Comment

By the coming Sunday, we will know whether Narendra Modi has won or lost. What we will not know is why. Not because political analysts don’t have explanations.

They usually tend to have theories to fit any development, especially with the help of 20/20 hindsight. But none of them tell us anything beyond what we already know.

Let’s assume Modi wins. One can almost predict what will be said. His admirers will claim his development agenda-cum-Hindutva record worked.

They will say his leadership stood out compared to what the Congress had on offer. His opponents will say that secular forces failed to work together.

If Modi loses, his friends will claim that development does not work as an electoral plank. He should have gone the whole hog for Hindutva. Others will say he alienated too many caste groups (Kolis, Patels, etc).

Yet others will glibly talk of anti-incumbency — as if no leader will ever be voted back to power. His critics will celebrate his fall, and claim that the people of Gujarat have proved they don’t want a communal, divisive leader.

The problem with such analyses is their shallowness. We have heard them before. They may be true to some extent, but they don’t wash well.

I find the simplest explanations most convincing: elections are won or lost because of a failure of leadership, or a failure to communicate ideas effectively.

Leadership can come from an individual (like Modi) or from a collective (like the CPM). Without leadership and a vision for the future, people will not vote for any party, even if they have done well in the past. Elections are always about the future, not the past.

According to Marcus Buckingham, a management author who has studied the art of leadership very closely, the most important characteristic of a great leader is that he “rallies people to a better future” (The One Thing You Need To Know, Pocket Books, 2006).

According to him, there are five primary levers (or human needs) that leaders use to get people to band together under them: the need for security (especially safety of one’s family and self); the need for community (fear of the outsider), need for clarity (to reduce anxieties about the future), the need for authority (to deal with fears about chaos and anarchy), and the need for respect (we all need to feel we are needed and relevant to the world.)

Applying the above ideas, it seems to me that if Modi wins, it would be because he worked some of these levers successfully.

In 2002, he used the first two levers (security and community) by playing on Hindu fears about Islamic terrorism. In 2007, he started differently, by talking about development.

But when that didn’t seem to be winning him votes, he switched tracks and tried to play on fears about terrorism. He also played on the authority and respect levers, by repeatedly painting himself as a strong leader, one with Gujarati asmita (self-respect) in mind.

An interesting question: Why doesn’t the development theme work anymore? India Shining flopped. Chandrababu Naidu’s reforms failed to win him re-election.

Digvijay Singh lost to Uma Bharati. And Modi’s Vibrant Gujarat didn’t seem to excite the crowds. So what does leadership theory tell us about why this theme doesn’t work?

Actually, the answer is clear: tom-tomming past successes cannot enthuse anybody about the future. A leader has to paint the future, not live in the past, however glorious it may have been. Churchill lost after the war because he didn’t look like a peacetime leader.

A leader who talks about his past rather than the future thus has little chance of winning. Anti-incumbency may cease to be important if a leader manages to tell his voters what he plans to do in the next five years rather than regale them with stories about his previous five.

R JagannathanIf development doesn’t work for Modi, it’s because his spiel was about past achievement. For voters, the past is over.

Email: r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net