There's a wild West Wind blowing. His name is Modi

Exit polls and post-election surveys have a notorious record of inexactitude in India, so it’s perilous to take their findings as final. Yet, when there is such a unanimity in the findings of virtually every survey and exit poll, as there is from this round of the Gujarat Assembly elections, it provides reasonable grounds for forward-looking prognostication.

Here’s what they seem to say: there’s a wild West Wind blowing in from Gujarat, and its name is Narendra Modi. Like the untamed, untameable force of nature to whom the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley composed his Ode , Modi is both Destroyer and Creator - and he has already rustled the dead winter leaves in far-off Delhi.

And along with those withered leaves, the gale force of the gusty Gujarati is also driving out dead political thoughts across India to quicken a new birth. And durbar politicians across the spectrum who had been administering the kiss of life to the cadaver of yesterday’s politics are as “sapless foliage of the ocean” who, upon hearing the West Wind blow, have grown grey and trembly with fear, and  have despoiled themselves…

The verdict from Gujarat, which will be confirmed and validated on 20 December when the official tally come in, is not so much an election result as the trumpet of a prophecy.  And if the exit poll findings turn out to be true, they send out an unambiguous message: that the arc of politics will invariably propel Modi towards Delhi, where he will, if given half a chance, bend the arc of politics decisively.

All this is not to say that Modi faces no political headwinds. Dilli dur ast. The irresistible force will encounter many an immovable object, and should a situation arise where the BJP needs a consensus builder and a coalition tightrope walker, the wild West Wind from Gujarat, blow he ever so tempestuously, may yet be tamed. His acceptability at a pan-national level hasn’t seriously been tested, despite anecdotal evidence from opinion poll surveys that suggest he has a groundswell of support .

Besides, as columnist Swapan Dasgupta says, there will always be “ambulance chasers” conducting endless autopsies of the 2002 riots in order to  box him in in Gujarat and not give him the elbow room to broaden his canvas.

Yet, politics isn’t immutable. Already, we’re seeing what appear to be the first signs of capitulation from hold-outs within the NDA who were earlier signalling trenchant opposition to Modi’s ascendance. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who disallows even posters of Modi to be put up in Bihar, is already trimming his sail to harvest the West Wind’s power of propulsion. On Monday, he said that he concurred with BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad’s postulation that the NDA’s prime ministerial candidate must be drawn from “a large party” .

Politicians oftentimes speak in tongues and in riddles, but even through the mumblings, their thought process comes through. And in this case it probably points to an acceptance of a political inevitability.

The point has been made that Modi is eclipsing the BJP with the sheer power of his personality, and that his rise, by cutting off the BJP’s umbilical cord that binds it to its mothership  (the RSS), he is recasting the party in his image and emasculating the BJP. If that indeed is happening, it’s a good thing. If the BJP’s tether to the ideological rigidity of the RSS were to be snapped, it would, if anything, render the party more acceptable around the centre of Indian politics.

The fact of it is that even more than in previous elections, the BJP’s election victory in Gujarat this time (if confirmed) was all about Modi. In that sense, Modi “presidentialised” the Assembly election. More important, as Shekhar Gupta points out in the Indian Express, Modi sought a third mandate not by promising freebies  and goodies, in the way that the Congress did. The only thing he promised was another five years of Modi. Even the BJP’s manifesto appealed to the aspirations of the Gujarati, and steered clear of the welfarist populism that characterises the discourse pretty much elsewhere. And from all accounts, it is a message that resonated within Gujarat.

It is this template, more than anything else about Modi’s record in office in Gujarat, that requires pan-national amplification. Our national discourse on economics, which has always been weighted in favour of the far left, needs a corrective balancing force. Even the BJP, for all its record of advancing economic reforms between 1999 and 2004, has lost its nerve and is positioning itself even further to the left of the feckless Congress. That economic discourse, like much of the dead political thought that characterises the polity today, needs a kick in the pants. It would be vastly improved by having a strong gust of a wild wind whip up some creative destruction, engender a Clash of Ideas and clear the cobwebs.

Just such a wild wind is blowing in from the west. And his name is Narendra Modi.