The closer the election, the clearer it becomes that this is the most important general election since 1977. In that distant year, Indian voters were offered a choice between a dictator and her son on one side and a raggedy, disparate caboodle of crusaders for democracy on the other. They chose the caboodle mostly because they had learned the hard way what losing democracy meant. This time the choice increasingly appears to be between the past and the future, between an old idea of India and a new one. Those selling the old idea, in their different ways, are the Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party and the ‘secular socialists’ who banded together last week as a third front.
What is the old idea of India? It is the one bequeathed us by Nehruvian socialism whereby we have created India as she is today. A land in which a vast infrastructure of politicians, officials, clerks and peons govern badly an angry and restless populace that no longer understands why basic needs are so hard to meet. A land in which young people demand to know why the sons of officials and politicians live like billionaires while they hunt desperately for jobs in a market that in the past 10 years has dried up. So crony capitalism is a favourite catchphrase with the AAP lot, without them noticing that this is always a creation of the state. In the eyes of AAP, it is corporate India that is to blame.
What is most depressing is that if you talk to leaders of the parties in the old India club, the solutions they offer are no different to the ones we have already tried. In their campaign speeches, they talk of secularism and socialism, poverty alleviation schemes and empowering women. On corruption, the Lokpal is a ‘new’ idea that has been around for 40 years. They know that they offer nothing new, so they throw in dark references to the man they most fear and loathe. Narendra Modi.
The reason why they fear and loathe him is because his popularity, according to recent polls, has increased dramatically despite repeated attempts by the old India club to remind voters that he is a ‘maut ka saudagar’. A merchant of death as Sonia Gandhi famously called him. What they seem not to have noticed is that his popularity has increased because he has succeeded in selling voters a