Whence stability?

It is not much more than two months since the new government has been in place in India. Enough controversies have come and gone, at least in the 24x7 news media, that is does not feel new anymore. The normal 100 day honeymoon period has been shortchanged. But, the fact that the government has lasted this long makes me say that in the last elections the “electorate has voted for stability.” I hope I gagged you now, even if you had not been earlier.

Even as the election results were being blared in our ears, the political know-it-alls went to town with the claim that people had proclaimed their desire for stability. I would have made millions of dollars if I had got a penny every time this sentiment was espoused.

Tsk, tsk … the electorate never did any such thing. While both the Congress and BJP sought vote on the platform of, inter alia, offering political stability, the wise electorate chose to ignore these pleas. The elections were an exercise in ascertaining the wishes of the majority in a constituency, on issues of local import in the main. At best a few abutting constituencies, say not more than half a dozen, may have come together to form a block for a particular party, again on regional considerations and no wider. A working group emerged (and this is a crucial word), after a few (fortunately fewer than earlier) stuttering steps.

The position of a party at the national level emerged from the disparate results. While the national level leaders may have witnessed huge throngs at their election meetings, it is the local leaders with not much say on the wider podium who got the work done.

Mr P Chidambaram has been one of the darlings of the national power and business groups, and enough of a confidante of the people who take decisions to have been given the charge of Home Ministry after the Mumbai terror attacks. Then, how do you explain the tough time he had in the elections? The voters of his constituency almost rejected him because of his relevance to his constituency – adjudged minimal or at best marginal. Only a recount got him where he is now.

Did Telugu people vote for Congress because of what the party did at the national level? No. It is because state level politicians manipulated the issues that resonated with the local populace. Did Kannadigas vote for BJP because they thought it would, as the power at the centre, settle the Cauvery water dispute in their favor? No. At best, they could have thought of a stronger bargaining position vis-à-vis Tamil Nadu.

Why did people vote for Jaswant Singh in Darjeeling? Surely not because the people thought they will help BJP come to power? Did the Gujjar issue play out at the state level or national level in Rajasthan? Or, both?

Were communists rejected solely because of their opposition to the nuclear deal? Did Singur and Nandigram, both local issues, not play any part? What about intra-party quarrels in Kerala?

Stability is an emergent property. In our genome, does one gene know and/or dictate what the other genes will do? They have choreographed a delicate dance that has survived millennia even as it changes in the details. Election results have to be looked at through a similar lens.

The 13 day, the 13 month and also the four year plus governments of BJP, the five year one of Congress and all the other formulations ever since an almost unitary form of dispensation at the centre seem to have come to an end are emergent phenomena. The five year stability of the previous government was achieved through dubious, though systemic and ostensibly democratic, means. One can never state with complete certainty that a similar scenario with an alternate climax will not be played out during the next four years plus.

Who is interested in political stability? Holders of capital. They see politics and governance only through the prism of risks to their capital; they set store by stability and are mortally afraid of anything emergent, which indicates uncertainty. The mortgage crisis in the US emerged from the bursting of the housing bubble nationwide, in itself an emergent property of the CDOs that bundled up mortgages across the country.

No wonder then that as soon as it became clear that the pulls and pushes on the ruling combination have been moderated this time round, the markets zoomed. “Certainty has triumphed!”

Stability can be reckoned only in hindsight. And, aspiring for it definitely cannot be the reason for the actions of individual actors, or indeed of disparate groups in a large and complex setting. The predictability of an emergent phenomenon is no better than a shot in the dark. Our political pundits are blissfully unaware of this.

Raghuram Ekambaram