This is the week of big anniversaries, two decades of Tiananmen, 25 years of Operation Bluestar. But staying closer home, it is chastening now to remember what a tough year 1984 had been for India, arguably the most challenging in our history since we became a republic. Operation Bluestar resulted, besides other trauma, in large-scale desertions and mutinies in the army’s Sikh units, Indira Gandhi’s assassination and then the retaliatory mob massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. And, as if that was not bad enough, almost exactly when we were picking up the pieces, the Bhopal gas tragedy happened. All this, when India had almost no government at the Centre. A very tentative Rajiv Gandhi had filled in the breach and India had gone into election mode immediately. And yet, that year ended on a note of resurgence and optimism of a kind rarely seen in our history. Rajiv won a mandate that made the adjective “historic” an understatement. In fact, he put it more aptly when, in his first interview, he acknowledged that people’s expectations were “scary”.

Remember, he had got 412 seats in the same Lok Sabha then. Now, his party has secured 206, exactly half as many, and the wave of optimism it has unleashed, in so many ways, is comparable to those heady days of a quarter century ago. OK, we must admit that our politics has evolved in so complicated a manner in these 25 years that 206 is probably the new 412. But the natural corollary, then, is that, just like the mandate of 1984, this one has also generated popular expectations that a realistic and intelligent politician would describe as “scary”. And the problem with such mandates is that they leave the voters more impatient, less forgiving. Feel-good takes no time to turn into disillusionment, and the voter often comes back at you with the fury of a jilted lover. That is why, as Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi move into this fresh term, it would be useful to analyse how the mandate of 1984 was lost, if the same mistakes are not to be made again, because if 206 is the new 412, it should also follow that the voter now will be only half as unforgiving as in 1984, a full generation ago.

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