Not by charisma alone

The last few elections have driven home one uncomfortable truth. Charisma is not the be all and end all in politics, particularly in elections. To put it in a nutshell, Mr or Ms Charisma is what he or she has done or convincingly appears they will do. As a result, electoral outcomes can no longer be equated only with the personal aura of a leader.

In fact, today, the questions which go through the mind of an average voter before he exercises his franchise are: Can this person deliver all that he's promising? Can he/she better our lives? Will this neta change the system so that there is justice for everyone? Or is the leader pro-rich and anti-poor, trying to fool the electorate at election time…?”

GOONDA RAJ

Clearly, in recent times, the paradigm has shifted. One is not trying to advance the theory that charisma amounts to nothing. In fact, it works when there are great expectations, or when expectations have even been halfway fulfilled.

In 2007, Mayawati came to power because people believed that she was a different leader. One who had an inclusive concept which was not focused on the Dalit populace, but also on the upper caste and some other denominations. She was also seen as a future Chief Minister who would take the corrupt and derail the goonda raj set up by the outgoing Mulayam Singh Yadav government and the Samajwadi Party he headed.

Coming to 2012, Mulayam was not at the forefront of the charge. It was his son Akhilesh who was promising the winds of change. He didn't have the charisma of Rahul Gandhi or his sister Priyanka, or for that matter Congress President Sonia Gandhi. But why did he succeed, and that too, handsomely?

The truth is that those with the charisma add-ons had already encashed on it in the 2004 and 2009 general elections. People then believed the Nehru-Gandhis were trustworthy and voted for them in 21 Lok Sabha constituencies. UPA-I had also launched many aam aadmi welfare schemes which seemed to be working at the grassroots.

But soon the equations changed. The Congress began to be afflicted by the trust-deficit syndrome. Many of its schemes had limited success at the ground level and blaming Mayawati for this in UP and in rest of the states didn't do much good.

Also, there were corruption issues like the 2G scandal and the CWG games mismanagement.

The buzz suddenly, despite Rahul Gandhi's commendable exertions, was regarding the new kid on the block — Akhilesh Yadav. It is another matter that if Mulayam's son fails to deliver, the electorate will choose another party, another leader.

CORRUPTION

Voting for change when the ruling dispensation fails has become far more constant than ever before. In Tamil Nadu, in 2009, the DMK-Congress, riding on the aam aadmi plank, won 26 of the 39 Lok Sabha seats.

The electorate believed that another term for Manmohan Singh would bring good tidings for the people. But two years later, the wave reversed — a spate of scandals involving DMK ministers, including party chief M. Karunanidhi's daughter, Rajya Sabha MP, M. Kanimozhi, saw the DMK stocks fall. So did the reputation of UPA-II.

Many of the Central government's schemes for the common man began to flounder while some others failed to take off, thanks to differences between Sonia Gandhi's pro-poor National Advisory Council and the government. The result: in the 2011 Tamil Nadu assembly elections, Jayalalithaa's AIADMK alliance swept the polls, putting the DMK and the Congress in the category of non-players.

It would be far from the truth to equate the AIADMK's triumphant return to power to Jayalalithaa's charisma. That very crowd-pulling ability didn't charm the electorate enough in the 2009 general elections to vote for her party. So what had changed in two years? Certainly not Jayalalithaa's persona.

The bottomline is that the trust deficit factor had kicked in, and there was no faith both in the DMK, and the UPA government at the Centre of which it was part of.

SCANDALS

In Delhi, when the Congress won a second term under Sheila Dixit in 2008, it was seen in several quarters as the triumph of ‘Sheila aunty's' grandmotherly persona and her genial ways. But in reality, it had more to do with her administrative abilities.

But in the forthcoming 2013 assembly polls, those very qualities of the Delhi chief minister, which inspired confidence, will be questioned because of the multi-crore scandals in the Commonwealth Games, and the large number of people who were displaced to ‘hide' the poverty-stricken underbelly of the national capital from the rest of the globe.

Today, such scandals, or the failure of governance is something that the public is aware of, thanks to the growing reach of TV. Even those who can't read can get a sense of what is happening, and what is going right and what is going wrong through this medium. Of course, they might be getting news from a channel prone to sensationalism. But they do get the general drift on which neta or party is corrupt and who was caught with his or her hand in the till.

It is also rather ironic that change in political perceptions has been catalysed by welfare schemes like the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MREGA). It has opened the eyes of the people to what the government can do if it wants to. Similarly, the RTI Act has suddenly empowered the janata to question the authorities on why schemes aren't being implemented, or why beneficiaries are being short-changed.

In the India of the new millennium, the government that works is one that will be given a second chance. Those who depend only on charisma can hope for the best but be prepared for the worst.

(The writer is a senior Delhi-based journalist.)

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