The Great Indian Marathon
The longest running marathon in India is the political race
run every five years. From the day election results are out till the next
election results are announced, the race is on without a day’s let up. The race
picks up towards the last leg when the runners run at their optimum marathon
pace. The political marathon is similar to the long distance running event at
the starting point as both have a large number of participants. But there is a
significant difference- in the political marathon the participants divide
themselves into groups and as in relay
race choose the anchor person for their group who can exhort them to run with
him to reach the top of the podium finish. The rules of the political marathon
are that it is open to the entire population above 18 and it allows for lane
change if they feel the anchor person of their group fails to keep the lead.
The 16th Indian political marathon that started in
2009 is heading towards a finish presumably in the next one hundred days. Every
media channel has become a clairvoyant and using their election tracker
methodology has forecast the winner of the marathon. Their readings are based
on the pace of the race so far run, the handicaps and hurdles the runners had
encountered, their strategies to overcome them and their grand plan of action
designed to outwit all fellow competitors in the last lap. Every channel has
zeroed in on two possible finalists while the third that had started the race
in 2009 with high hopes and expectations is seen trailing far behind the other
two. It suffers from incumbency
handicap, compounded by alleged corruption charges and inefficiency. Since the
rules permit switching lanes, there is a great flux of coming in and going out
of participants from one group to the other, though there are sizeable
loyalists who do not falter in their allegiance to their chosen leader.
The winner of the great Indian marathon is to be decided by
725 million strong electorate, of which
first time voters (between 18 and 23) will be around 160 million, semi urban
and urban middle class voters 225 million and Muslim minority around 110
million. The rest will be mainly rural electorate with a tiny fraction
belonging to the rich upper class. These electorates are divided into four
groups and three of them have their anchormen while the fourth is trying to
cobble up an alliance with a number of anchormen and anchorwomen seeking the
top position.
Who will win the race? In the last few months the opinion
polls were unanimous in the choice of a strong,
goal-centric runner with high base fitness levels backed by 15 years of
experience in running a state and running it well (though exclusively for his
acolytes and admirers). He was off to a running start by running down his
opponents-specially the Shehzada(the prince) of the ruling party. But this campaign
seems now to run on empty as the Shehzada is no longer to be counted. The
Shehzada, like Julius Ceasar has refused the crown every time he was offered it.
The poor Shehzada has been written off
by everyone in the media, and so the high seeded competitor has turned to run
down the next seed who is the new babe that had started running even before it
let loose the umbilical cord of its mentor. Can this new baby whose fledgling
steps are at the high speed of an expert runner, turn out to be the winner?
Even before he had won RunDelhi, he decided to go for RunIndia, arrogantly
claiming that he had already covered it. He started his training with a scandal
a day to keep all his rivals at bay. His body language reveals his confidence-
as he has mastered the language both of the middle class morality and that of
the lower class petulance that makes him a darling of both the groups. He goes
through his daily calisthenics that include toe touching of his aam admi groups,
tilting the windmill of the police, horizontal stretching on the cold open
roads and torso twisting as per the directions of his group in order to leverage an effective way to run. His
training includes promoting physical endurance to avoid dehydration through sipping
his electrolyte-replenishing energy from his cheerleaders.
This brings us to the third competitor who even before the
start of the marathon has been consigned to oblivion. He has to run with the
handicap of incumbency further compounded by allegations of corruption, of
inefficiency and incompetence. All the hard training he had undergone to keep
himself running has proved to be a waste. But he doesn’t want to hang up his
boots and has started cleaning them, making them wear- worthy and fit for
running. Is it too little or too late as the anchors lobby their favourite
question at him. He knows that unless he runs a point-to-point course from East
to West, from North to South braving the scorching and rattling pace of his rivals,
he will be nowhere near the podium. He may have to change lanes and cannot be
always seen as left of centre which is now the lane of the number two seed and
nowhere near right of centre that is occupied by the number one seed. Sometimes
he wonders whether he should opt for a three legged race whereby he ties one
leg to the legs on the left to outwit the legs on the right. He has to be fiercely
combative to be ahead of the other two, but as he inches forward, he finds the
other two to his left and to his right making giant strides to overtake him.
As for the fourth group, there is no cohesion as to who
should be the anchor person. The ego clashes among the different partners make
it difficult to arrive at an acceptable leader. Disparate groups need desperate
remedies that unfortunately are not to be found. The gender problems have also
arisen with three queen bees clashing amongst themselves and clashing against two
of the opposite gender. Can gender coalition be possible for the fourth group
to take off?
So who will be the winner? The supporters of number two
dismiss the incumbent (seeded number three) as of no consequence and jeer at
the number one seed saying it will be a repeat of the age old story of the hare
and the tortoise. The modern version of the story of the hare and the tortoise
is slightly different. In the modern version as given by the British playwright
Edward Bond, the tortoise is slightly lame which makes the hare supra-confident.
As the race begins, the hare runs very fast till he reaches the last lap. He
turns to see the tortoise still far away somewhere at a distance of nearly ten
laps behind. He decides to take a short nap, but when he gets up, he finds the
tortoise at the finishing podium and cries that the tortoise had not completed
all the laps. The tortoise standing at the top of the podium says that his over
confidence had made him mentally lame thereby underestimating the strength of
his opponent’s lameness.
The political marathon is at an exciting state where to
identify the winner is more difficult than identifying a needle in a haystack.
Time for all astrologers, numerologists, tarrot card readers , star gazers to
make hay while the RUNIndia marathon is on.
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