Election Graffiti

I feel my nerves doing a gentle jig when Mulayam Singh Yadav promises to keep his door open so that aam janata like me can reach him in times of trouble, or when Sonia Gandhi looks dolefully into my eyes and intones that sheunderstands just how I felt when I was caught without an umbrella when it rained last week, because her “late husband” had quite the same experience.

And, yes, I am also not quite sure whether I’d like to be considered a part of L.K. Advani’s flesh and blood, fervent though his vote-for-us appeal was on the TV screen last week. In fact, it struck me very forcibly on that occasion that this hypocritical bunch is best confined to TV screens. That way you can at least switch them off, if you so choose.

But there are little delights too in this nowhere period that stretches between a government that is dying on its feet and one that is struggling to be born. It would be churlish on my part not to acknowledge them.

Like Laloo Prasad Yadav’s monkey-cap, for instance. A sartorial addition that fits his image like a glove. Or Mayawati’s gold-embroidered “lady’s suits”, worn for extra effect (especially while delivering speeches about Dalit poverty) with diamond-studded jhumkas. It’s also nice to knowthat Shankersinh Vaghela tries to put his best face forward on the campaign trail not in the old-fashioned way of listing the achievements of his government but by submitting himself to a good facial (a survival tip that he no doubt picked up from Mrs Vaghela). The message, in this case, is the massage, as McLuhan may have put it.

Don’t know if you have noticed, but the one positive fall-out of the Sonia Effect is that political campaigning has suddenly acquired some style and panache. Poorly-starched kurtas of the boring old days are no longer in currency. There is even a new brand of psephologists who have taken to forecasting election outcomes based on fashion trends.

The deep-maroon sari Sonia Gandhi wore at Kali Padiahere the other day could translate into a 2 per cent swing in favour of the Congress, give or take 10 per cent of the votes, while the salwar-kameez she favoured for the Punjab appearance may not amount to very much, or could even damage party chances, because its pauncha was abit too broad and quite out of date. Drivel, you say? Well, surely not much worse than the stuff that TV poll shows have been spewing non-stop these days, what with every man, woman and child in this country being magically transformed into TV political analysts.

That’s not all. This land that came up with the revolutionary concept of the zero, and which produced Aryabhatta, Bhaskara and the unknown author of Surya Siddhanta, has suddenly discov- ered that it is a mathematical nation. Everyone who is someone in the corridors of power is busy working out complicated sums as if his or her life depended on them. In the process, ordinary people become numbers and ordinary communities are rendered into strange acronyms like MY and AJGAR.

It all reminds me a bit of A.A. Milne’s rhyme about the King of Peru, who would “murmur and murmur, until he felt firmer, this curious rhyme which he had”:

Eight eights are sixty-four,

Multiply by seven.

When it’s done,

Carry one

And take awayeleven.

Nine nines are eighty-one

Multiply by three

If it’s more,

Carry four,

And then it’s time for tea….

Meanwhile the ballot-box sits like the Sphinx with the country’s future in its belly.