The Evening Report: Phase 5: A lotus in every city
Electoral politics in India underwent a dramatic transformation with the turn of the millennium that almost none of the so called intellectuals or political analysts noticed. Even the RSS which usually has a sharp sense of the socio-political trends in India took nearly a decade to understand this phenomenon. To this day, nobody has really made an attempt to decipher this change fully and make sense of this new India that we witness every day.
For the first 5 decades of our democratic existence, namely, the 50’s, the 60’s, the 70’s, the 80’s and the 90’s, electoral current in India flew from the villages to the cities. Many political leaders and parties used to face severe rural anger and wouldn’t even realise in their cocoons of urban dwelling that a massive anti-incumbency wave was sweeping against their governments. Rural anger or rural support was the most important factor that decided who would win or lose an election. There are dozens of examples of this, but let us just take two national elections as an example. The 1989 election which is widely regarded as the “Bofors” election was actually a rural anger election against the Rajiv Gandhi government’s handling of the severe 1988 drought. Similarly, in 1996, despite running a very successful liberalisation government, P.V. Narasimha Rao failed to anticipate the rural angst against his policies which were yet to bear any fruit to the villages.
After two generations of reforms – first by the P.V.N government and the second by the Vajpayee government – something had drastically changed in India in early 2000’s. Political current had begun to now flow from its cities to its villages. At first, slowly, then gathering steam from 2009 onwards. Why was this happening? There are essentially 3 parts to that answer.
With liberalization, there was far greater migration of labour from rural to urban India with much greater employment prospects.
The opening up of communication and Internet through the smart phones meant greater communication between the two Indias, urban and rural, that had hitherto lived in their own silos.
Through exposure to the world, the villages of India began to reflect as a microcosm of urban dwellings with similar aspirations and similar goals.
So, when Vajpayee led NDA lost power to UPA by a thin margin of seats in 2004, do you know what was the most peculiar feature of those results? BJP and NDA had lost virtually every seat in three of the largest metropolitan areas of India in terms of Lok Sabha seats – Delhi-NCR, Mumbai-Thane belt and the greater Kolkata region. That was the first demonstration of how the political current had begun to flow from the big cities to the villages.
In 2009, when Manmohan Singh returned back to power spectacularly defeating L.K. Advani, the same encore was repeated. BJP again failed to register any wins in the three largest metropolitan regions (by Lok Sabha seats). It was this status-quo that Modi challenged in 2014. He built a largely urban aspirational campaign and then scaled that model to the rural parts. This has been one of the least understood parts of his political journey but then Modi had a head start over the assorted intellectuals and political observers of the country, because he had witnessed this shifting current in Gujarat over the decade that he had presided over the state. He is an extremely astute observer of politics and had internalised this transformation long before he took stage at the national level.
