Tragedy in 3 acts

Politics in India has been the major sport, far more demanding than cricket, much more entertaining than Bollywood. There is an openness to it and it produces the same string of surprises as a Twenty20 match. Yet, politics at the ground level, the nature of the political machine, the rise of new constituencies, and the power of local bosses never gets reflected on television.

TV represents a bowdlerisation of politics that we must understand. It simplifies the political at three levels. Firstly, it simplifies complexity and speeds up the time of politics. A political struggle which is as complex and Byzantine as a Russian novel with its demographic surplus of characters gets reduced to a simplified cast and a predictable narrative. TV also scienticises politics to idiot formulas, thereby reducing it to a second-order chemistry. Thirdly, it confuses representation for reality, where a group of narrators actually feel they are narrating the true and real. The recent Assembly elections in four states and one Union Territory was an example of this. I want to show how the production of politics has become separated from the construction and consumption of politics in India.
TV, as a media, constructed the recent election in terms of three ideal types. The first group saw themselves as experts but they derived their expertise from numbers, from ideas in finance and economics. Their strength was their ability to forecast trends, their weakness, a sense of politics which they equated to a market. They suggest politics, like markets, has an invisible hand which can be easily read. If one can manage numbers, one can manage politics. There is an elegance about their presentation. Their faith in formulas about swings and incumbency effects is endearing. Politics only enters their analysis as a trickster when their forecasts fail. It is the anomaly that ruins their equations.
The second group can be dubbed the Machiavellians. They are insiders as experts, the flies on the wall that bring backstage to frontstage. The best are old politicians and journalists who bring years of insight, turning biography into analysis. Yet, politics never goes beyond a sense of conspiracy, the factional battle or rebel candidates. The Machiavellian understands the politician but lacks a sense of people. People are seen only as a set of categories they can predict and manipulate. The Machiavellian’s real sense of insight is his joy of politics and politicising. He will be brilliant on Jayalalithaa, clichéd on the voter. Oddly, he will make little sense of Mamata Banerjee. She appears as a spoilsport, a fact of nature and not culture.
For the Machiavellians, cynicism is a substitute for humour. Their narratives are stark, realistic, involved and strangely voyeuristic. They are poor on trends but acute on individual behaviour. They see numbers as unaesthetic, an insult to the calculativeness of political intelligence.
The third group can be dubbed the virtual democrats. They operate through the wisdom of committees and structure their groups like TV panchayats. People are projected as representing different regions as experts and a whiff of different ideologies is retained. This group is the most interdisciplinary in terms of scholarship with sociologists, political scientists, historians and journalists all fine-tuning each other’s sensitivities. They are insightful at the micro level but inane at the macro level, full of good anecdotes but painful on policy. They attempt to humanise politics but merely end up transferring the perspectives of Page 1 to Page 3 nuggets. They confuse representation with representativeness. At the general level they wallow in political correctness or cliché.
Interestingly each group responds to failure or to their mistakes in a different way. The first group re-examines data as if there is an error in information but not interpretation. They read electoral failure like our space researchers see the failure of a rocket. A little calculation, an estimation error is all they can think of. The Machiavellian feels let down, as though he has missed some vital gossip. He behaves as if he has been out of touch, acts as if the error is almost a personal flaw. The third group counters a failed story with another story. They are masters of “on the other hand”, experts on the “but”.
What one misses in each of these presentations is a sense of the political as a craft, as values, as the play of the logic of a society, or a party, as economic dynamics. One misses the rough and tumble of power. In fact, figures like Mamata or Jayalalithaa seem alien to all three forms of political analysis. Yet who can deny that both are immensely political but operate according to a logic of politics that eludes current political analysis, which confuses prediction with understanding.
Jayalalithaa is read like an ice maiden and Mamata like a fact of nature who has entered politics but is not quite political. The analyst can never forgive her for what the people have — her failure as railway minister. They feel contempt for Mamata, see her as an unexplainable tsunami-like force which should disappear once the impact is achieved. They feel she is illiterate about governance. For them, the Marxists look more politically real even after they have stupefied a state into economic sterility.
The question one asks now is why is it that the plethora of political analyses says so little about politics? Are political analysts as a group too much of a club such that their intelligence has turned incestuous? Or has politics become a different language, a populist game which refuses translation into their creamy social science categories?
All three groups salute the success of democracy and the wisdom of the voter but they all seem distant from the voter. One has heard of political cronyism but what one is facing is analytical cronyism. The latter is a situation where all the analysts come from homogenous backgrounds, project their wishlists and their favourite stories on to a politics which is ruthlessly and unforgivingly dynamic. One is almost tempted to facetiously ask whether they are present not for the truths they seek but for the entertainment they provide. Politics demands stories. Politics is desperately in need of analysis. But there is a failure of storytelling and analysis that democracy needs to reflect on. It needs a sense of humility, a feeling for the classic, but, above all, a craftsman’s sense of an instrument where one has to politically tune oneself to a different reality. One hopes commentary can rework itself the way politics perpetually does.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist