Bush on the other issues. Kerry was voted for by a majority of women, the minorities and, surprisingly, the Jews. But in each of these categories, Bush increased his share of the vote .

What does the voting pattern now indicate in hindsight? The Democrats missed the point that in 2004 the war on terrorism outweighed economic issues. To go further, Kerry’s advisers failed to convince the electorate that the war in Iraq was different from the war on terror. The increase in voter turnout eventually helped Bush. Certainly in the crucial state of Ohio, the rush of voters who don’t normally vote did so to express their displeasure, most of all, to gay marriages.

So the outlines of the constituent parts of the values factor are now clear. Each issue was not critical, but together they created in the Republican voter the impression that the US would be better led out of its troubles by holding on to the values of an earlier era. The value conundrum is interesting for India. If there is any party touting values it is the BJP; yet the popular vote at the last Indian election showed the peoples’ rejection of the BJP’s values and, in that sense, it was a vote for the opposite values. Of course India is not the US. But values obviously matter. So Advani would do well to re-strategise, accepting the fact that the BJP lost the war of the values in 2004. Harking back to the same values would be to invite defeat.

Unmentioned in any US media was any comparison to the presidential elections that brought Nixon to power in the middle of the disastrous Vietnam war. The US of today is not nearly as bitterly divided as the US of those days when unwilling conscripts returning wounded from that war were spat on by young anti-war liberals. Is there an unspoken aversion from a silent majority to repeating the tragedy caused by this revolt to the other war?

To an Indian observer of political theory the distressing aspect of the conservative victory is the threat to take western liberalism backwards. In the background somewhere sits the US Supreme Court, silent so far and, of course, the American people who surely can be trusted.