NATIONAL INTEREST

rising discontent and defiance of the reign of the Right in South Korea in the same geography; and even the rise of the socialist Alexis Tsipras in Greece, defying what would otherwise be an unarguably pan-European trend.

See how this has played out in India post-2014. The states the BJP won immediately after the general elections, Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand confirmed the same trend. But what happened then in Delhi, Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala? The first two, the BJP (or Indian Right) fancied winning on form, but were routed instead. In the next two, they failed to make any impact, unable to even repeat their general election vote share. In West Bengal, in fact, Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, in most ways Left of the CPI(M), won. And in the last, while the BJP didn’t matter, and the Congress (UDF) was itself deeply Left-of-centre, the real Communists won.

It leaves us all very mixed up and confused. What is the voter telling us she likes? It is change, of course, but not change in the old-fashioned sense which we used to call anti-incumbency. If that were the case, why would the Right-wing governments of Britain and Colombia lose referendums while there is no counter-surge of the Left? Similarly, if it is unstoppable rise of the Right, how does Arvind Kejriwal’s very juvenile (literally, in vintage, not as a value judgement) party break this momentum in Delhi, threatens to do so in Punjab and looms large in Goa and Gujarat, all states with