This much seems clear: The BJP and Narendra Modi did not lose Delhi because Mr Modi wore that Rs 10 lakh suit pinstriped with his own name. The BJP and Mr Modi did not lose because of all the personal comments made against Arvind Kejriwal, like calling him a monkey, a Naxalite and so on.
Mr Modi and the BJP (phew, at last, on the third try) did not lose Delhi because so many people within the BJP made several communal and distasteful comments about Hindus, women and religious minorities. Mr Modi and the BJP did not lose Delhi because the Congress decided to eliminate itself from the contest. Mr Modi and the BJP did not lose Delhi because Mr Modi made the world’s largest promises to the people of India and kept almost none of them.
Mr Modi and the BJP did not lose Delhi because he and they were arrogant (may a pox fall on me for even suggesting this). Mr Modi and the BJP did not lose Delhi because Mr Modi spent more time making speeches abroad than he did working in India. Mr Modi and the BJP did not lose Delhi because the BJP president, Amit Shah, said that all those promises about bringing back black money and giving Rs 15 lakh of that to each Indian was just election rhetoric. Mr Modi and the BJP did not lose Delhi because of anything as mundane as anti-incumbency, that is, frustration with the way the government was functioning at the Centre. Mr Modi and the BJP, you might ask, did they lose Delhi at all?
Perhaps this is a gigantic plot conceptualised by the bazaru media and implemented by the Aam Aadmi Party and Mr Kejriwal and swallowed hook line and sinker by an ungrateful, fickle, turncoat voter? There could be other reasons, too. It must, for instance, be the fault of Kiran “I haven’t lost” Bedi, who not only did lose but also blamed the BJP for her loss. The BJP, for the record, managed to win just three seats out of 70. That’s a loss of 60 Assembly segments that they had won in the general elections in May 2014 and 29 of the 32 seats they won in the last Assembly elections in Delhi in 2013.
But more than anything else, with their vote share almost intact at 32 per cent, they managed to win just three seats. Three. A loss like that only can be blamed on voters, on the candidate you chose, on the Opposition, on the media. It cannot possibly come back to the BJP or the Prime Minister who said that Delhi knows India’s mind or some such approximation of Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s famous saying about West Bengal and India. No, the Prime Minister must be protected at all cost. Because he has been elected, in case you didn’t know. This is a courtesy which can only be extended to this Prime Minister. All other democratically elected people are fair game.
But the problem posed by AAP’s victory is too enormous even for a 56-inch chest to deal with. It looks like almost the whole of Delhi voted for the AAP. This is in spite of all the negative fallouts of the India Against Corruption movement. Perhaps Delhi looked around it and decided it wanted a monkey and a Naxalite over a hot air balloon in embarrassingly expensive pinstripes.
Could the voter by any chance have been speaking to all of India’s politicians? Could Delhi’s voters, willy-nilly, have decided that the new player on the scene was better than all the rest on offer, warts and all? Mr Kejriwal did the most un-politician-like thing of apologising to the people for his earlier mistakes. Maybe the ungrateful, fickle, evil voter liked that. You don’t win 67 seats out of nothing.
And nothing finally brings us to the once mighty Congress Party, which got nothing from Delhi with a grand total of zero seats. The only consolation for India’s Grand Old Party is to take a leaf out of the BJP’s book and claim that since zero was an ancient Indian invention, they’re on to a good thing here. Or not. Mr Modi and the BJP might know the answer to that one.
The writer is a senior journalist who writes on media affairs, politics and social trends
