who cares about ideology anyway?
Indians are famous for number crunching. We are one of the word’s leading factories for producing accountants, engineers, mathematicians etcetera. Good quality too.
So we just couldn’t keep it out of politics, could we.
At some point in it’s history, the Indian politics became less about ideology and values, and more about the winning formula. and Indian Muslims have become the ‘x’ of this formula. You know, most mathematicians use ‘x’ as the variable around which they build an equation. all of us have at some point in school or college struggled with getting to the right equation — i.e. how to place ‘x’ in the equation.
The ‘15 Delhi election results also indicate this. The Aam Aadmi Party has been successful in creating an equation that brings together the middle class (pulled from the BJP pockets), the lower income groups (snatched from the Congress in completion), and the Muslims (again, snatched from the Congress). It is a combination that is unique in 1 sense. They haven’t played the caste card at the state level (must’ve been a factor at constituency level though).
They’ve scored 67/70. ‘x’ + (urban middle class) + [lower income groups] = AAP is a winner.
Another important thing that has started happening is that the ‘x’ has decided to figure out the equation itself. Over the past 1 year, BJP has lost any elections in which the muslim community could figure out who was BJP’s main opponent. Examples here being the 7 LS seats in UP (only ones they didn’t win because either Cong or SP withdrew their candidate as a favor to family), Bihar by-polls (RJD-JDU combine kept it simple) and now Delhi. infact one of the 3 seats that the BJP has won in Delhi is due to the fact that the Muslim vote was split.
One thought that baffles me though is this. Muslims have somehow decided that defeating the BJP is more important than anything else. As far as I can see the past few months have been fairly smooth for one and all. Am sure they have some reason, but the effect is spectacular. Because they tend to vote as a herd, now parties form equations seeing how they can add something to ‘x’ and get it right. This collective purchase will create some interesting combinations in the upcoming elections in UP & Bihar. A political potpourri is coming up.
What the future results will be will depend on one factor. And this factor is the sad outcome of the sad fact that our politics is mathematical. And this factor — the next identifiable vote bank that BJP can loose after some of the urban middle class — is Hindu conservatives. BJP’s attempts to appeal to ‘x’ to somehow get them into their equation AFTER ironically winning the election has created a deep sense of disappointment amongst those who were rooting for fair stuff like a common civil code. This set of people is apart of a larger identifiable set that can be defined as [Hindu moderates, Hindu extremists]. Because BJP is upsetting the master set trying to get something which they can’t get, sooner or later someone is going to come along and attempt to start chewing away at one of the two extremes of this data set.
Looking at the identifiable variables, I’m certain we are not too far from the scenario.
