According to the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, India is a terribly unhappy place, ranked a miserable 136 in a list of 146 countries in the recently released World Happiness Report. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal are all happier places, apparently. Only the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the region is sadder than us as the unhappiest country in the world. The report evaluates levels of happiness by taking into account factors such as the GDP, social support, personal freedom, democratic rights and levels of corruption.
I neither vouch for nor am against the report. But as a citizen of a country where elections happen in regular cycles, I will indulge in some pop psychology and put the happiness test to politics and see how mandates make people feel. No doubt, losers feel unhappy along with their voters, and victors feel happy, which is natural. But there have been some big mandates in recent times that made people feel euphoric. One such was the arrival of Narendra Modi in 2014 and the defeat of the old Congress-led UPA, then seen as corrupt, pointless and adrift, that made many people very happy. But a section of Indians and the world's third-largest Muslim population became deeply unhappy and frightened by the result.
One could say that that is bound to happen with any mandate, some happiness, some unhappiness. Not quite. I have in my lifetime witnessed an election that made almost all the people deliriously happy, and that would be the 2015 victory of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi. In my 2015 book on the rise of the AAP titled, Capital Conquest, I had gone over the granular data on who supported the young party, founded in 2012 that swept 67 of the city-state's 70 seats (that too just six months after the BJP had won the national election and swept Delhi's seats as well). Almost all sections of society in our nation's capital came out for Arvind Kejriwal, who has since won a second term in 2020.
The AAP had created a new template in its 2015 Delhi victory. Most election strategies in India are based on the caste plus formula that works on community X joining with caste Y and managing to get enough support from caste Z to have more votes in the first past the post system than the other side. The AAP conversely got votes from all sections of society. According to the CSDS data analysis of the 2015 election, 77 per cent of Muslims voted for the AAP, leaving the Congress as did 57 per cent of Sikhs, who had in the national election backed the BJP.
In 2015, the AAP won across all sections of the economic divide but was way ahead of the BJP among poorer voters in the city and was also ahead, but with fewer percentage points, against the BJP among the middle class and wealthier sections of the city-state. The point being that all sections of society were happy, and residents of Delhi would recall that there was a feeling of euphoria among people who believed they had successfully voted for dramatic change and given new people a chance. That year the victory of the AAP made people across the board very happy.
A similar sentiment is being reported by friends from Punjab who appear to be delighted at having kicked out the old and voted in the new, and the mention of Bhagwant Mann as the chief minister just makes people smile these days. And again, the data from the state shows the AAP victory as being comprehensive and in each section of society. The young party was ahead of the Congress among Hindus and Sikhs and across caste lines. Everyone, therefore, has reason to be united in victory (except for those who lost). The AAP has thus pulled off comprehensive record-making victories in two states, and it must be understood that this happens because they can inject hope for a better future, the leadership has credibility, and the party has the capacity to make people feel like change agents.
There is a great deal of scepticism about the AAP's capacity to spread further afield as they had emerged from the Anna movement in Delhi and had marked a presence in Punjab when they surprised by winning four Lok Sabha seats in 2014, following which they emerged as the principal opposition in the 2017 state election. But anything can happen when the Congress is just giving away state after state and leaving a vacuum. The Arvind Kejriwal-led party may be small, but it packs a mighty punch when it delivers, and it's done so twice in a decade.
Kejriwal himself is as self-made as they come, from bureaucrat to activist to leader of a mass movement to administrator with a compelling record for innovation. He is a human dynamo who has obviously decided to cast his party as the opposition to the BJP in a world that has already been re-organised by the BJP. And let's remember that Narendra Modi is a leader who got a huge party as the theatre of his ambitions while Kejriwal created his own party and has an image larger than the formal organisational structure of the AAP.
Both men know how to make people feel good, work with emotion and create narratives about delivery, true or false.
To return to the happiness quotient, it is currently high in Punjab that has the satisfaction of throwing out what appeared, in the end, to be a useless vacillating Congress beset with infighting. For all future plans, besides the AAP's own abilities and Kejriwal's image, what the young party has going for it is the sheer unhappiness and doubt that the name Rahul Gandhi invokes. The Congress must recognise that even though it has bases across the country, and the next round of elections take place in states where it is a player, even thinking of the party and its leadership today causes great unhappiness to its own supporters.
(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and author)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.