B S Yeddyurappa flashes a victory sign after becoming the 23rd Chief Minister of Karnataka. BSY will have to prove his strength on the floor of the Assembly today. (Reuters photo/File)
It’s been a week of binaries. The most disturbing images are global and local, from Gaza and West Bengal, where the panchayat polls have featured violence on a visually astonishing scale, even for the state which had pushed the envelope at Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh. The death toll is lower than usual this year, but a repoll was required in 568 booths. It is a staggering figure, a throwback to the days before TN Seshan cleansed the stables. And while people in the rest of the country may be outraged by it, in West Bengal it’s business as usual.
The most powerful image from Gaza was of a disabled man with a slingshot, turning the story of David and Goliath on its head. He was killed by the Israeli military, but several commentators noticed the compulsive use of the passive voice in the coverage in print. People were not killed, the headlines suggested. They just died. Just rolled over, one presumes. While US channels covered the violence in Gaza, it was left to social media to focus on the contrast between the festivities at the new US embassy in Jerusalem, and the murder in progress not far away.
Here at home, the Karnataka election resulted in some bizarre television, with anchors triumphantly calling the election in favour of the BJP before counting was finished for a single seat. It was so precipitate that former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi tweeted a link to the official results site, with a polite reminder to the effect that while the mills of the EC grind slow, they grind exceedingly fine. Those anchors were fuming at the dishonour of the mandate when the BJP finally fell short. The very same anchors who had applauded the BJP’s conquest of Goa as a master-stroke of strategy.
Now, the politics of the last resort is being played in Karnataka. Kerala Tourism took first mover advantage with a cheeky invitation to God’s own country, and it appears that the Congress has taken up its offer. The Karnataka opening is also being played in Panjim and Patna. The stage is set for days of breathless TV drama and moral grandstanding, with a little help from selective amnesia. Tourism offices should consider making up political tourism packages. The bulk discounts would be most attractive.
But mercifully, there will be no more exit polls, which have proved to be much less reliable than betting sheets. The compass was swinging wildly in this election. Like most of the exit polls, the local media were giving BJP the lead. The national press generally backed the Congress, and both parties claimed to be winning hands down. Plan B beckoned, and a couple of desperate innovations presented themselves on TV. Times Now hedged by commissioning two polls, which produced very different results. And NDTV ran a poll of polls, whose statistical basis is not obvious. What is the logic of taking the mean of several polls, all of which got it wrong, in the hope that errors would average out?
This week, both The New York Times and the Washington Post ran stories about the WhatsApp battlefield in India’s elections, which has become at least as important as the campaign trail. But strangely, neither mentions WhatsApp University, whose history department is kept creatively busy in the election season. Specialists in the modern era were especially active this time, researching Bhagat Singh’s guest list and historical wrongs done to the army, which the generals had no prior intelligence of.
The week ended with a sense of relief as the Supreme Court ordered an immediate floor test in Karnataka. It turns out that the judiciary can still be depended upon to perform its function fairly, and the outpouring of good wishes for the court suggested that secretly, a big section of opinion-makers had not expected it to perform according to specifications. That was a rather nice farewell present for Justice Chelameswar, who had spearheaded the televised dissent of four judges, and who has now retired.