Indians, we were told, lack a sense of history. That may have got discredited as a classic Orientalist overstatement, but in the case of our own tribe it often seems true. Political journalists and commentators share a penchant for delivering sweeping political judgments and writing instant political obituaries regardless of how wrong we may eventually be proved. This is particularly true in the case of a ‘historic’ victory or a ‘crushing’ defeat at the hustings. We may or may not unreservedly venerate the victor, but we invariably dismiss the loser as a hopeless has-been.

In 1977, when Indira Gandhi led the Congress to its first resounding defeat, everyone thought it was curtains for her and her party. Yet three years later she bounced back with a comfortable majority. More recently the BJP’s string of victories in assembly elections in November 2003 — and the spate of analyses that followed — convinced the party leadership that the Congress continued to be in a state of terminal decline. That conclusion imbued the BJP top brass with so much confidence that it advanced the general elections by six months and we all know what happened thereafter.

Of course, electoral verdicts — especially in bipolar states — tend to get overturned in every alternate election, thanks to the matrix of expectations and disappointments that come under the lazy rubric of ‘anti-incumbency’. It requires no great powers of prophecy to predict that the Congress could regain, say, Chhattisgarh the next time round, or the BJP has every chance of winning the Delhi assembly.

... contd.