I’ve lived continuously in the New Delhi parliamentary constituency for the last sixty years. My parents were employed by the government and my childhood was spent in a series of sarkari colonies that happened to fall within its boundaries. My first election memory is the success of Mukul Banerjee, my namesake and the Congress’s candidate in the 1971 general election. When my parents retired, we moved to a neighbourhood south of the Ring Road that ought to have been part of the South Delhi constituency but which, by some quirk of delimitation, was included in the electorate for
the New Delhi seat, and this is where I politically came of age in 1978 when I turned twenty-one. You had to be twenty-one to vote till Rajiv Gandhi’s government amended the Constitution to enfranchise teenagers ten years later.
So I was too young to vote in the watershed election that ended the Emergency in 1977, but it was one of only two wholly satisfying election aftermaths that I can remember, and I didn’t vote in either of them. Indira Gandhi, her younger son, and her sycophantic party had become monstrous through that authoritarian interregnum and their rout was a moment of perfect happiness. I was cramming for my third year B.A. exams in my aunt’s flat in Delhi University when the results trickled in on the night of March 21. Listening to the news on All India Radio, I heard a bulletin declare that Mrs G had lost her seat in Rae Bareli. I ran to my aunt’s room, shouting the news. She was pleased that the regime had lost but her loyalty to the Congress, learnt during its anti-colonial years, died hard: “Hai bechari!” she exclaimed.
My earliest election memories consist of voting for no-name candidates. In 1980, the two main contenders in New Delhi were Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the external affairs minister in the Janata Party government, and C.M. Stephen of the Congress. Voting for an unrepentant Congress led by the architect of the Emergency and her thuggish younger son was out of the question and in the absence of a compelling cause like the dismantling of the Emergency, voting for Vajpayee, a sanghi, was impossible. So I voted for someone I can’t recall whose principal quality was that he wasn’t either of the above.
Looking back, my voting life began in a republic first deformed by the Emergency and then further deformed by Mrs Gandhi’s experiments in communalism. Her party’s complicity in the pogrom of Sikhs after her assassination and the complicity of the State in that killing created twisted precedents that changed the republic forever. Her son’s instrumental use of her assassination in 1984 for electoral ends led to the poisonous Congress campaign of 1984 that demonised Sikhs. Rediffusion, the advertising agency that the Congress hired, framed a series of vile newspaper ads that, amongst other things, asked readers to vote for the Congress if they felt threatened
by their taxi driver. Taxis in many Indian cities at the time were mainly driven by Sikhs.
K.C. Pant was the Congress candidate who won the New Delhi seat in that election. I didn’t vote for him. To a degree that’s hard to explain forty years on, the Congress became radioactive for a generation of liberals after 1984. First the Emergency, then the pogrom, had turned Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri’s party into a malevolent juggernaut run by violent lumpen. I don’t think we had the political vocabulary to understand the significance of 1984. Nationalist historiography had given us a binary: secularism and communalism. Communalism, in this universe, came in many flavours: Sikh, Muslim, Hindu. The bigotry that the Congress used as a touch paper in 1984 had to be, therefore, a form of Hindu communalism, born in part out of a resentment of Sikh secessionism and militancy.
We thought that the Shiv Sena’s violence, the massacre of Muslims in Nellie in 1983, and the pogrom of Sikhs in 1984 were simply instances of Hindu communalism. We didn’t see them for what they were: the first violent bids to remake nationalism itself in the image of the majority. Majoritarianism is a clumsy word, but it has the advantage of correctly naming the exclusionary politics that has defined the recent trajectory of South Asia’s nation states.
The Congress might have helped lay the groundwork for this mutant nationalism in the decade between 1975 and 1985, but once India’s Grand Old Party had mainstreamed majoritarianism, the project had only one real inheritor: the political formation that had birthed it a hundred years ago on the margins of the Congress’s anti-colonial nationalism: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its political proxy, the Bharatiya Janata Party.
I don’t recall voting for V. Mohini Giri when L.K. Advani won the New Delhi seat in 1989. I suspect the horror of 1984 made the Congress seem as bad as the BJP, especially for people who had lived through the Delhi pogrom and visited the smoking ruins of Kalyanpuri and Trilokpuri during relief work.
But by the time the 1991 general election came around, the malign frenzy that eventually led to the demolition of the Babri masjid had reached a fever pitch, and I was intensely invested in voting for, of all people, Rajesh Khanna, the ex-superstar who had been nominated by the Congress against Advani. The prospect of defeating the architect of the Ram Mandir in the capital’s oldest parliamentary constituency was irresistible. And it might have come to pass: Advani squeaked home with a tiny majority of 1,500 votes. The reason he did was that the Congress’s ’84 reputation persuaded a progressive sliver of the electorate, that included many friends of mine, to vote for the socialist candidate put up by the Janata Dal, Manju Mohan, who had no chance of winning. But she did siphon off over twenty thousand precious votes that might have produced the glorious spectacle of the absurd Rajesh Khanna vanquishing the sinister Advani.
It took the demolition of the Babri masjid and the murder of Muslims in its wake in Mumbai and elsewhere, five years of Vajpayee’s prime ministership, and the pogrom in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat in 2002 for the realisation to dawn that every political tendency other than the BJP’s was the lesser evil. When the National Democratic Alliance lost in 2004, against the odds, despite the BJP’s India Shining campaign, I wasn’t in Delhi to vote Ajay Maken to victory in New Delhi. Sitting in Brooklyn, incredulous with delight at the result, I reprised my ’77 reaction by yelling the news out to my wife. Ironically, I didn’t vote in either of the two elections that succoured my soul.
I didn’t know then that Manmohan Singh’s prime ministership was the dusk before the Hadean night of Modi’s decade in power. The prospect of a local, Delhi dawn, promised by the assembly performance of the Aam Aadmi Party through the Modi ascendancy, never translated into victory in Delhi’s parliamentary seats. The smirking Meenakshi Lekhi won successive terms in New Delhi. She won’t be on the ballot for a hat-trick, though, having vanished like Alice’s disappearing cat, replaced by Bansuri Swaraj, the daughter of a BJP grandee, the late Sushma Swaraj. It’s a measure of Modi’s clarifying effect on Indian politics that the anti-BJP vote won’t, for once, be divided because the Congress and the AAP, the two principal Opposition parties in Delhi, have divided the city’s parliamentary constituencies between them. The New Delhi seat has fallen to the lot of AAP whose candidate is the peculiar Somnath Bharti. It makes no difference: he could be a lamp post but come late May, he will, for my ilk, be the One.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com