Message in the age of nuance

The argument largely works across every constituent of Maharashtra’s mandate: urban slum, high-rise, village farm; the trader, the clerk, the landless labourer. Let’s first deal with the message of May: the revolution of rising expectations. When the BJP — assuming that voters were now mature enough to digest slick first-world advertising — drove home its high-decibel message that India was shining, people who had otherwise benefited from its economic policies focused only on the flawlessness of the images. They didn’t care to see what was right in their life, and in their country. They saw all that was wrong: the pot-holed road, the uncollected garbage.

When people are disadvantaged and illiterate — so goes the theory — their expectations are dramatically lower. If it is hard to imagine a modern leader with the charisma of an Indira Gandhi, it’s because her voters did not expect too much from her. Indian societies in the 1970s were inward-looking cocoons that had little contact with or information of better lives. When people become more educated, learn more about societies and worlds other than their own, they realise all that they are missing. The pace of that change has accelerated dramatically in the past five years, as politicians are finding out to their consternation.

And so the Congress and the NCP set about addressing — or seeming to address — basic voter demands. In election rally after election rally, Sharad Pawar’s men flaunted electricity bills with a zero balance: free power was a huge relief for millions of struggling farmers in Maharashtra’s vast hinterland. Most of the Sainiks and BJP candidates who won in areas like Marathwada similarly talked power and water.

By conventional wisdom, the NCP’s former deputy chief minister, Chhagan Bhujbal — forced out after allegations of proximity to master forger Abdul Karim Telgi — should never have been re-elected. He was an outsider with corruption charges in his constituency of Yeola in rural north Maharashtra, from the backward Mali caste in a Sena bastion dominated by Marathas. But Bhujbal’s campaign managers never bothered to address the charges of corruption, or his caste: they focused exclusively on daily problems. His workers met farmers either early on their way to the fields or late evening when they returned. Their argument was simple: your problems haven’t been addressed, so let’s talk about them. In Mumbai, the mandate clearly revealed that voters overwhelmingly backed candidates who were visible locally and tackled local problems. The starkest example: the election of ‘Daddy’, as former don Arun Gawli is called. Voters didn’t fear him. They chose him only because he gave water, helped with jobs and repaired buildings in depressed Chinchpokli.

But addressing this revolution of expectations cannot, in itself, explain why Maharashtra stayed with the Congress. After all, India’s richest state is firmly in crisis. The Congress-NCP government did not offer particularly good governance: many ministers blatantly leached the government of loans, loan waivers, land and other concessions for their own enterprises. Some were sugar barons, others were education barons. The state’s debt is set to cross an astronomical Rs 1 lakh crore. The Democratic Front government was plagued by land scams, the Telgi scandal and many others.

This is not as contradictory as it seems, if you consider the second variable that decided the final math: respect. It might seem intangible, but respect — not just for voters but for their intelligence — ensured that shrill campaigns simply didn’t cut it. As always, the glowering Sena, for instance, made any number of personal attacks on Sharad Pawar. Not once did Pawar retaliate. The Italian barbs against Sonia Gandhi, went particularly badly. In meetings, on the streets, the irritated murmur was unmistakable: she married an Indian and so is Indian now, do they think we’re idiots? And so you had Mumbai’s clear-thinking bhaiyyas giving the Sena short shrift by rooting for the NCP or Congress, even while their families vote Mulayam, BJP or Mayawati back home.

Thousands turned up to hear Mayawati in poor, baking Vidarbha, but she had two problems: her shrill, abusive speeches, and her candidates. In a state where caste still rules, she had takers. But the hurdle was her tone and her ironically non-Dalit candidates, most of whom were a motley crowd of OBC farmers, Muslim traders and Marwari businessmen. She spoke of Dalit oppression, her victimisation, yet kept local leaders firmly in the background — a style better suited to the 1970s or interior Uttar Pradesh.

In contrast, the party that did its best yet, garnered the best seats-contested-to-seats-won ratio (they won 71 of 124) and emerged as Maharashtra’s single-largest party — the NCP — ran a varied, intelligent campaign. If they talked development in Mumbai, they talked survival in the dying cotton fields of Vidarbha and Marathwada. They did not abuse rivals, and did not talk down to voters. They do run a politics of shameless patronage, but it is a patronage that has in large part made Pawar’s homeland of Baramati shine, with its giant milk and sugar cooperatives, schools, smooth roads and colleges (some with hostel rooms sporting broadband connections). It was a finely nuanced, modern campaign, even it wasn’t particularly meant to be that way. And did it work.