Democracy’s manic moment returns

It would be justified for Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders, workers and supporters to be ecstatic about winning 67 of the 70 assembly seats and a vote share of 55 per cent, literally obliterating political rivals. It is a phenomenon that seems to recur like the blue moon, but with less regularity. It dazzles those involved in it as well as those who are watching it from afar. The victor’s ecstasy overflows even as the party and the leader relish the champagne moment. Of course, AAP leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is unlikely to sip champagne to celebrate his electoral triumph. It should not come as a surprise if thousands of young AAP supporters, too, do not turn to the bubbly to mark the party’s achievement. The sweet taste of triumph is sure to linger a lifetime for those who have worked for it.

The temptation to interpret it as a verdict against corrupt politicians, against the arrogance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), would be plausible but it would fall far short of explaining the tidal-wave effect, sweeping away everything in its path. The figures are sobering compared to AAP’s seat tally of 95.7 per cent, which crosses the coveted statistically significant mark in the most exact experiments. AAP had actually polled 4.8 million votes out of a total Delhi electorate of 13.3 million -- that is about one-third of the total votes, and 58.4 per cent of the votes polled.  Its total domination of the legislature cannot be a matter of comfort either for the AAP or for Delhi. There are some victories which are self-defeating in a manner of speaking.  

There is a need to make sense of this phenomenon and it is going to be elusive. Intelligent guesswork is all that one can attempt. It seems to happen roughly once in a decade or more, and in some polities. For example, at the national level this had happened in 1971 when Indira Gandhi had 352 members in a Lok Sabha of around 518. It amounted to 79.82 per cent of the votes polled in the 441 seats that the Congress had contested and its share of the total votes was 43.68 per cent. It had happened again in 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi won  404 of the 491 seats the party had contested, and it had cornered 49.10 per cent of the votes polled in the seats it had contested, and 51.80 per cent of the total votes polled. 

At the state-level, it had happened in the Tamil Nadu assembly elections. In the wake of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, the AIADMK-Congress combine won 224 out of the 235 seats, reducing the DMK, the main rival, to two seats. The phenomenon does not seem to recur consecutively. When the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) came on the political stage with a big bang effect in 1983 winning 201 out of 294 seats on its debut, and increased it to 202 in January 1985, the vote percentages were 54.04 and 46.21 respectively. When the party bounced back in 1994 after losing the 1989 assembly election, it won 226 of 294 seats, but its vote percentage was 44.14.
The statistics do not matter as far as the political parties are concerned. There are only winners and losers, and margins are of academic interest. But these are the very figures that should tease a political observer. The discrepancy between popular vote share and seat share in the legislature can be seen as a distortion of the first-past-the-post system. That is why advocates of electoral reforms want some kind of proportional representation so that no segment of the electorate is left out of the frame. This is however an interesting theoretical argument.  In a country like India, simple, and even overwhelming, majorities are needed to keep the wheels of governance moving. The centipede-effect that a proportional representation system would have on the working of the government would be disastrous. Despite distortions, the existing system seems to be a fair reflection of the general mood of approval or disapproval of the people. Experience has shown that parties with overwhelming majorities cannot misuse power beyond a point and the next election sets right the imbalance.

This still leaves two questions unanswered. The first is the ‘wave’ phenomenon. Psephologists seem to have attained reasonable accuracy in extrapolating data to predict a wave. But it does not explain the reasons for the decision that a voter has taken in his or her mind at the time of pressing the button on the electronic voting machine (EVM). It would of course be impossible to pinpoint the millions of split-second decisions taken in the voting booth. This should perhaps be possible in the distant future of super super-computers. 

The second question pertains to the meaning of the verdict as it is generally understood. Here we are on familiar, but unreliable, ground. It would seem that people, the word with all its vague connotations, feel and think in the same way for a while. While it lasts, it reflects in a popular vote of the wave kind in an election. It represents the overall pattern or the Gestalt as it were. Here we enter the dangerous stage of social psychology, which has been correctly described not as the psychology of the society but the psychology of an individual in a society. It is this aspect which needs to be studied at length in political science.

This does not exclude the general conclusions that need to be drawn from this election. All the parties and the people in general should be able to think out their own interpretations, and these interpretations will shape the policies and actions of the parties and the people during the next five years. One of the general conclusions that can be drawn is that this is not a vote for radical change because no one, including those in the political vanguard, has any clue about what the future should be like. They are grappling with existing problems and they are looking for possible solutions. There is no Utopia waiting to be unveiled. The mistake Prime Minister Narendra Modi made in May 2014, and the mistake that Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal will make in February 2015, is to wave the wand and pronounce abracadabra. People make a note of it even as they get back to their daily routines. 

The author is a consulting editor with dna