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The road beyond the Gujarat victory

— PHOTO: AFP

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi addresses the media in Ahmedabad on Sunday after his party’s victory in the Assembly elections.

As the title of Aamir Khan’s block-buster movie said, Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar. The winner takes it all; the winner gets to interpret the score, he gets to determine “the man of the match” award, and the winner also gets to write the history of the contest. And Narendra Modi is the clear-cut winner in Gujarat. He seems to have already begun exercising the victor’s prerogative to arrogance.

Friends and other drum-beaters of Mr. Modi are expectedly ecstatic, and are busy over-reading the nature of the Chief Minister’s victory. On the other hand, the Congress leaders find themselves at a total loss to understand the total rebuff they have received at the Gujarat voter’s hands.

For now, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national leadership has no choice but to appear to be rejoicing in Mr. Modi’s victory, though not many were prepared to bet on such a comprehensive win for the Gujarat Chief Minister. But, to be sure, the drums now beat as loudly at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi as in Gandhinagar. Many a prime ministerial ambitions stand rekindled. There is a temptation to believe that the Modi experiment can be replicated outside Gujarat.

Sooner than later Mr. Modi will cause a more difficult headache to the BJP on the national stage than he has done so far to the Gujarat Congress leaders. Mr. Modi can arrive on the BJP’s national scene only if the party is willing to abandon totally the Atal Bihari Vajpayeeian legacy. It is worthwhile recalling that the only time the BJP came to power at the Centre was when it was able to market itself as a party committed to the Vajpayeeian brand of moderation. It would require an enormous leap of faith — and a gargantuan cunning — for the BJP leadership to conclude that the rest of the country will fall for a Modi-type of aggressive leadership idiom.

That, however, is a choice for the BJP to make. Still, the euphoria in the saffron camp apart, the Gujarat verdict is also time not to lose sight of the fundamentals. Though the logic of electoral democracy does demand that the loser accepts the defeat with good grace — and the Congress seems to have done so — it is nowhere prescribed that the loser must also give in to the victor’s ideological pretensions. Just as it is important not to under-value a defeat it is important not to over-read a defeat.

While a comprehensive analysis of the detailed results must wait, the Congress should feel no reason to be apologetic about its campaign in Gujarat. In fact, it was for the first time in many, many years that the Congress came fairly close to getting its act together in Gujarat. Irrespective of the massive imbalance in the number of seats won by the Congress and the BJP, it needs to be said that the 2007 battle has dramatically re-aligned the calculus of Gujarat’s political economy. Implications of the Patel factor, the split within the sangh parivar, and the Congress’ re-discovery of the adivasis and the poor will be felt soon, once the victory fever subsides. It would be counter-productive for the Congress leaders to feel disheartened or worse allow themselves to be distracted in internal mud-slinging or finger-pointing.

In any case, the Congress fought a determined, pitched battle. It fought fire with fire. There was no dearth of resources; the Election Commission had ensured a fairly level playing field; and, what is more significant, the Congress did not pull its secular punches.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s “maut ke saudagar” (merchants of death) metaphor was intended to offer the Gujarat electorate a clear cut choice between an uncompromising secular vision and an equally unsentimental divisive Hindu vote-bank strategy. Mr. Modi’s victory only shows that the message did not register with the Gujarat voters who obviously remain frozen in the 2002 memories. Mr. Modi managed to successfully list the Gujaratis’ empathy in his manufactured standoff between “Gujarat” and the outsiders. However, the Sunday win does not necessarily endow any kind of ideological legitimacy to Mr. Modi’s voice nor does it provide a licence to communal forces or even political respectability to his message outside of Gujarat.

Nonetheless, the secular forces outside Gujarat will need to draw the appropriate lesson that too much conflict ends up providing political comfort to the communal camp. Too many leaders in too many States are content with fighting their separate “secular” battles, without bothering about the larger perceptions and expectations of good behaviour, sound reputations and sensible governance.

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