The perils of punditry

A lot of pundits got the outcome of the Indian election horribly wrong and are now having to eat humble pie, none more so than M. J. Akbar, chief editor of The Asian Age, New Delhi. In the months leading up to the election, he had railed in column after column against Sonia Gandhi’s style of leadership of the Congress Party, calling it an unmitigated disaster and predicting that Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s BJP-led National Democratic Alliance would win the election in a cakewalk, putting a virtual end to the Congress Party as we know it.

Akbar, a former Congress Party MP who, until only a few years ago, never tired of reminding his readers that India was a “secular country” and that Congress was the party that best symbolised those secular credentials, became a bitter opponent of the party after his know-it-all manner caused him to fall into disfavour with the Sonia crowd.

With the advent of the Hindu nationalist BJP-led government in 1999, Akbar suddenly metamorphosed into an ardent supporter of Prime Minister Vajpayee. Akbar’s writings seemed to suggest that Vajpayee was the font of all political wisdom and quite easily the best thing to come along since sliced bread.
In a column published shortly before the election, Akbar took a leaf out of the BJP’s book by lashing out at the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi for speaking such hesitant Hindi. He even criticised Sonia for bringing Rahul, 33, and Priyanki, 32, into the electoral fray, deriding their advent into the campaign as “the return of the babalogue.” The same column had him repeating his familiar mantra about how Vajpayee’s NDA would win the election in a cakewalk.

Well, now we all know what really happened. Far from the NDA winning in a cakewalk, it was trounced in 24 out of 28 states and ended up with 187 seats, as against the Congress-led alliance’s 217. With the support of the two communist parties, the Communist Party of India and the CPI (Marxist), which put up their strongest showing ever, winning 62 seats, plus the support of several other smaller parties, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (a grouping of 20 parties), has 320-plus MPs, giving it a very comfortable majority in the 545-seat Lok Sabha (including two MPs to be nominated by the president of India).

To add to the discomfiture of pundits like M. J. Akbar, Dr Manmohan Singh, 71, an Oxford-educated economist and former finance minister, and the first non-Hindu to hold the office of prime minister in India, told reporters at the presidential palace in New Delhi on Wednesday after meeting President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam that Sonia Gandhi was the one who had secured a mandate from India’s electorate to rule, but he was assuming the post of prime minister because of the wishes of the Congress Party leader.
“With madam’s guidance and support, I am sure we are going to make the future happy,” Singh added, just in case anybody still had any doubts about who was going to call the shots in the new dispensation. Echoing Singh’s words, senior Congress Party leader Kapil Sabil said, “Sonia Gandhi will be the guiding light, a friend, philosopher and guide.”

The Congress Party president was under intense pressure from her emotional supporters to accept the prime minister’s post, but decided to nominate Singh for the job, in a decision that shocked her party rank and file.

Sonia Gandhi, who accompanied Manmohan Singh to the presidential palace on Tuesday, told reporters that the Indian government would be “safe in the hands” of Singh after he was invited by President Kalam to form a government.

As for Sonia’s response to the pressure she was under, it has to be said that it was the essence of cool: “Being under such pressure takes you down a bit. But I’m glad everything is over,” she said. How do you like them onions, Mr Akbar?

Speaking of punditry, though, I, for one, am in the happy position of being able to exclude myself from the ranks of the red-faced pundits who got the outcome of the Indian election wrong. I say this because I never made any predictions about the outcome in print.

Although I had a sneaking suspicion about how the election might turn out, I kept my thoughts to myself, not so much because I was afraid to go out on a limb by making a prediction but because I simply didn’t know enough about the complexities of India’s politics, with its 700 registered political parties and bewildering array of regional alliances and special interest groups.

Being conscious of my lack of knowledge (I mean, does anybody here in Pakistan know the names of even a hundred of India’s political parties, let alone 700?), I held my peace, preferring in the days leading up to the elections to talk of other things – such things as “shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings,” to quote from Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”

What is relevant about this poem in the present context is that it goes on to say: “’I weep for you,’ the Walrus said; / ‘I deeply sympathise.’ / With sobs and tears he sorted out / Those of the largest size, / Holding his pocket handkerchief / Before his streaming eyes.”

I suspect there must be a lot of streaming eyes in the ranks of the BJP, too, these days, as they endlessly debate what went wrong.

What went wrong, of course, were many things. First, there was the Vajpayee age factor. At 78, he’s no spring chicken and not getting any younger, or any fitter for the hurly burly of politics and the demands of being in government. Running the government of a country of India’s size would be enough to give anybody the screaming meemies. The fact that Vajpayee, despite his advanced age, was able to cope with the demands of running that government for four-and-a-half years, says a lot for his grit. In the end, though, voters evidently thought he didn’t have much grit left, or at least not enough for another five years in office.
Second, there was the Muslim swing vote factor. Although Muslims comprise only 12 per cent of India’s population, their votes can make a critical difference in closely fought contests.

This time, most of the Muslim swing votes went to the Congress Party, which has long projected itself as a secular party, as opposed to the Hindu nationalist BJP and some of its more militant allies, including Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and Narendra Modi’s bloodthirsty Hindu mobs in Gujarat – the scene, in February 2002, of a horrific massacre of Muslims, in one of India’s worst outbreaks of communal violence. The BJP’s alliance with such groups didn’t help its cause any with Muslim voters across India.
Third, and perhaps most important of all, was the backlash generated among India’s hundreds of millions of rural poor against the Vajpayee government’s “India Shining” slogan, an advertising campaign touting the benefits of the country’s high economic growth. The BJP-led NDA is said to have spent five billion rupees on the campaign. The slogan may have resonated with India’s middle class, but it boomeranged badly with the rural poor, who quite rightly felt that they had received none of the benefits of this high economic growth. It was not computers the poor wanted but jobs and basic services – electricity, potable water and healthcare.

Then, there was the incumbency factor. Incumbent governments are always blamed for everything that goes wrong. And the Vajpayee government proved to be no exception, with the rural poor blaming the ruling BJP for all their woes.

Why a whole legion of high-powered pundits couldn’t see all this in the run-up to the election, is anybody’s guess – though I suspect it has more than a little to do with the fact that pundits think they have an “inside track” on things that makes their predictions impervious to what the poor are thinking.

Ultimately, however, it’s what ordinary people think that counts. As a character says at the end of John Steinbeck’s 1930s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” about people in the impoverished dustbowl states of America’s depression years, “We go on forever, ‘cause we is the people.”