Actor-politician Rajinikanth, who sat out the Lok Sabha and bye-polls in the state, has announced that he will contest in the Tamil Nadu assembly elections, whenever announced. While speaking to the media in Chennai on Friday, a day after polls to 38 Lok Sabha seats and 18 assembly seats in the state concluded, Rajinikanth was asked when his entry to electoral politics could be expected. “Whenever assembly elections come,” he replied, adding, “We are prepared.”

When asked about the less-than-ideal voter turnout in the state, he said, “Seventy percent is a reasonable turnout.” Referring to the low turnout in Chennai, the state capital, a smiling Rajini added, “I think a lot of people went to their hometowns because of the four-day continuous holiday.”

The actor also said that it would be good if the number of booths in the state were increased.On caste-based violence on poll day, he said, “It’s definitely less than what has happened before. They (the Election Commission) have conducted the polls well this time; there is no doubt about that.”

With Tamil Nadu witnessing 22 bye-polls this poll season, the fate of the Edappadi Palaniswami-led AIADMK government hangs in the balance. When a journalist asked if Rajinikanth would announce his political party in the event of a regime change, he said, “Let’s see. We will decide all that after May 23. “

With the regard to rampant allegations of cash-for-votes this poll season, Rajinikanth said that the Election Commission has to look into it, refusing to comment further.

When asked if there is a chance that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be re-elected, all the actor said was, “It would become apparent on May 23 (when results are announced).”

In February, the actor had announced that he will not be contesting in the parliamentary elections and that his goal was the legislative assembly elections. Rajinikanth made this statement in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, which was held in Tamil Nadu on Thursday.

He had also stated that he does not support or endorse any political party for the polls and that the flag of Rajini Makkal Mandram, his political outfit, and his pictures shall not be used by anybody for poll campaigns.

On April 9, the actor had welcomed BJP’s poll promise to set up a separate authority to link rivers and said that if the party comes to power, it must implement it. He had asked the people of Tamil Nadu to vote for a party that would address the water crisis in the state.

Ghazipur, Apr 19 : Triggering a controversy, Union minister Manoj Sinha has warned the detractors, that anyone who points a finger at BJP workers will find himself paying for it within four hours.

Sinha, who is seeking re-election from Ghazipur seat, was addressing ‘Kisan Panchayat Sammelan’ in Saidpur area on Thursday evening.

“If any finger is pointed at a BJP worker, then I assure you, in four hours the person will pay for it,” the 59-year-old sitting MP said.

Sinha further said that party workers are ready to bury corruption and illegal wealth.

“No one has the temerity to look a BJP worker in the eye. If they do, then rest assured, those eyes will not be safe,” he warned during the election meeting in his constituency.

The Union minister was apparently trying to convey that BJP would not allow those steeped in corruption and crime to enter in his constituency.

Sinha faces the joint opposition candidate Afzal Ansari of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), who had defeated him in 2004.

Amta/Malda (WB), Apr 18 : Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday mocked the Congress’ promise to eradicate poverty, and said India will actually be freed of poverty the day it gets rid of the Congress.

Singh said the indication after second phase of election is clear that the BJP will return to power.

Addressing election rallies at Howrah and Malda districts, Singh said since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress has been promising eradication of poverty.

“Now, Rahul Gandhi is also pledging that. The fact is the day the country becomes free of the Congress, it will also get freedom from poverty,” the senior BJP leader said.

Lashing out at the TMC in Bengal, Singh alleged that democracy has ceased to exist under its rule in the state.

“Violence has been unleashed on opposition parties. Is it a sign of democracy? In Bengal, we will fight till we restore democracy,” he asserted.

He alleged that the TMC has replaced democracy by “goondaraj”.

Under the TMC rule, “all the three — the mother, the motherland and the people are suffering,” he said, referring to the ruling party’s slogan of ‘Ma, Maati and Manush’.

Maintaining that infiltrators will be thrown out, Singh said refugees will be given citizenship under the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill.

The Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the BJP are engaged in a bitter fight over the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. The saffron party has also vowed to bring in National Register of Citizens (NRC) across the country and weed out infiltrators.

Referring to Bangladeshi actor Ferdous Ahmed who was ordered to leave the country after he took part in a campaign of the ruling TMC in West Bengal, Singh said people like him will not be allowed to act as per their whims and fancies.

Mumbai, Apr 19 : Hours after she resigned from Congress party spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi on Friday formally joined the Shiv Sena in the presence of party chief Uddhav Thackeray and youth wing president Aditya Thackeray here.

Welcoming her decision to join the Shiv Sena, Mr Thackeray said, “We welcome her in our party. The party will gain strength with her experience.”
Sources in the Congress said, “Rahul Gandhi has not accepted her resignation so far.”
Citing that there was ”no respect for women” in the grand-old party as reason for resigning from all posts, Ms Chaturvedi said, “I am extending my gratitude to the Shiv Sena chief for this opportunity. I belong to Mumbai and in future, I will continue working for the Mumbaikars.”
A couple of days ago she had hit out at the Congress for reinstating UP party workers who allegedly had misbehaved with her.
In a letter to party president Rahul Gandhi, Ms Chaturvedi tendered her resignation from all posts and the primary membership of the party.
”In the last few weeks, certain things have convinced me that my services are no longer valued in the organisation and that I have reached the end of the road. At the same time, I feel that more time that I spend in the organisation will be at the cost of my own self respect and dignity.
”What saddens me is that despite the safety, dignity, empowerment of women being promoted by the party and has been your call to action, the same is not reflected in the action of some of the members if the party. I would request you to accept my resignation and relieve me of all my roles and responsibilities from the party on immediate basis and oblige,” she said in her letter to the Congress president on Thursday which was released to media on Friday.

Belagavi, Apr 19 : Close on the heels of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s addressing election rallies in Bagalkot and Chincholi yesterday, AICC President Rahul Gandhi will try to woo voters of Chikkodi, considered as the cradle of the co-operative movement in Karnataka, this evening.
According to Veerkumar Patil, a senior Congress leader in Belagavi, district, more than one lakh party workers are expected to participate. Elaborate arrangements have been made for the success of the rally. Voters from Belagavi, Dharwad and Chikkodi are expected to arrive in large numbers.
The Congress has fielded sitting MP Prakash Hukkeri for Chikkodi Loka Sabha seat, a Congress bastion for a long time.
The BJP had fielded Annasaheb Jolle, replacing the former MP Ramesh Katti, in an attempt to clinch the seat from the Congress.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha election Katti had lost the seat by a slender margin of 3000 votes.

Everyone curious about the 2019 election process senses it as a radically different, even an unusual, phenomenon. However, they are uncertain what name to give it. Designer democracy is that apt name.

Like the 2014 election, the current one is also designed as a fight between friend and enemy. Enumerating the “achievements” of the government, BJP president Amit Shah wrote in its manifesto that under Narendra Modi’s leadership, we made “an India that our friends praise … and our enemies fear.”

Beyond the manifesto, the Hindus-as-friend versus Muslims-as-enemy distinction pervades recent election speeches of Modi, Shah and others.

Along with designing friends versus enemy distinction, a designer democracy has other features too. Before illustrating the Indian case, let us note that as a global phenomenon while some features of designer democracy are common across the nation-states, others are specific to each context.

Designer – the very word

The term designer is derived from design, which as a noun means a plan of a building, garment or such objects. As a verb, it means to “signify, designate, name, style”. In the field of design – in architecture, industrial design, engineering, communication, marketing, computer design and so on – it means to draft, sketch, shape and simulate.

Designers who see themselves as “scientists” maintain that design is about solving problems. However, anthropologist Tim Ingold rightly observes: “Every object of design sets a trap by presenting a problem in the form of what appears to be its solution.” One can indeed say that problem in itself rarely exists. In a democracy, something becomes a problem only when it is mobilised as one to arrest voters’ attention.

There was no specialised designer in the Indus Valley civilisation because the craftsmen who made objects were also mostly their designers. As a specialised activity, designing is typically modern, unleashed by industrialisation. So is a modern democracy. With increasing technologisation and mediatisation of lives, both design and democracy changed.

The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier who designed Chandigarh described a house as a “machine for living.” Likewise, a society itself began to be viewed as a machine, and so were political parties. To journalist Prashant Jha, BJP is the “greatest election machine.”                     

What is designer democracy?

As we argue in The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare: A Long View of India’s 2014 Election, a designer democracy signifies “an electoral polity under a neo-liberal economy where voters are viewed as consumers and parties/contestants as salesmen, and the communication between them is mediated predominantly by modern electronic and visual media, including social media.” Structurally, it fully crystallised in the early 1990s with the privatisation of the economy and the growing influence of media, mobile phones and digital media included.

Integral to the structure of designer democracy is the datafication of politics. In 1956, Eric Da Costa, an Oxford-trained economist, established the Indian Institute of Public Opinion in Delhi. Likewise, political scientist Rajni Kothari copied American-style behaviouralism to use survey research to study election.

However, it was from the early 1990s that Prannoy Roy – a pioneer of opinion polls and psephology – and others accelerated the datafication of politics. Today, companies and institutes conducting election surveys, exit and other polls are numerous.

Replication of economic model in politics

The foremost feature of a designer democracy is the replication of the economic model in politics. In its 2019 manifesto, BJP views India primarily as an economy aspiring “to be the world’s third largest economy by 2030.” This aspiration echoes BJP’s 2014 manifesto where it resolved to “revive Brand India.” That is, India has always been a brand, what it needs is a revival.

In the fashion industry, a brand means “the personality of a product.” India is thus a market product in need of a salesperson. On April 15, the Times of India did a video story titled: “Why Brand Modi Remains BJP’s Biggest USP in UP?” USP stands for unique selling point/proposition, a term in marketing.

Replicating market model into politics runs on the logic of political marketing and permanent advertising central to which is the primacy of image or simulacra over reality and truth. Modi took to marketing as no one else did before. To K.N. Govindacharya, once a key BJP leader, Modi’s “forte is political marketing” informed by “images, messages and signaling.”

The BJP-RSS combine as well as the compliant media marketed Modi’s image as the only choice to rule India. Fashioning such an image, however, entails, as in marketing the ‘Iron Lady’ image of Margaret Thatcher, use of guile, perception-building, pretension, half-truth, rumours, lies and more. Like the concept of design enunciated by Vilém Flusser, trickery, image-staging, deception and plotting characterise a designer democracy.

The sheer amount of money spent on elections demonstrates it. In 2014, BJP spent Rs 5,000 crore on advertisement alone. In 2018, when five state elections were held, BJP spent more money than Netflix, Colgate or Dettol did on television advertisements.

In a designer democracy, ordinary people have little to choose from. Often they choose from more of the same. Importantly, issues of justice, truth, civic participation, the pursuit of the common good are reduced to the ratings of politicians by polls and to the calculus of mammon. Honest, ethical people cannot even think of contesting elections, let alone win them. Clearly, this damages democracy in its original meaning of demokratia in Greek: capacity to do things – by individuals and cultures.

Structurally, a designer democracy characterises all parties, including the Congress. Here we focus on BJP because it exemplifies designer democracy at its best.

The regnant design: The algebra of warfare-welfare

With politics as a mediatised market, what is its leitmotiv? It is polarising politics of friend-enemy dualism, intensified after the Cold War and with the designing of a new enemy in the form of terrorism. The fear of terrorism – later substituted with Islam – became a hot commodity in the political market.

Australian democracy illustrates this well. Before 9/11, Australia had no anti-terror law. By 2008, it had made 45 even as no significant terrorist attack happened on its soil. Working at Australian universities between 2009 and 2017, I witnessed many elections. Though Muslims constitute 2.6% of Australia’s population, Islam/terrorism figured prominently in elections.

In India too, terrorism became the pivot of politics after 9/11 unleashing a more dangerous version of the friend-enemy dualism. In a televised debate after 9/11, Modi congratulated the media for speaking “the truth” about “Islamic terrorism.” He held that the world had witnessed terrorism “for 1,400 years” (since Prophet Muhammad’s time).

He proudly stated that “we have succeeded in dividing the country into two camps: those who are against terrorism and those who are in support of terrorism.”

This politics of enmity marked his tenure as Gujarat’s chief minister as well as the 2014 election campaign as demonstrated by sociologist Manisha Sethi.

Gujarat government’s ad on the back of Air India’s boarding pass, 2019

Politics of enmity abound in 2019 election speeches by BJP leaders. Modi is determined to teach the Congress a lesson for using the term “Hindu terror” (how is “Islamic terror” justified?). While embracing illegal Bangladeshi Hindus, Shah terms their Muslim counterparts as “termites.” Maneka Gandhi openly threatens Muslims for not supporting her.

Such politics of warfare co-exists with welfare or development. However, welfare-development itself is also largely religious-ethnic. The advertisement by the Gujarat tourism department on the back of boarding pass, issued on January 8, 2019, by Air India for Delhi-Patna flight, read:

Surely, many non-Hindus and Hindus would like to visit the Dwarka temple. However, their reason might differ from the one scripted by the government.

Like the text of the government’s advertisement, democracy too can be designed differently. And humanely.

Agencies