Election turns into event management, Narendra Modi style

By the end of the day today, this Maharashtra Assembly election which experienced pollsters and pundits have found it difficult to call, will show trends of which party will eventually form or lead the next government. By all predictions, it will be a BJP government with a complete majority or a Bjp-led government.

The politicking behind the politics is, by now, well documented: the splits between the two alliances, the shrill campaigns, the war of words more than a clash of ideas, the personality cultism and the (Narendra) Modi factor in swinging votes. As in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year, so in the Assembly: it’s a Modi election, parties come far behind.

Irrespective of the result, what is this election telling us?

First up, it is possible to create and re-create a wave such as the Modi wave. The BJP, which was formed in the then Bombay and has nurtured a long ambition of governing both the country’s political and financial capital, seems to have perfected this skill. The party’s managers have figured out how to sustain the mania for nearly a year as well as how to whip it up in a fortnight.

Secondly, if there were any doubts that the electioneering had been reduced to an event management in the general election, the Maharashtra Assembly election is confirmation that the event management approach is here to stay as long as the BJP dominates the political discourse. Other major parties approached the election from the traditional approach: candidates, defections, money, caste, community and so on. It was not enough. Modi practises “the politics of spectacle”, as the re-doubtable Lord Bhiku Parekh described it.

Thirdly, the event management approach means the election can be contested without an over-arching issue. For a while, it seemed that the Shiv Sena and BJP would haul the Congress and NCP for their sins of omission and commission in the last 15 — certainly last five — years, but corruption did not become the focal point of their campaign. It was an also-ran issue. As opposition, these parties failed to keep a leash on the government; as election rivals, they let the Congress-ncp off the hook. The “spectacle” takes the focus off the substantive.

Fourthly, two years away from celebrating its 50th year of existence, the Shiv Sena, in a reaction to the Modi-driven campaign, reverted to its time-tested issue of Marathi manoos or the sons of the soil. Indeed, there are genuine concerns about the place that the community, culture and economy will come to occupy in a rapidly globalising Mumbai Metropolitan Region.

Cities, by their very nature, tend to be melting pots. The Sena should find new strategies to articulate genuine concerns on these fronts or graduate to other issues. Uddhav Thackeray seemed to have seized the early advantage after the Sena’s break-up with the BJP but eventually got stuck on a whining note throughout the campaign, muddling up history, focussing on regional/ linguistic identity, and resurrecting imagery and voice of its late founder Bal Thackeray.

The Congress, which had won 17 of the 36 seats in Mumbai in 2009, would be fortunate to win a third of that now. The NCP and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena are likely to become bit players.

An election turned into an event, dominated by a star personality asking for votes on his personal pledge of good governance, has to now draw out voters. Mumbai has the distinction of having 13 constituencies in the 20 with lowest voter turnouts in the state in the 2009 Assembly election. All its six Lok Sabha constituencies were in the ten with lowest turnouts in the state in April this year. Have Mumbaiites been sufficiently stirred — or offended — by Modi to head to their polling booths?