THE CLOCK STRIKES SAFFRON, AGAIN

A GAP had opened up in India's polity this summer.

- SANTWANA BHATTACHARYA

It was after a decade that political strands contrary to the reigning one had found space for articulation.

With two saffron sweeps in succession, first in Haryana and now with a tsunamic victory in Maharashtra, that gap has been closed emphatically. Both states exhibited a strong 'recoil' effect, almost a hypercorrection of the way they voted during the Lok Sabha election.

A similar reversal of pattern also made itself felt in Jharkhand, though going in the other direction and offering cold comfort to the Congressled INDIA bloc. It would be a travesty to reduce the tribal state, with its own identity and internal specificities, as a meagre consolation prize. But in the grand scheme of things, against the sheer weight of India's richest state on the western coast, it will be read as the exception that proves the rule.

What is that rule? That the sum total of the BJP machinery, when it plays to form, easily attains the unstoppable and allconquering momentum of a juggernaut.

And the Congress caravan, when it runs to form, finds it difficult to hold even a straight line at a sustained speed. Psychologically, it seems to behave like an ADHD patient, moving in sporadic bursts, then relaxing its vigil, becoming easily satisfied at transient markers, starting to relish its chicken kolhapuri before it is cooked. As a combat unit, it often appears to be like an artist drafted hurriedly into a war it would have rather dodged: it jaywalks like a window-shopper, almost disinterestedly, stopping to watch its own reflection in the glass pane.