ANALYSIS
High profile candidates alone do not win elections. Finally, the political party that commandeers its forces on the ground most effectively will emerge victorious
Discourses, when not rooted in ground realities, have an aberrant tendency to become fallacious, and end up being embarrassingly farcical. That’s why chinwags about elections among the chattering classes often fail to predict the outcomes of elections.
The reason why these discourses are so cerebrally vacuous is that they usually dwell more on non-issues, choose to emphasise needlessly on personalities over electoral realpolitik. Bangalore South is a case in point. It is reckoned to be a prestigious constituency, and the bulk of its electorate is the target group of all three major political formations. Bangalore South is urban and sophisticated, filled with IT professionals; a fifth of its electorate would be casting its ballot for the first time; and the people here are politically alert. The constituency is as demographically fragmented as in any other metropolis, and caste factors often inject a final booster shot for the winner in the race to the finishing line.
It is in this ethnic quagmire that Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani will be wrestling it out as a Congress candidate against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) incumbent Ananth Kumar and the dark horse in the fray, Nina Nayak of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). It is because of the big names that are contesting (Nayak is not a nobody, she’s a former chairperson of the Karnataka State Commission for Protection of Child Rights), that Bangalore South has become the gabfest of the chattering classes. And unfortunately, people are harping more about the personas than how difficult or easy it might be for the Congress in Karnataka to upstage Ananth Kumar, the representative from Bangalore South every time since 1996.
The discourses disregard the fact that the Congress has grabbed this seat only once since 1977, when R Gundu Rao emerged winner in 1989 even though the tide was against the Congress that year. The animated colloquies brush aside the contention that Nilekani is only a big name, not a political heavyweight by any yardstick. If Nilekani upstages Ananth Kumar, it will not be because of his clean image; it may be because the terrain is fertile enough to bear fruits for the Congress. The ground has been shifting from under the BJP’s feet here by the election. The party won by a facile 4.1 per cent margin in 2009 compared to the whopping 22.2 per cent difference of 1998. Bangalore South is also home to a considerable number of followers of both the Saffron school of thought and the vociferous anti-corruption brigade.
Yes, the political situation here is complicated; as it always is for an Indian election. Those are the very ground realities one was alluding to. Now, make the scene a bit more nebulous by granting credence to the contention that the public mood in Karnataka is now weighed heavily against the Congress, which returned to power last year but has remained inert and unproductive.
In the end, it will only be about how the contesting parties are able to commandeer their forces on the ground. That’s how and why elections are won and lost. Not because a colonel somewhere wore clean clothes.