[Reader-list] Analyzing the constant election analysis

[Taha Mehmood]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Columnists/Santosh-Desai/City-City-Bang-Bang/Analyzing-the-constant-election-analysis/articleshow/4572872.cms

Analyzing the constant election analysis
25 May 2009, 0000 hrs IST, Santosh Desai

In the space of a few hours, the cacophony of doubt gave way to the
lucidity of definitive knowledge. From a point of time when anyone
dressed
in khadi and leading a party of more than two people was seen as a
potential Prime Ministerial candidate and the television screen was
riddled with the self-doubt that comes from having too many
permutations to juggle, the move to clarity was swift.

All the confusion vanished and the air of authority of the many
experts who have taken up residence in our homes, thanks to
television, was restored. Experts tend to oscillate between
presumptive knowledge and retrospective certitude, and the election
results, once out, allowed experts to gravitate to the latter.

Suddenly, it was quite clear what had happened. The specific
explanation offered varied but the tone of certainty was a constant. A
vote for stability, the youth vote, the provocative attacks on the PM
that made the middle class strike back at the BJP, Varun Gandhi’s
polarizing ways, Modi’s visibility nationally, Rahul Gandhi’s hitherto
undiscovered political genius, a vote for good governance and against
divisive caste politics, the return of national parties and the coming
demise of regionalism - these are some of the more common explanations
that were instantly discovered.

And this happened even before the vote share data, without which any
real analysis of election results is meaningless, came in. Even the
things that most people seem agreed on may not stand up to scrutiny.
The idea, for instance, that this was a vote for stability seems
far-fetched given that the one thing that everyone was agreed on
before the elections was that we would not have a stable government
. For anyone to back any party on this basis would be an act of
extreme optimism.

Stability is a consequence of the vote but it is very doubtful that it
was the intention. Similarly, there is no evidence so far that the
youth vote has had any major role to play in the outcome. Now it is
possible that this may turn out to be a variable when we look at the
results more deeply, but so far this is only an unsupported
hypothesis. However, all our media is full of the need for greater
youth and we are looking long and hard at the age profile of the
Cabinet. As Swaminathan Aiyar, in one of the few thoughtful analyses
that have appeared after the elections, argued so persuasively in The
Economic Times a few days ago, all of the dominant theories about why
the Congress
won are at best partial explanations.

At a certain level, analysis can often be the delivery mechanism for
our pre-conceived notions about the world. The explanation precedes
the enquiry; we find the answers we already know. We find only those
answers that fit the frames we use to see the world through. For
example, since Varun Gandhi was seen as an issue before the elections,
we explain the results through him. Because commentators thought that
youth would play a role in the outcome, we continue to frame the
results through this issue in spite of the fact that there is no basis
we have to do so.

Since a large section of media believes that voting should not be
based on caste or communal lines, we are quick to embrace the theory
that this result is a vindication of an existing belief. We see in the
result what we want to see. At a deeper level, not being able to
explain things satisfactorily is deeply dissatisfying. We look for big
unifying answers rather than a series of small local explanations.

The repeated use of the phrase ‘The Indian voter’ and the many
allusions to his or her wisdom serve to implicitly render singular
what is fiercely plural. There is no definitive voter and all of
India’s decidedly diverse electorate can certainly not be regarded as
a single organism with a unified consciousness. A statement like ‘The
Indian voter has voted for stability’ is a meaningless one, not only
because of the argument it contains but because the idea that millions
of Indian voters have somehow acted in concert is a highly improbable
one.

Of course, it is possible to see some unifying pattern if it is
overwhelmingly suggested by data, but in this case that is far from
being true. The alleged wisdom of the electorate is in fact nothing
but a sly surrogate for the wisdom of the analysts, who, to use Sunil
Khilnani’s argument in a recent article loosely, use the electorate as
a ventriloquist’s dummy to get their theories across. The other common
pattern we see in these analyses is to explain elections in terms of
people than in terms of issues. So even if Manmohan Singh may be
electorally insignificant for a large part of India, we find it more
comfortable to find an answer using his persona as a frame.

It is even more difficult to accept that the reasons could lie in
deeper structural shifts, for that seems too technical and too sterile
to merit our consideration. The truth is that we are interested in
explanations that use ideas that interest us. We can own things only
when we hold the key to understanding them. Eventually deeper analyses
will become available, but by that time we will have lost interest.
Like the 2004 elections, which are now framed entirely through the
alleged debacle that the India Shining campaign represented, ignoring
many other equally significant variables, it is likely that the 2009
elections too are seen as the Arrival of the Youth or the Death of
Communal Politics till the next elections come around and give us a
new theory.

santoshdesai1963 at indiatimes.com