Analyzing the constant election analysis

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.
[email protected]