Where Chaiwallahs Can Be PM

In the end, the exit polls were wrong: It wasn't the NDA that scraped past the half way mark, it was the BJP that single handedly got the majority! The absolute majority has robbed the media of the usual next stage of an election: who will align with whom? What will they demand in return? What impact will it have on a cohesive agenda to govern? All moot points now. We don't need to suffer your blackmail tactics, amma and didi.

To those who bemoan the rise of the “communal” leader, Harsh Pant has the answer:

“(Narendar) Modi is a product of contemporary India, where the secular versus communal binary, while important, is no longer the be all and end all of politics.”

Besides, let's face it: we have had a communal party in power for most of the period since 1984 anyway: the Congress killed 3000 Sikhs in 1984.

While Bal Thackeray made the remote control model of governance (in)famous at a state level, madam and baba took it to the next level, the national level. As Pant said:

“The damage this has done to India’s institutional fabric is immense and the true costs will be fully known only in the future.”

In the short term, what the puppet Manmohan Singh did was to create a leadership and power vacuum. And nature abhors a vacuum. And so, as Rajdeep Sardesai (he writes a lot better than he talks, really!) wrote , people decided to go with:

“someone whose despotic streak and questionable role in the 2002 riots could be forgiven in the overarching need for a ‘decisive’ leader.”

And while the common feeling was that India was sick of old people running the country, turns out that wasn't the case. As Pant points out:

“Ironically, for Congress who had conjured up the image of Rahul Gandhi as nation’s youth icon, it is Modi who is attracting most of the youth voters. India’s young, increasingly aspirational, find the idea of a dynastic endowment anachronistic while the story of a backward caste, tea-seller working his way to the highest office in the land seems inspirational.”

The rags to riches story aside, Modi shares another characteristic with younger India: it is OK to be ambitious. Modi turned this into a US style election, with the candidate name announced upfront:

“He wants to be India’s next Prime Minister, he is telling his countrymen and women, and he is not ashamed to ask for their support. His ambition is his greatest asset in an increasingly ambitious India.”

The prince, Rahul baba, on the other hand believes in the ‘divine right to rule’ principle. As Sardesai wrote:

“Rahul needed to prove himself by doing the real heavy lifting, not by midnight stays in a Dalit home or  suddenly waking up to call his own government’s ordinance ‘nonsense.’”

Modi came with a track record of knowing how to govern: compare that with Kerjriwal in Delhi.

And while Modi isn't perfect, isn’t what Pant says true?

“Politics is not a contest among ideal types.”

It's more a “May the best man win” kind of contest; and the best man did win today.