Forget that idiot.
There is more to think about. The Deccan Chronicle report on YSR's analysis of the five states shows its was the infighting and back stabbing that did the parties in and not the BS. Need to find a way to keep the 'rebels' happy or pay the rpice of their antics. Its no longer fun and games when one party is out to finish the other.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Delhi's djinns will haunt BJP
Ashok Malik
What are the national implications of the five State elections, the votes for which were counted on Monday, December 8? <b>Is India any closer to knowing the voter's mind in regard to the 2009 Lok Sabha contest? Frankly, for all the punditry and instant analysis of the past week -- "anti-incumbency is dead", "performance is rewarded", "terrorism is not an issue", "people want development" -- we just don't know. If anything, the confusion has been compounded.</b>
For both national parties, the glass is half-full. <b>The Congress's creditable victory in Delhi and defeat of a charismatic if divisive Chief Minister in Rajasthan gave it a stronger-than-expected booster shot at a time when the UPA Government looked weak and muddled. </b>
The BJP's return to power in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh indicates success for the party's federative impulses. Once seen as an entity limited to promotion of a handful of all-India issues, the BJP has demonstrated that it can mean different things in different States, with different, region-friendly faces.
<b>The social and economic conditions in Gujarat, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh are far apart. Yet, in all of these, the BJP has managed to present itself as a robust State party, with a local leader of some appeal</b>.
However, there are negatives too, and for both parties. <b>The Congress's inability to put up a united front in Madhya Pradesh and lack of options to the controversial Mr Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh signal potential long-term decline. </b>
<b>When a formerly dominant party goes out of power for 10 years in a State, it finds recovery very difficult. </b>The Congress's own predicament in, say, Orissa is there for all to see. If defeatism grips the party in Bhopal and Raipur, the consequences could be catastrophic.
<b>For the BJP, the hard lesson of the December 2008 State elections has come from Delhi. A small city-State, almost entirely urban and with all the trappings of a national capital, Delhi is not representative of India. It is, at best, a snapshot of the urban middle and upper classes that constitute the 'creamy layer' of the Indian electorate.</b>
However, <b>in many respects, the problems the BJP encountered in Delhi, and which saw it sinking to a humiliating defeat, were a microcosm of the party's larger predicament. They reflected its wrenching effort to effect generational change and fine-tune its platform for a contemporary constituency. </b>
In that sense, <b>the Delhi defeat </b>was not the defeat of one individual or candidate or election manager; it <b>was the defeat of old BJP, unequal to the task of responding to new India</b>. Some of these issues are going to handicap the party in 2009 too, as it prepares for the Lok Sabha election.
<b>There were three factors that held back the BJP in Delhi.</b> One, the veto on candidate selection was left -- as it had been in most of the States the BJP won in the past few years -- to the local leadership, the chief ministerial nominee and the State unit strongman. <b>In Delhi, overconfidence perhaps got the better of these individuals.</b>
Having convinced themselves that the election would end up being a referendum on the performance of the Union Government, <b>due diligence was neglected while deciding upon nominees. Below-par personal favourites -- whether generational or factional -- beat more deserving candidates to the party symbol. Demographic expansiveness was not deemed a priority, not even entirely understood.</b>
The results of leaving candidate selection to either out-of-touch leaders or entrenched but essentially outmoded party bureaucrats are now obvious. <b>It is for the BJP to guarantee this disaster is not repeated in any future election.</b>
Second, more than most other political traditions,<b> the BJP and its extended family have spent long periods agonising over the relative importance of personalities, parties and platforms at election time.</b> There is, of course, no template for the right proportion; it varies from election to election.
Yet, all three have to work together to achieve success. <b>Where there is dissonance between any two factors -- in Rajasthan, for instance -- a perfectly winnable election is lost. Delhi had a similar, though not quite exact, tragedy to relate.</b>
After 10 years of the Congress, with urban infrastructure under severe pressure and with the Chief Minister seemingly tired and jaded, Delhi was ripe for change, or so it seemed even three months ago. <b>Logically, the BJP should have contrasted the local Government and its legacy with a vision for the future -- 'building a metro for the 21st century' and so on. As others have put it, a positive, forward-looking campaign, a new civic sensibility, was needed -- not merely a list of the Congress's shortcomings.</b>
There is one fallacy to this post-facto analysis -- did the BJP have the face for such a campaign? Could it have sold audacious, high-octane dreams to Delhiites and simultaneously offered them the chief ministry of Mr Vijay Kumar Malhotra, born in 1931? It may sound rude and even flippant, but in the age of Twenty20 fans (and voters), <b>why was the BJP insistent on offering a candidate who was born before India played even Test cricket?</b>
<b>Third, politics is an inherently dynamic phenomenon.</b> Fifteen years ago, in a large swathe of India, the BJP moved ahead of the Congress because it pushed forward a younger crop of leaders -- new ideas, new voices and new energies. These mirrored the yearnings of the contemporary voter.
<b>Today, as the Delhi episode bears out, the party is a lion in winter. It is the new Congress. The leadership is past 75; the so-called second generation (55-65 years) is being kept from the frontline. A traffic jam has occurred as those further down the path are being pushed back. A symptom of this was the party's unwillingness to allow even multi-term municipal councillors to contest the Delhi Assembly election.</b>
In recent years, the Congress's obsession with empowering the ND Tiwari-Arjun Singh generation became the subject of ridicule. It also made the party look out of touch and cost it popular appeal. In Delhi, the BJP made the same mistake. Unless it is careful, its rivals will use this argument against it in 2009 as well.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is that geriatric gap.
There is more to think about. The Deccan Chronicle report on YSR's analysis of the five states shows its was the infighting and back stabbing that did the parties in and not the BS. Need to find a way to keep the 'rebels' happy or pay the rpice of their antics. Its no longer fun and games when one party is out to finish the other.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Delhi's djinns will haunt BJP
Ashok Malik
What are the national implications of the five State elections, the votes for which were counted on Monday, December 8? <b>Is India any closer to knowing the voter's mind in regard to the 2009 Lok Sabha contest? Frankly, for all the punditry and instant analysis of the past week -- "anti-incumbency is dead", "performance is rewarded", "terrorism is not an issue", "people want development" -- we just don't know. If anything, the confusion has been compounded.</b>
For both national parties, the glass is half-full. <b>The Congress's creditable victory in Delhi and defeat of a charismatic if divisive Chief Minister in Rajasthan gave it a stronger-than-expected booster shot at a time when the UPA Government looked weak and muddled. </b>
The BJP's return to power in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh indicates success for the party's federative impulses. Once seen as an entity limited to promotion of a handful of all-India issues, the BJP has demonstrated that it can mean different things in different States, with different, region-friendly faces.
<b>The social and economic conditions in Gujarat, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh are far apart. Yet, in all of these, the BJP has managed to present itself as a robust State party, with a local leader of some appeal</b>.
However, there are negatives too, and for both parties. <b>The Congress's inability to put up a united front in Madhya Pradesh and lack of options to the controversial Mr Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh signal potential long-term decline. </b>
<b>When a formerly dominant party goes out of power for 10 years in a State, it finds recovery very difficult. </b>The Congress's own predicament in, say, Orissa is there for all to see. If defeatism grips the party in Bhopal and Raipur, the consequences could be catastrophic.
<b>For the BJP, the hard lesson of the December 2008 State elections has come from Delhi. A small city-State, almost entirely urban and with all the trappings of a national capital, Delhi is not representative of India. It is, at best, a snapshot of the urban middle and upper classes that constitute the 'creamy layer' of the Indian electorate.</b>
However, <b>in many respects, the problems the BJP encountered in Delhi, and which saw it sinking to a humiliating defeat, were a microcosm of the party's larger predicament. They reflected its wrenching effort to effect generational change and fine-tune its platform for a contemporary constituency. </b>
In that sense, <b>the Delhi defeat </b>was not the defeat of one individual or candidate or election manager; it <b>was the defeat of old BJP, unequal to the task of responding to new India</b>. Some of these issues are going to handicap the party in 2009 too, as it prepares for the Lok Sabha election.
<b>There were three factors that held back the BJP in Delhi.</b> One, the veto on candidate selection was left -- as it had been in most of the States the BJP won in the past few years -- to the local leadership, the chief ministerial nominee and the State unit strongman. <b>In Delhi, overconfidence perhaps got the better of these individuals.</b>
Having convinced themselves that the election would end up being a referendum on the performance of the Union Government, <b>due diligence was neglected while deciding upon nominees. Below-par personal favourites -- whether generational or factional -- beat more deserving candidates to the party symbol. Demographic expansiveness was not deemed a priority, not even entirely understood.</b>
The results of leaving candidate selection to either out-of-touch leaders or entrenched but essentially outmoded party bureaucrats are now obvious. <b>It is for the BJP to guarantee this disaster is not repeated in any future election.</b>
Second, more than most other political traditions,<b> the BJP and its extended family have spent long periods agonising over the relative importance of personalities, parties and platforms at election time.</b> There is, of course, no template for the right proportion; it varies from election to election.
Yet, all three have to work together to achieve success. <b>Where there is dissonance between any two factors -- in Rajasthan, for instance -- a perfectly winnable election is lost. Delhi had a similar, though not quite exact, tragedy to relate.</b>
After 10 years of the Congress, with urban infrastructure under severe pressure and with the Chief Minister seemingly tired and jaded, Delhi was ripe for change, or so it seemed even three months ago. <b>Logically, the BJP should have contrasted the local Government and its legacy with a vision for the future -- 'building a metro for the 21st century' and so on. As others have put it, a positive, forward-looking campaign, a new civic sensibility, was needed -- not merely a list of the Congress's shortcomings.</b>
There is one fallacy to this post-facto analysis -- did the BJP have the face for such a campaign? Could it have sold audacious, high-octane dreams to Delhiites and simultaneously offered them the chief ministry of Mr Vijay Kumar Malhotra, born in 1931? It may sound rude and even flippant, but in the age of Twenty20 fans (and voters), <b>why was the BJP insistent on offering a candidate who was born before India played even Test cricket?</b>
<b>Third, politics is an inherently dynamic phenomenon.</b> Fifteen years ago, in a large swathe of India, the BJP moved ahead of the Congress because it pushed forward a younger crop of leaders -- new ideas, new voices and new energies. These mirrored the yearnings of the contemporary voter.
<b>Today, as the Delhi episode bears out, the party is a lion in winter. It is the new Congress. The leadership is past 75; the so-called second generation (55-65 years) is being kept from the frontline. A traffic jam has occurred as those further down the path are being pushed back. A symptom of this was the party's unwillingness to allow even multi-term municipal councillors to contest the Delhi Assembly election.</b>
In recent years, the Congress's obsession with empowering the ND Tiwari-Arjun Singh generation became the subject of ridicule. It also made the party look out of touch and cost it popular appeal. In Delhi, the BJP made the same mistake. Unless it is careful, its rivals will use this argument against it in 2009 as well.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is that geriatric gap.