The Lesson from 1999

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It was an innocuous single column story in a national daily ten years ago which triggered a little chronicled episode of skullduggery in Indian politics. A man, widely heralded as the architect of the great Indian economic revival, a darling of middle-class India, a man known for his integrity and honesty had just lost an election from a constituency where a large number of voters were exactly those who believed, furthered and propagated this image. These voters were largely educated, urbane and had been the biggest beneficiaries of the benefits of his policy changes. Yet, South Delhi Parliamentary constituency, one of the most upper middle-class of the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, had decided to hand Dr Manmohan Singh a resounding defeat in his maiden attempt to be an elected represented in Parliament.

Politics usually defies the inevitable. It indeed challenges any sort of predictability and is never known to offer any guarantee. Leaders are born and anointed each day yet they have gotten themselves tainted pretty unpredictably. They may have worn true leadership status briefly but found it hard to measure up through time. Reputations may have fled abruptly, performance often appeared wearied or a result of a clever sleight of hand. Nothing of this fits a man of the pedigree of Dr Manmohan Singh. His loss from a constituency which was a template of middle and upper middle-class India was, perhaps, logic-defying. The result had turned conventional understanding of politics on its head.

So what happened? Why did Delhi, the city which leads the nation, miss a rare opportunity of having an MP of national significance and immense stature in the Lok Sabha?

It all started with a 250-word piece in a national daily before campaigning had begun. It stated the Congress was fielding Dr Manmohan Singh from South Delhi as they wanted him to be projected as an alternative Prime Ministerial candidate since the party was nervous the issue of Sonia Gandhi's foreign-origin would derail her chances of becoming a PM. Suddenly, the professional politicians in the party, the ones adept at the art of the trade, sensed an unexpected threat to their chances from a complete political amateur.

So, within a week of us covering and tracking Manmohan Singh's maiden attempt at the hustings, it was apparent some of his own party colleagues were out to "fix" him. The plot was being masterminded by a senior Congressman from Madhya Pradesh (he is still a part of this government) and was being implemented on the ground by two lieutenants (one of whom is also a current union minister). The genial, mild-mannered Dr Singh was being made to extensively campaign at several resettlement colonies around Gautam Nagar, Jamia Nagar, Badarpur - the kind of areas which were traditional strong Congress vote banks. He was even taken to several gurudwaras, where he attracted decent crowds. With little experience of political campaigning, Dr Singh mistook the swathes of cheering and slogan-shouting crowds as an indicator of his campaign working. Little did he realise, during campaigning seasoned politicians actually focus more on their weaker areas...the strongholds will vote for you anyway!

It became worse. The anti-Manmohan camp ensured a wily political nobody was appointed as his campaign manager, who apparently took little interest in pointing the missing aspects of the game. In fact, campaign material (in those days, the EC was far less stringent) sent by the All India Congress Committee for Dr Singh's constituency could not be put up for over a week as his campaign managers claimed the keys to the room where it was stored was lost!

As if all this wasn't enough, Dr Singh's spartan, non-political ways made it worse. Each time we spoke to the area party workers they would appear sullen - here was a candidate who never realised arranging for their evening quota of liquor and entertainment was a political necessity. They lamented the lack of cash in his campaign - he was not even calling the area police officers to secure the release the workers' illegal campaign vehicles, they complained!

At least on two occasions, we journalists covering his campaign had witnessed Dr Manmohan Singh's driver asking for directions to their own street-corner rally site, with no party functionary piloting them the location. Needless to say, the sitting Congress MLAs of these respective areas stayed missing throughout his speeches and programme. Most of us sensed a good man was in a political soup. The AICC sensed it too...they sent in two observers to try and retrieve whatever they could of his campaign. Amazingly, whenever we subsequently met Dr Singh at his Safdarjung Road residence after the day's campaigning ended and pointed this out to him, he would dismiss it as journalistic penchant of seeking a controversy and appeared genuinely uninterested in our theory. He appeared a man who was too simple to imagine his own flock could work against him.

Days later, Dr Singh had lost by about 30,000 votes. In a seat of over 11 lakh voters, this margin was indicative of how the lack of enthusiasm amongst party workers manning tables outside polling booths, an equal number of unenthusiastic workers which never bothered to coax reluctant voters to come out and vote, essentially ensured the party's committed voters actually never voted in full force and proved to be the key differentiator. So while an energized rival party cadre and polling machinery ensured a larger number of their committed voters cast their franchise, Dr Singh lost as his admirers remained arm-chair supporters.

We are not sure if the cribbing and chattering class of upper middle-class Delhi had learnt a bitter lesson from this verdict. But it needs to be understood an educated, erudite, honest and taint-free candidate merely contesting elections isn't enough. He needs to win as well. And pretty obviously achieving victory in elections is a complex task and dotted with episodes of skullduggery which required counter-maneuvers. It also obviously needs a mix of effective cadre support, an ability to mobilise and please party workers and ability to understand and handle the crooks in the system. It needs a way to beat the established system.

Decent people like Dr Manmohan Singh couldn't fathom or handle it. And it's unlikely most other similar decent people, even if they are in other parties can handle it either. So having learnt this bitter lesson as far back as 1999, how can Delhi and rest of India ensure they manage to get at least one decent guy in?

By understanding our only hope of beating the skullduggery, the shenanigans and the dirtiness of the politics of electoral victory is by heavy voting. Especially by the South Delhi type thinking and chattering class. By realizing comparatively decent candidates won't just win simply because their constituency has huge number of right-minded and thinking voters. They will win only if ALL these right-minded, progressive and thinking voters in a constituency actually queue up to vote. In the hope they will outnumber the gullible and ignorant voters who knowingly or unknowingly had fallen prey to political intrigue.

Delhi missed its chance in 1999 in testing this. In 2009, we have another chance to test if the queues stay full of right-minded voters. Not just in Delhi, but all across India. We are often optimistic enough to believe we are educated and have immense ability to sift between the good and the bad, between the progressive and the regressive and between what is better for us. Surprisingly, we are also pessimistic enough to assume we are so few anyway, that our vote won't matter so find no motivation to go out and vote. Something which perhaps may have been reason Dr Manmohan Singh failed in his only attempt at a Lok Sabha seat.

Maybe it's time to surprise ourselves. Maybe in 2009 we discover we actually DO have a pretty large number of right-thinking voters.