Who lost the election?

There was much skepticism when the exit polls gave the BJP and NDA an unimaginable majority. The consensus among rational thinkers was that since the NDA peaked in many states in 2014, the vote share and hence the number of seats would only come down. This belief can’t be shrugged aside. Because this is what logically happens. Five years of incumbency and a sustained attack on the government by the opposition and a section of media was likely to have this impact on the elections. But then the voters spoke.

Image: ToI

Opinions in India are not shaped on social media or news rooms. The sharp divide we see today, among the people torn between BJP and everyone else is not how India behaves. The outlandish campaign by anti BJP camp was very successful. But the success was limited to a very small section of the electorate. This section was upwardly mobile, English speaking, comfortable in their secure jobs, financially sound and blissfully unaware of the ground realities. These people are the ones who identify themselves as liberals, sometimes fiercely so. These were the people who had their reasons to dislike or even hate the BJP. Much of their world view was shaped by the Western narrative of politics.

The Western narrative which is full of binaries of the Right and the Left. The Western narrative, which caters to a largely homogenized but relatively small population. The divide between the Right and Left works well in countries like the US, UK and some European countries. The history of the Western world makes it much easy for the divide to be exploited by the media or the politicians. Throw in words like Nazi, Fascism and nationalism and one can easily scare a large section of the society.

But India is not the West. We are not a homogenized society and we are definitely not a small population. The problem with the liberal section of the Indians is that they do not understand this vast difference between the West and India. They copy the Western template of binaries and put it to use in India. A battery of liberal messiah were propped up to peddle the Western style narrative to influence the opinion of people. Stand up comedians, YouTube warriors, sulky looking TV anchors, disgruntled journalists, historians and so on. A whole new breed of online news portals came up, which were unabashedly biased against the ruling party.

Needless to say, propping up such individuals and organisations requires a lot of money. Let there be no doubt, no matter how much one hates a political party, they will not co-opt unless their needs of ‘roti-kapda-makan’ are addressed. So the likes of Kunal Kamra, Varun Grover, Atul Khatri, became popular because they spoke what the liberals wanted to hear. The liberals thronged to their comedy nights and paid to listen to their canned comedy.

The likes of Dhruv Rathee, who started off as a small time YouTuber, often posting Islamophobic content, suddenly became the darling of the liberals because he changed his tune and was now playing Saxophone instead of the Nadaswaram. The fact that he patently lied on multiple occasions was not a problem because the liberals thought lies are fine as long as it serves their purpose.

The Wire, Scroll, The Quint, Alt News, etc. came into existence and pretended to be the ‘neutral media’. But anyone with half a brain and an eye could see what they really were. They were simply an extension of the liberal ecosystem, which was tasked to devour the BJP, slowly but surely. It is almost impossible to find out one positive piece of reporting on these portals. They were invariably full of apocalyptic future where the days were gloomy and the nights scary. In the five years of the BJP rule, these ‘news’ websites could not find a single positive piece of work done by the government. That is how ‘neutral’ and ‘independent’ these websites are.

So coming back to the question, ‘who lost this election’? The likes of Kunal Kamra and Dhruv Rathee have made their money, so have the ‘neutral’ websites. The loser in this election is the small section of liberals who thought their cheers for Kunal Kamra will bring down the government. It is almost as if they spent the last five years in an echo chamber, listening to their own dissenting voices and no one pointed this out to them. Blissfully unaware of the sorry situation they were in, they carried on with the hubris.

Some people might say this victory is a defeat of the liberal media and the likes of The Wire and Scroll. But don’t forget, the people working for The wire or Scroll took their salaries home every month. They have nothing to lose. The joke is on that small group of liberals who handed over their money to Kunal Kamra for thirty minutes of cheap thrills.

Udayan on Modi: I want to give you guys my vague opinion

Here Udayan Mukherjee, an economist from JNU and former host at CNBC talks about a 'what if' scenario for Scroll.

The write up is on predictable lines. A lot of rhetoric and wordplay with zero data supporting any of the claims made there. After dedicating the initial paragraphs to the possible scenarios of the NDA managing or not managing to form the next government, Mukherjee arrives at his core subject, financial market.

The tone of the article is aligned to the editorial policy of Scroll. A heady mix of hubris, mocking and patronizing attitude, which is fine. Scroll has every right to pick a tone that plays to its gallery.

Mukherjee says, 'Modi did nothing to change the course of markets in his five years...'

The stock market works primarily on cues from

They say all is Kaput
Image: Scroll.in

many different sectors like government policy, economic reforms, currency fluctuation, domestic consumption, foreign trade and so on. But the market also functions on 'sentiments' and 'speculations'. The sensex gained 25% between Sep 2013 and May 2014, compared to the 42% gains it made since UPA-II came to power and Sep 2013 when Modi was declared the PM candidate. So yes, the government has a role to play in the stock market performance, but there are other factors that come into play.

Next he paints a gloomy picture of the economy where from jobs to exports to manufacturing, everything is a big mess. He says, '...but any dispensation would have to tend to this [economic situation] – either through a well thought out fiscal stimulus and credit enhancement blueprint or NYAY or some form of basic income guarantee.'

Now when an economist starts supporting a handout programme, one can be assured that the economist has become partisan. Mukherjee supports NYAY, which is a Congress plan to 'revive' the economy. It plans to hand out 72,000 rupees to every poor family to boost consumption and hence the economy.

On paper it sounds like a brilliant idea. Sadly such ideas have shown limited results in countries with formalised system of identification of poor. Here the Congress plans to rely on certificates issued by Tehsildars to identify the poor. I don't even want to tell you how a certificate from Tehsildar can be bought.

The latter part of the article delves into more sarcasm and less data. The problem with such one sided articles is that anyone with half a brain can see through the rhetoric and bias. Mukherjee makes motherhood statements without backing them up with any data. This might be due to the fact that a trained economist, whose words should be backed by solid data, has delved into fiction writing (his first being Dark Circles).

So yes, Modi might well lose this election and spectacularly at that. But painting a picture of gloom and doom is not going to make it happen. Such articles might make the BJP haters happy, since most of them do not understand data in the first place. But facts are more important than how a certain economist feels or thinks like.