The genius of Rome’s ‘bread and circus’ was to distract the hoi polloi away from the political process. India has long surpassed the excellence of the ancients – it has turned the political process itself into a diversion for citizens from the cadaverous state of its politics.
Bypoll results have come in for three seats across three states. Bankipur in Bihar saw Prashant Kishor finally enter public office; Datia in Madhya Pradesh witnessed a BJP bastion switch; and Manjalpur in Gujarat, rather insipidly, stuck to the BJP.
On first pass, media coverage is razor-focused on what these three elections could mean for India’s overall political future. Points and counterpoints are being traded en masse, with reliance placed upon arguments ranging from the statistical realities of abysmally low turnouts to the chessboard on which caste dynamics are portrayed. One set of the commentariat wants us to believe that multiple states and central governments would be teetering on the verge of imminent collapse owing to isolated elections in just three seats, while the other is most reassured that these results are pure noise and no signal, with the inevitability of BJP rule remaining an article of faith.
The truth is, what we are witnessing is the death of sanity in Indian politics – televised and tweeted in real time.
The Indian public has been successfully convinced that the summum bonum of politics is to win elections. Good politics is when elections are won; bad politics is when elections are lost. Never mind outcomes, past trends of delivering public goods, whether party representatives have addressed local issues, or anything of that sort – all politics is only about arithmetic. Voters and the political machinery of parties have simultaneously buried the raison d’être of politics, being the actual conduct of governance, under an impression or a simulation of the process, which begins with and ends with winning seats.
However, we have not stopped at only trivialising politics. We have also gamified it. Parties that have hardly had any difference in service delivery have similarly adopted the lack of ideology as their preferred school of thought, and whose representatives optimise for muscle and money instead of improving government services have successfully divided people into tribal camps. Oozing with dopamine, assaulting the senses, and bristling with volume, citizens fight citizens without cause, having discarded the calculus of comparing governance outcomes and instead being subject to an animalistic manic delusion of identifying with parties that view citizens merely as entries in the electoral roll. Politics is now a parody of itself – a convenient one to mask the systemic corruption animating the corpse we today call our political elite.
Some day this nation will have to fight wars, counter pestilence, or take difficult economic decisions. On that day too, we will see verbal pugilism unfold on our airwaves and chat threads in response to a panchayat election somewhere that we have never heard of before. Impassioned soliloquies, name-calling, and crystal glazing based on individual, highly localised outcomes will entertain us. What we will miss in the commotion would be note-counting machines buzzing overtime in our political nerve centres, and the cold, unsparing stare of doom as it unflinchingly approaches.