Nobody knows anything

Never forget: nobody knows anything.

It is an adage popularised by the late William Goldman to describe Hollywood where people confidently predict surefire hits and then end up with massive flops.

 

The Haryana election results show us that when it comes to Indian politics, that adage works just as well. The Congress went into the election expecting it to be a surefire hit. It ended up with a flop that will affect all its future calculations.

 

   It wasn’t just the Congress whose expectations were dashed. Nearly every expert predicted a substantial Congress majority. The exit pollsters, determined to reclaim their reputations after the disaster of the last Lok Sabha polls, worked extra hard to make sure they got the results right. In fact, they got them wrong again.

 

   During the last general election campaign journalists who had toured constituencies often warned that the public mood was changing and though their editors and owners did not back them or give them the prominence they deserved, they were clearly onto something.

 

   This time, the vast majority of journalists bought into the conventional wisdom that, after two terms, the Haryana electorate had tired of the BJP and that the Congress would be back. Even those who did not predict a massive victory for the Congress and said that the election was much closer than was generally acknowledged, rarely came close to predicting the scale and scope of the BJP victory.

 

   More to the point: this time, even the politicians got it wrong. The Congress was so confident that battles had already broken out about who the next chief minister was to be. And the supporters of Kumari Selja, the Congress leader who was sidelined during the campaign, were deeply unhappy, but believed nevertheless that a Congress victory was inevitable.

 

   At the BJP, a damage control strategy was ready. The prime minister did not repeatedly barnstorm the state as he normally does during assembly elections and the campaign focused more on local issues not just on the usual invocations of the Modi magic. Even the BJP was ready to face defeat and to insulate Narendra Modi from its reputational fallout.

 

   So, what happened? How did all these calculations come to nothing?

 

   Same answer: nobody knows anything.

 

   We are all election experts on the day after the results have been declared so there is no shortage of theories to explain why the Congress lost. Most blame Bhupinder Hooda. Was he too arrogant? Did he make a mistake by excluding Selja? Was his caste appeal too narrow? Did he choose the wrong candidates?

 

   I am always wary of the tendency to find a fall guy after every defeat and for all the criticisms of Hooda, many of which are probably accurate, we already knew all this when he was running the campaign. And yet this did not stop the experts from claiming that the Congress was heading for a massive victory.

 

   For me, the more interesting question is not, “Isn’t all this Hooda’s fault?” The question to ask is: “How does the Haryana result change the way we look at national politics going forward?”

 

"There are no certainties in politics. There is never anything to be overconfident about."

   One of the problems with the Congress has been its unrealistic optimism. For instance, when the BJP failed to secure a majority at the last Lok Sabha election, congressman claimed that their bad days were over; Modi’s time was ending and from now on, all elections would result in defeats for the BJP and victories for the Congress and its allies.

 

   If you read what Congress supporters and activists were posting on social media or listened to what they said in private you would feel that Narendra Modi would have difficulty lasting out as Prime Minister and that a string of assembly election defeats would lead to the collapse of government.

 

   This is just silly; as silly as the BJP’s dream, before the last parliamentary election, that the Congress was finished and would wither away once the results were declared and the NDA had won 400 seats. Politics does not operate on the basis of wishful thinking.

 

   As little as we can predict about politics, some things do seem clear. The Congress forgot one of the basic realities of Indian politics. The Prime Minister’s appeal is not what it was many years ago. But he is still extremely popular with his supporters and most polls suggest that he is more popular than Rahul Gandhi in North India.

 

   Also, to focus only on Modi’s popularity is a mistake. The BJP wins elections because it is a cadre-based party that knows how to run election campaigns, can depend on the RSS for support on the ground and can deliver voters to the EVM booths on election day.

 

   The Congress, on the other hand, is in the middle of an awkward transition. Now that Rahul Gandhi has shaken off the years of abuse that the BJP has directed at him and emerged as a popular figure the Congress has to decide if it wants to recast itself as the party of a younger, less hate-filled and more equitable India. That is the image it projected at the General election and it helped the party massively increase its tally.

 

   But the Congress has its share of regional leaders who claim to understand their states. In attempting to give them the prominence they demand, and by letting them pettily diminish their local rivals, the Congress goes back to an older version of itself.

 

   In Haryana, by subcontracting the election to Hooda, who had already lost two assembly elections before, it went back to an older version of itself. This is a phenomenon that tends to repeat itself in such states as Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh where the old guard demonstrates again and again that it can no longer win elections.

 

   That’s one lesson from Haryana. But there are others too. The BJP won the state even though Narendra Modi was not the issue. That victory tells us something about the strength of the party even without the Modi factor. Brand Modi may have lost some of its lustre. But even on a bad day, the BJP is a better organised party than the Congress on its good days. To go into elections and say, as the Congress did, “the Modi magic is fading so we will win easily” is a huge mistake.

 

   There are parallels with the forthcoming Maharashtra campaign though it is possible to overstate them. Maharashtra is not a straight fight like Haryana and the Congress has no one dominant leader who will call the shots and pack the candidates list with his cronies. Because of the nature of the opposition front, much of the heavy lifting will be done by the Congress’s allies and not the Congress itself.

 

   But never forget: nobody knows anything. There are no certainties in politics. There is never anything to be overconfident about.

 

   While reports of the imminent collapse of the BJP government have been greatly exaggerated, the Congress can still wound the BJP in the months ahead. But it cannot do that if it continues to be the old Congress that has been rejected so often at elections.

 

   Nor can it sit back and take victory for granted. Not when it’s up against the BJP, perhaps the greatest election winning machine in Indian history.