Was Lokpal a poll issue? Sonia, Team Anna are both wrong

Reading and interpreting election verdicts is tricky business: even when we know how people voted, there is no way of knowing with certainty why they voted the way they did. Which is why everyone with an opinion has been floating a theory to account for why the Congress was routed in four of the five States that went to the polls, how the ruling combine in Punjab beat back the anti-incumbency factor, and why the BJP secured an emphatic win in Goa. [caption id=“attachment_237758” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The Congress President addresses the media. PTI”] [/caption] Was the perception of monumental corruption at the Centre a factor in the State Assembly elections? If so, that may account for why the Congress, under whose watch the sky-high scandals unfolded and which did its damnedest to beat back Team Anna’s efforts to bring about a strong Lokpal Bill, was trounced. Sonia Gandhi bristles at the suggestion. The Congress, she claimed somewhat fancifully, had done the most to fight corruption. As evidence to support that specious theory, she trotted out her party’s propagandist line: “Who brought forward the Lokpal Bill? The Congress did. We had it passed in the Lok Sabha, but in the Rajya Sabha, you all know who blocked it…” Sonia’s claim ignores the blindingly obvious fact that the Congress’ record of its dealings with Team Anna for much of the past year, which is well chronicled, was duplicitous and calculated to spike the mass yearning for a strong enough Lokpal Bill. It first tried to co-opt the Anna movement, and when that failed, and the motley group of protestors remained steadfast in their resolve to press for a Jan Lokpal Bill, it sent them packing and pressed ahead with an apology of a Lokpal Bill. Even if voters may not have understood the microdetails of the Lokpal Bill debate, they were informed enough to know that the UPA government had notched up the notorious record for the world’s biggest corruption scandal in the 2G case. For Sonia to wilfully ignore that is sheer political cussedness. But if Sonia Gandhi’s reading of the election verdict is flawed, so too are the somewhat exaggerated claims that the outcome was the result of the exertions of Anna and Baba Ramdev. Kiran Bedi, for instance, frames the Congress’ poor showing entirely against the backdrop of the various parties’ stand on the Lokpal Bill. In her estimation , the Congress suffered because it was “blatantly against (an) effective Lokpal Bill,” and spent much of its time discrediting the anti-corruption movement. She reasoned further that the national parties (presumably meaning the Congress and the BJP) had not been rewarded because they had not focussed on fighting corruption by providing strong Lokayuktas. Having framed the debate to Team Anna’s advantage, Bedi corrals evidence to prop up that thesis. The SAD-BJP government may have been itself corrupt, but in Bedi’s line of reasoning, it was re-elected because the Badals and the BJP turned up at Jantar Mantar to express solidarity with Team Anna when it organised a protest meeting to press for a Lokpal Bill. But there’s a giant hole in that line of argument. If parties have been voted out (or in) on the basis of their stand on the Lokpal Bill, as Bedi claims, how can one account for the thumping victory of the Samajwadi Party, whose leader Mulayam Singh Yadav was one of the fiercest critics of the Bill in the Lok Sabha? Bedi doesn’t address the point, preferring instead to ignore an Inconvenient Truth. But in fact there might be a reasonable explanation to account for the seemingly disparate verdicts in the different States. In a larger sense, the verdict everywhere (except in Manipur) was an anti-Congress vote, but the beneficiary depended on whether the Congress was in a one-to-one contest of whether there were other, stronger alternatives to the Congress. Indicatively, the Punjab verdict can being explained thus: even though the SAD-BJP’s record in office at the State level was tainted by allegations of corruption, the scale of corruption at the Central level made the Badals’ own record of corruption seem like a teddy bear’s picnic. Since Punjab effective ely witnessed a direct contest between the SAD-BJP and the Congress, voters perhaps punished the Congress with the Central scams in mind. That explanation is admittedly a bit of a stretch, but sounds faintly plausible. Similarly in Uttarakhand, the only viable alternative to the BJP, whose record in office was far from clean, was the Congress, but again the voters did not want to reward it, which is why we have a cliffhanger situation playing out. In Goa, on the other hand, the Congress suffered from a “double taint”: the State government was itself corrupt, and the Central government scams too cast a shadow. And since there was a direct contest – and a clear alternative in the BJP - the voters threw out the bums and voted in the BJP. How does one explain the Uttar Pradesh verdict? Why did not Mayawati , guilty of corruption on a smaller scale as compared to the Central government, get the benefit of the doubt in the way that the Badals did in Punjab and the BJP government did in Uttarakhand? The only plausible explanation is that the Samajwadi Party presented a very strong alternative to the Congress and the BJP, which is why it became the disproportionate beneficiary of the voters’ backlash against Mayawati’s corruption. Hypothetically, if the SP had not been around, perhaps the BJP would have secured a mandate. And if it had been a direct contest between Mayawati’s BSP and the Congress,  Mayawati may well have been returned to power. So, it’s possible to argue that to the extent that Team Anna’s mass popular movement against corruption over the past year elevated it to a national issue, which was top of the mind for millions of voters, it may have influenced voters and determined the outcome on the margins. But to claim, in the way that Kiran Bedi does, that the verdict can be explained through the prism of the parties’ stand on the Lokpal Bill is more than a stretch. Both Sonia Gandhi and Team Anna are guilty of cherrypicking facts to fit in with a specious argument. The verdict is much more many-layered, and reflects yet again a clarity of purpose in the voter that is lacking in the political players themselves.