Searching for Volonté Générale Part I
Campaign Promises
It has been a year since the madness and the euphoria. Madness, because the 2024 election season bared naked the histrionic abyss of political discourse, contestation and anxiety for everybody to face. Euphoria, because for many the fractured mandate, the fact no party mustered up a majority, signalled a return of coalition politics, a return of a more vibrant and assertive parliament standing up to executive overreach. It signalled a pale hope for more democracy.
A year since, and the madness has receded to simmer underneath, and the euphoria has soured into dejection. The incumbents deftly placated their coalition allies, their executive overreach still strong, the opposition indulgently infighting, swimming in shambles. It didn’t take long to remember that the political class have their own preoccupations. The idyllic constituency with people in sync and with the sacred republican bond between them and their representative, who is theirs and theirs alone, the city on the hill acting in concert is a fantasy. Our cities and constituencies are divided from all directions and angles, we are too numerous, and it’s all very chaotic. Our systems are overburdened. But even otherwise, the imagined idyllic hill entails everybody being switched ON all the time.
Democratic rights remain imperfect due to inequity, the sheer volumes of people, the complexities of systems and networks to deal with, especially in this country. An imperfection permeating all processes of civic and political action.
It has been a year since I bore witness to the churn of political action, beyond the act of voting and consumption of media cacophony. I attended an open house campaign coordination meeting between civil society organizations and the Lok Sabha candidate for Bangalore North from a prominent opposition party. Details are unimportant. But the grating, granular phenomenology illustrates how difficult and messy it is being ON all the time.
Heat. It starts with the heat because 8 died in Kerala, 20 in Odisha, 24 across North India, and on the last day of polling, in UP, 33 election officers and at least one voter died due to extreme heat. There were many more such cases across the season. Drudgery of material conditions, elemental, keeping us from our highest, most virtuous action of civic participation. Heat because your brain stews in its own sweat, trying to comprehend what the hell democratic representation even means for a billion-plus people.
And because political action involves getting outside the comfort and privacy of our homes, under the indifferent Sun. Even in the Tundra, it involves the stale hot air of candidates being late, the heat of debates and discussions, and the balancing of self-interests against common ones. It involves coming together with other people, to transcend individuality and attain a shared corporeality – to that extent, it involves body heat.
In the blistering summer heat, Dennis and I walked Church Street’s baking concrete to the SBI building. Dennis (we shall call him Dennis) was a civil society veteran from my neighborhood, looking for people to help campaign there. Incidentally, I had heard about the meeting through my involvement with the group Bahutva. The stairwells of the SBI Building tunneled cool air. The office where the meeting took place was crammed and hot. Two dozen, and counting, civil society activists in the lobby, the interior rooms busy with miscellaneous campaign operations. The Candidate was half an hour late. We sat in a circle, on sofas and chairs, while others stood around the periphery. Crammed in the lobby, in the blistering summer heat.
The Candidate spoke about his platform, track record and motivation. He had been a Rajya Sabha MP. He had helped mobilize people against a hate campaign way back in 2009, he had been part of parliamentary committees, authored parliamentary reports. This was a critical election for the future of democracy. Our ‘Last chance’. The stakes had never been higher, so he’d chosen to fight on the frontlines. Rajya Sabha elections are not democratic in the way Lok Sabha ones are.
It moves on to dust. Dust raised by democracy’s churn. Dust of contestation, belligerence and violence. Violence of rhetorical venom, hysterical heads of government dogwhistling about our land and gold being redistributed to those with "more children", to "infiltrators". Violence of real form, political party workers clashing in Bengal, Tamil Nadu and elsewhere. Frontlines, where, in the heat of battle, individuals are reduced to specks of dust making up the sandy banks of voting blocs, communities and demography.
‘Team Bengaluru’ was his party’s platform for all the city constituencies. They’d kicked their rivals out of the state government, it was time to go national. They were promising their guarantees for the whole country now, the incumbents had left everything in disrepair – unemployment was at historic highs, the economy was tanking, the social fabric was unravelling, and the people’s freedom of expression was being choked out.
The Candidate briefed the room for forty minutes. The floor opened for suggestions with the primer - to get the “polling booth as crowded as possible” in the campaign’s favour. He joked about the “Deep South” of the Northern Plains having more numbers and more energetic mobilization, and about his party often being seen as incapable of countering their venomous narrative.
“I didn’t say that, sorry”, he smiled.
The folks from Bahutva, Eddelu, Jagrutha, and the other organizations were no-nonsense, hard-boiled and practical people. They began saying their piece. They said:
The state elections were precisely targeted affairs. Organizations like Eddelu had worked to mobilize voters on the ground. Their surveys showed a large deficit in the so-called ‘secular’ voter turnout. So, they advised against spreading out too thin and trying catch-all tactics. Concentrated messages to communities they knew could be wooed, a focus on the swing votes. Their current surveys showed that there was a significant abstention among Muslims in voting last time around, but they were also largely united behind the Candidate’s party. On the other hand, one survey had found 27% of the city’s Vokkaliga vote remained undecided. They brought up outreach for the working class, the Scheduled Castes and OBCs in the constituency. They brought the numbers; they had the votes. How was the Candidate going to hold himself accountable to them? They had concerns about their living and working conditions, city governance had repeatedly failed them, with the indefinite and unconstitutional suspension of municipal elections they were bearing the brunt of urban dysfunction. The water crisis this year had disproportionately affected them.
The Candidate responded:
“Parliament, one set of issues. Corporator, another set of issues.”
Okay. But could he promise an inclusive package of some sort? Gift-wrapped perhaps in their platform of ‘Brand Bengaluru’?
“I get it. I get it”, went his response.
Grime. Because politics is about coalition building. Magna Carta, the wars of the Mughals and Marathas, Rights of Man and Jacobin Terror, the Era of Good Feeling, the sunset on the Raj and our tryst with destiny. Coalitions building, coalitions falling apart. Dust coagulating through spit, ink and blood. Coagulating into grime with dreams of becoming fertile soil. But the gulf between such swanky political ideals and the mess of our lived realities is wide. Grime because it is a grimy business.
The Candidate leaned on a campaign rhetoric, idyllic and statesman-like. Governance, justice, equity and prosperity; employment schemes and subsidies and constitutionalism; all pertinent issues but diffused and abstract. It had a stubborn strain of platitude, a technocratic management style appeal with generalities nobody could deny. Void of details, it chased the meridian. They told him in no uncertain terms, the so-called ‘educated’, ‘middle-class’ was overwhelmingly and staunchly pro-incumbent, lost souls and a lost cause. The real ones were the swinging plurality, the working class and the poor – ones not easily gaslit by rhetoric of ‘GDP’ and ‘international standing’ as much as by transactional practical policy promises. The discussion was at times circular in discussing how exactly to build this coalition, which communities to be prioritized, and what messaging for who.
In a bit of a déjà vu, the man who joined the meeting late, apologized and asked to speak his mind, stated that they needn’t take too much time focusing on the Muslim community since they were already behind the Candidate’s party. It was the undecided, swing voters, the working class, Scheduled Caste and OBC communities on whom the thrust of the outreach ought to be.
“No. You can’t take anyone for granted”, said the Candidate.
“Sir, if you don’t want to listen to my point, I can leave!” said the man.
“No, I’m not doing that to you”, placated the Candidate
“You’ll lose the undecided vote. The opposition will swing them”, responded another man.
It’s a difficult business, building a coalition. Town halls in slums, in apartment complexes and gated communities, door-to-door canvassing, meeting people and actively listening to their concerns. Active listening and charismatic engagement to rally a swing. Suggestions for strategies poured in from all quarters, but time and bandwidth wouldn’t allow all of them to be realized. All those different communities with different interests and concerns. Bangalore North was a constituency with over 3.2 million eligible voters to woo, a tattered rag cloth strip of land spanning 21 kilometres from Malleshwaram to Kumbalgodu, and splayed out in all other directions.
We had little under a month before the model code of conduct and voting. The campaign needed to blitz Bangalore North’s public consciousness, cover as much ground as possible. The more active and energetic the campaign, the more buzz and momentum.
“That’s what we need from you”, the Candidate told the room.
He briskly ran through his hopes that everybody present would campaign and canvass for him, tap into their networks, mobilize their organizations and communities. Grassroots initiative to help him whip up a winning coalition.
They were ready to broker congregations and town halls, but the crux of the matter was whether he would personally, physically address the crowd? Door-to-door canvassing and proxy campaigning were well and good as supplements, but adhesive to cobble up a coalition was the leader’s physicality – people had to see him sweat and put in the effort. The campaign already had a slew of public appearances, the schedule was busy, the Candidate qualified, but he would try to accommodate some of their plans.
“Whom can we contact for your calendar,” a lady asked.
“Yeah, just reach out to my team”, the Candidate waved his hands.
It was a wrap. The campaign staff asked everybody to pose for pictures with the Candidate, asking us to blow it up on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and wherever else. They ushered people to various picturesque formations. Some went willingly, even enthusiastically, and others complied very blasé. The rest, including Dennis and I, circumvented all the commotion to get out of the hot crammed room, into the cool airy hallway.
Heart. It takes heart to take political action. To keep on keeping on. I knew people present in the room who’d gotten into legal trouble for criticizing the powers-to-be, for holding protests, and working with the underclass. People who’d grappled with the bureaucratic labyrinth, faced state intimidation and violence, with no guarantees for their civic efforts. Heroic action needs to run the risk of being rendered futile. To witness heroic action in democracies, look to your local civil societies. Uphill Sisyphean tasks with Promethean hopes.
The channels of power are such that, increasingly, citizens only have the five-yearly election cycles to select their national and state representatives – they robbed Bangalore’s city-level representation five years ago. Every five years, the frontlines open up for jousting, before it bottlenecks itself once again. Politicians are forced to reckon with public sentiment only cyclically. The feudal parts of the country still have pocket boroughs for some politicians, but the city is a more demanding beast, and our political machines have revolving doors.
Murmurs and whispers circulated among people’s lips. A man came up to Dennis, asking how he thought the meeting went. They sized up the Candidate, busy taking pictures with people in the lobby. How was our chosen Candidate (for yes, irrespective of everything, he was our electoral hill to die on), how was our Candidate for Bangalore North going to fare against the incumbent machine? The incumbent Goliath. A fighting chance, with tilted odds for the cautiously optimistic. All contingent upon the work he put on the ground, how much heart he’d show in the dust, the grime and the vampiric heat. Could he turn it up and turn it ON? And keep on keeping ON?