Fractured verdict, future tense

So what happens after the hung Lok Sabha verdict of May 2009? This is what happens

Hardnews Bureau

May 15, 2009. The future is here.

Results to all the Parliament seats have been declared. The Congress and the BJP have hung on to the same number of seats that they had in the last Parliament. A depressing 143 for the Congress and a miserable 130 for the BJP. The UPA and NDA, too, do not have the numbers to form the government without the support of the truncated and devalued Left parties or the mercurial and ambitious Mayawati.

How soon will India get its next government?

In this futuristic scenario, as this essay visualises, what is the line between despair and hope?

The urgency has deepened by the speed at which the economy has begun to falter after the country went into poll mode two-and-a-half months ago. Companies are defaulting in their loan repayments. Job losses are mounting steadily. The stock market, too, in the absence of government-guided intervention, has nosedived to a new low. The economy is looking very shaky and hardly "insulated" from the global contagion as the earlier UPA government's ministers had irresponsibly claimed in the past.

And then, there is this terror attack in Delhi. Despite the Election Commission's obsession with security, the much-expected and anticipated terror strike still managed to take everyone by surprise. Fortunately, the security forces in central Delhi stood up to the attack and shot down the terrorists, not before a dozen odd people had been killed.

The UPA was hoping to win the national elections on the strength of its performance. After all, they had sunk in thousands of crores of rupees in its ‘flagship programmes' like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the urban renewal mission or the loan waiver scheme. While huge infusion of funds in banks and the rural economy had helped in keeping the financial system afloat, it never gave the UPA, especially, the Congress, the dividends they were looking for. Their election campaign of being the best party for the worst times did not work. Their expectation of a bounce in their fortunes after the Mumbai attack got dissipated after the Delhi face-off.

What also did not work in its favour was the drafting of Priyanka Gandhi in the election campaign. She campaigned all over the country. But she could not make much of a difference in the caste-ridden states of UP and Bihar -- two states that bring 120 seats to Parliament. The only cheer came in Andhra Pradesh (AP), where the Congress managed to save a few seats.

The BJP, too, did not do any better. They hung on to their respective strengths and did not make much of the anti-incumbency that could have benefited them. All through the campaign, the party looked listless. Their loud slogans had a vacuous ring to it. The BJP leadership had hoped that the Delhi terror attack would transform their fortunes, but it did not. The Congress kept on harping on the strong terror laws that were brought in after the Mumbai attack. In some ways, voters stuck to their preferences like they did after the Mumbai carnage in December 2008.

Interestingly, voting behaviour and results are a mirror image of what happened during the assembly elections where anti-incumbency did not work against strong leaders. In the assembly elections, the Congress that ruled Delhi got back the capital, BJP had retained Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and Congress wrested Rajasthan from BJP; but it was more a technical knockout.