The last Mr Clean

Tomorrow morning, hundreds of thousands of people in the villages where India, hopefully, still has a permanent address, will take a bath of almost ritual proportions. They will put on their best clothes, however threadbare, as if it were a religious festival. As if they had to reaffirm their allegiance to the faith. As, indeed, they do.

Through a time when darkness was rendered visible in a manner that Milton could scarcely have imagined, when a slew of politicians were on trial for crimes against the people, the Indian voter has kept his faith in the nation. In the last election, he flatly refused to give a clear mandate to any political party. Tomorrow, he promises to do it again.

Of course, keeping faith is an old habit, and old habits die hard. Down the years, the Indian voter has been the only factor in the polity to remain free of taint. Two decades ago, he took the firstopportunity he was offered to pull the plug on Indira Gandhi after the Emergency. A decade later, he gave V P Singh the chance to start the process that would lead to a more balanced, mature polity. At the same time, he clearly told Rajiv Gandhi that the dynasty was finished.

Whenever called upon to do so, he has made the ethical choice. He has voted for federalism and against absolutism. Now, he can be relied upon to reject leadership without vision and politics without agenda.

He? They, actually. For the Indian voter is large. He contains multitudes. The unkind would term it a sort of collective schizophrenia, with fracture lines aligned on caste, creed, purchasing power, local affiliation, practically everything. But this diversity is actually a strength for within it, the electorate holds the whole system of checks and balances that is the mainspring of democracy.

In the years since that battle between V P Singh and Rajiv Gandhi, the voter has come of age. In the Congress era, he made his electoralchoices by weighing competing party slogans. He was relatively naive, with a trusting belief that manifestoes are self-executing programmes. Today, he understands that what you see is rarely what you get. He has learned to look beyond rhetoric. Partly because the possibilities of rhetoric are limited these days. Partly because he is subjected to it more often in these times of instability, and all rhetoric has begun to sound the same.

The process has been helped by the fact that power is no longer absolute. The successful formation of a government does not imply that the political class can afford to ignore the people for the next five years. They may find themselves out on the streets begging for votes in scant months. Instability has reduced the power differential between the politician and the electorate.

The TV revolution has helped narrow the gap further. Politicians are no longer seen cutting ribbons and delivering complacent platitudes. Over dinner, the voter sees them trying — and often failing– to forge alliances that could save their careers. He sees them in the dock or being released from jail, mouthing stupid excuses all the while. For the voter, the politician has become touchable. His candidate is just another man, to be evaluated in human terms, not venerated as the fount and source of kingship.

The Election Commission has helped, too, by clamping down on conspicuous spending in the polls. The contemporary politician’s roadshow is less like a festival than it used to be. He has fewer opportunities for showmanship, or for impressing the populace with his ability to take over their lives and drown out their voices. No longer overwhelmed by the fanfare and bunting, the voter stands a fighting chance of evaluating the real issues and agendas he is supposed to decide between.

This time round, of course, he is in a bit of a quandary in an election without an agenda. But he can still decide between people. People with whom he is now rather familiar, and therefore has a healthy contempt for.For the second time since Independence, the Indian voter finds himself in a position to debar the political class from enjoying unalloyed power. In the last election, when that class presented him with a similar problem of choice, he may not have been able to force it to perform, but he certainly pruned some of its less desirable members. This time, going by past experience, he will again use his advantage maturely, and in the national interest.