Shiners versus Whiners; it’s Economics, Stupid

History will be kinder to Narsimha Rao than newspapers and voters have been.

This was a major refrain, in retrospect, after India’s most erudite prime minister lost the Parliamentary election in 1996 to the Bharatiya Janata Party led coalition. Rao had, by then, run a minority government that had ploughed through an Indian field mined with lethal economic problems. He had dodged the alarmingly threatening ‘balance of payment’ problem, negotiated the CTBT at great cost, and even postponed the scheduled national ambition of testing the nuclear bomb. And in a patriarchal way, he had backed the man who would thenceforth be known as the father of Indian Economic reform,a coy sardar called Manmohan Singh.

Those who remember those years, will easily recollect the collective orgasm of India’s pink press over Rao’s liberalisation policies. They wasted no time in praising the final divorce from socialism and its attendent licence raj issues. If there was a blot on Rao, it was two things that happened during his 5-year tenure. The Babri Masjid was demolished, which was equivalent to external aggression, and the hawala case, which was an act of internal dissent within the Congress, but significantly, which also sucked in other political parties, notably the BJP.

The final issue on Rao’s far-reaching changes was settled in the court of public opinion. And Rao’s Congress bit the bullet; it’s great to be praised sky high by the country’s mainstream press but quite another matter to seek legitimacy from the nation’s unwashed majority. That was the most dramatic conflict between the two personalities of schizophrenic India.

The truth is, that the post Y2K twenty-first century conventional electoral isdom is an updated version of what conventional wisdom meant till 1999. And that is something those in the business of media studies had rejected long ago, the hypodermic needle theory of public opinion; a theory that holds that the media directly impacts, and shapes public opinion. Somehow, India’s politicians and political parties tend to get easily swamped by media reports.

Before the polls in 2004, I had asked former petroleum minister, Ram Naik, if the BJP think tank ever considered the possibility of a vast scale rejection by the masses, just like Rao’s government had faced in 1996. Naik was emphatic that this was not something that they consider plausible, because the "feel good" factor had actually reached several small towns and villages, though admittedly not all villages. One could not fault the veteran BJP leader for his touching faith, tempered with enough realisation, that the fruits of economic liberalisation cannot be quite the miracle played out in the Gandhian antodaya model.

However, after all the hype and hoopla about India Shining, the results are a clear indicator that the BJP-led coalition misread public perception completely. It is true that the broadest trend suggests an inordinately strong urge for change, for new faces, for ending the status quo. The voters have thrown out some very hallowed names from Indian Parliamentary history. And they have been equal opportunity slayers at that.

However, the BJP think tank had unequivocally placed their touching faith in spreading the seemingly widespread appeal of India Shining to the peril of everything else. Their boardroom boys, all new economy young turks by sensibility if not chronological age, had decided that that was the best product to sell. And they paid the price.

In 1996, Rao’s reelection bid was not so much a referendum on economic liberalisation as the 2004 polls was a referendum on India Shining. Rao had the Babri issue to deal with, the large scale disaffection of the Muslims in the country, the welter of corruption cases already in court, the resentment within his own party towards those satraps of the Congress that were brought within the ambit of the hawala scam prosecution. And yet, he also lost out because the opposition spun his economic reforms into an anti-poor ordinance. Add to this, the distinctly uncharismatic leader, a wise man among the Lords and a Lord among the wise men all right, but a dud in public perception.

The NDA in 2004 had the advantages of reaping the harvest of Rao’s 1991 reforms that they were in no position to reverse, in the first place. Self-confessedly, they also had no inclination to. But the NDA went to the polls when the mainstream press, by now a forest of imagology, reinforced with the booming of satellite television and its panting-on-screen reporting, backed the India Shining theory. And they had a charismatic leader in Atal Behari Vajpayee who was the most saleable face of modern India. But, they did not cut.

It is economics, stupid.

The BJP rose at a time when the Congress’s diffused umbrella ideology had already fatigued the voter. It provided focus, it defined its supporters, it went about strategically with pinpoint accuracy to attract them. The rising Indian middle class, then, was the salaried ‘whiner’ who complained of being the first target of all budgets. The educated losers formed a huge and inordinately influential majority. Though technically, Chidambaram’s Income Tax reforms had quietened them after he brought the taxation policy on par with South Asian nations, and even inspired the biggest Indian mop up of black money through his successful Voluntary Disclosure Scheme, the BJP moved to lure this lot, and succeeded.

So, when the Vajpayee dispensation ruled for the last five years and meritoriously and greatly, enhanced the middle class, they promoted a lot of the lower middle class, and those just above the economically weak class, into the middle class bracket. Those among the upper and second decks of the middle class heirarchy, moved into the upper middle class bracket; they became the shiners of the India Shining campaign. They benefited, and converted the economic opportunities available to the educated urban, and esconsed themselves in the comfort zone of the reasonably rich. And this reasonably rich suddenly found that election battles are too infra dig for them.

It is possible that the exclusionist policy of concentrating only on a well-defined target audience was the BJP’s, and by extention the NDA’s, biggest hubris. They, the masters of the new economy, forgot the soundness of the marginal utility theory. As you promote more and more middle class men and women into comfort zone, they are excellent shiners but are embarrassed to whine in polling booths. If they have complaints, they prefer to do it on television or in the mainstream press. But, either ways, they tend to be of marginal utility as voters. That perhaps explains why the whiners beat the shiners in the 2004 parliamentary elections in India.