By Indranil Banerjea
Democracy is spectator sport of a different kind. The politicians are the players, but the outcome of the contest is not in their hands. Unlike all other sporting contests, say like boxing or football that keeping attracting millions of followers, the outcome in a democratic contest does not depend on the performance of the players. In a democracy, the outcome rests in the hands of the spectators. When the people come out to vote, they announce their verdict on the fate of the players.
For months, now the country has been witnessing this spectator sport. The players have been displaying their wares, and they have tried every trick available to them in their effort to get a favourable verdict. Like shrewd judges who appear impervious to all lawyerly arguments in the courtroom, the people in a democracy also keep the players guessing. It would be a bold politician who would claim to know the fate of a contest with an unquestioning degree of certainty. True, there is a fair amount of predictability about any election, under the category of guesstimates.
The atmospherics for this round of general elections have centred around a rout for the Congress after ten years of its UPA rule, and the BJP- led NDA being the frontrunner for forming the next government in Delhi. In broad brush strokes, this is the macro-picture.
But then, with 543 constituencies at stake, and every Lok Sabha constituency having its own distinctive features, all kinds of permutations and combinations are worked out in every discussion that takes place anywhere. In fact, just as every Indian sports lover is an expert on the game of cricket and game, similarly, every Indian voter has an opinion on which way a particular constituency will go. The certainty with which an individual Indian citizen predicts the outcome of the election in their constituency can be matched only with the confidence they have about the course of a cricket match that is underway on television.
So, the amount of confusion you have in your mind about the specific constituencies will in all probability be directly proportional to the depth to which you delve into the election scenario of a particular constituency.
Then you are more likely to get entwined into matters like the caste and the community profile of the constituency, the number of youth or first time voters, the performance of the sitting MP, the voter turnout, the track record of the political parties, the past voting figures and all that. So, in place of the broad stroke that the Congress is on a losing wicket and the BJP is batting strongly, a number of other imponderables come into the picture and the outcomes start getting hazy.
Then it becomes reasonable to assess the number of seats the regional parties will win, and the nature of alliances they will be forming in the post- election scenario.
The reason for this is pretty simple. Just as there are two axiomatic assumptions about this election, the third irrefutable condition about the Indian electoral scenario is the compulsion of coalition politics.
The formation of the central government depends on the ability of the major political players to shape alliances. At least, this has been happening for the last two decades, and there were very few indicators that point to any drastic change in this situation. So, even the front running BJP has demonstrated the need to sew up alliances with regional players, like the Lok Janashakti Party in Bihar.
Indeed, this is one element in which neither the spectators nor the major players have any sizeable glorious uncertainties; this is the most unpredictable feature of the post- election scenario. Normally, the process of coalition building is heavily slanted towards the winner takes all principle, with the single largest party being able to muster the numbers. But this is not a sure shot game and opens itself up to all kinds of flexibility. INAV