It is the Indian voter who has emerged triumphant in the recently held Assembly elections in the five States of Goa, Manipur, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh.
Once again he has shown that it is he who holds all the aces and the trumps. And he has left no political party or candidate in any doubt as to who's the boss. The degree of discrimination, discernment and political acumen displayed by him is simply breath-taking.
For starters, just note how he took the measure of Mr Rahul Gandhi and Mr Akhilesh Yadav. Both are young and of the same age, and put in enormous efforts of the same vigour and earnestness, tirelessly criss-crossing a large number of constituencies. If anything, all apparent advantages — being the scion of the formidable Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, proximity to the power structure and all the leverage and the largesse that go with it, being regarded as future Prime Minister, media focus — lay with Rahul Gandhi. They were enough to overawe any average citizen.
LEARNED DISCOURSES
But no, the Indian voter refused to be bamboozled or intimidated. He dismissed Mr Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party to the fourth position with a pittance of 28 seats, and crowned Mr Akhilesh Yadav with an unprecedented 224 seats. He could not have done it without weighing both the parties and their equally young, equally bright, star performers on a fine scale and finding one of them, for reasons best known to himself, wanting.
There has been a lot of learned discourses derived from 20/20 hindsight on the factors that determined the final tally. But no amount of analysis, however threadbare, will ever be able to plumb the complex and intricate calculations that the Indian voter makes before he presses the button of his choice on the electronic voting machine (EVM).
One thing is for sure. When the Indian voter is set on a course, no power on earth can shake him. He has demonstrated the strength of his will time after time, as during the election in Tamil Nadu following the anti-Hindi agitation and the Lok Sabha election of 1977 after the infamous Internal Emergency. He gave a long tenure of 34 years to the Left Front in West Bengal only to bundle it out in a summary manner at one stroke to give a chance to Ms Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress.
He has not hesitated to ignore the demonisation of Mr Narendra Modi and let him continue at the helm in Gujarat. In the recent elections, he has meted out severe punishment to the corrupt regimes of the Congress-NCP in Goa and Ms Mayawati in UP.
He is no respecter of persons and takes no notice of theories, doctrines or ideologies that political pundits, psephologists and academics keep churning among themselves.
BLOT ON VOTER'S RECORD
Many may view as a blot on the Indian voter's record the phenomenon of nearly one-third of candidates with unsavoury antecedents, including involvement in criminal cases, getting elected to Assemblies and Parliament.
Here too, we can be sure that with all the distilled wisdom of millennia of civilisation, he has worked it all out within and for himself.
It may well be that since he does not want his interests to go unrepresented in the legislature, he opts for the least objectionable among the choices before him.
Another hypothesis is that he considers the offences, though outwardly serious to the chatterati, to be a frame-up by political opponents or vested interests, or to have arisen from feuds and clashes commonplace among groups, political parties or trade unions. Or that, whatever the allegation or the charge against him, the elected candidate had been helpful to the people and effectively taking care of their needs.
Only when the Government approves of the provision of the button “None of the above” in the EVM to indicate the disinclination of the voter to vote for any of the candidates, would it be possible to read the voter's mind in the correct sense.
All this does not take away the responsibility of political parties to live up to the high standards expected of them.
It is here that young leaders such as Messrs Akhileshwar Yadav and Rahul Gandhi have a duty to bring about the needed change for the better in political culture.