First, the politics-is-mud types. Visually identifiable; usually the most nattily dressed people around, unless an ex-bureaucrat has turned up. Their job is easy: if the turnout is low, it’s because politicians are crooks. If not, money and muscle power won the day. If independents (better understood as temporarily-unaffiliated politicians) win: look, people don’t like politicians. If they lose: politics is a dirty machine, good people like us can’t break in. A closely-related species sees throw-the-rascals-out anti-incumbency in every election; given that the constituency’s incumbent needn’t be from the party that’s in power in the state, which needn’t be in power at the Centre, everyone is usually throwing some rascal out.

Then, the it’s-all-a-neoliberal-conspiracy theorists. Much more difficult to identify visually. After all, it’s politics: there are confusingly many khadi kurtas. But anyone throwing hands in the air, bemoaning the “lack of alternatives”, or breaking into a discussion to tell us the central problem is that the real issues weren’t covered in the corporate media, might well be wearing an “SEZs are Capitalist Plots” T-shirt under the Fabindia. Again, their task is easy: if the “neoliberal” parties decline in any way, the country is tired of being a pawn of international capital; if they don’t, it is because the country is a pawn of international capital.

Then there’s the governance-groupies. They’d go well beyond saying that good people are rarely voted out. If the Nitishes of the world appear to be sweeping, you’re A-OK: stick to the script, praise reform, congratulate the stockmarkets for correctly predicting everything, wind up by producing a couple of appalling statistics and blaming Nehru for them. But, if someone who’s believed to have been good at the job seems to be losing it, say it’s because they didn’t do enough. If only he hadn’t squandered money on state schemes! If only she’d pushed harder for FDI! After all, this is a new, post-1991 world. The voter is unbound. You have to surpass their expectations. Clearly you didn’t. Listen to me more carefully next time: what your rural electorate wants is simple — a stable government that understands that tax havens are a necessity in a globalising world.

... contd.