Is voting in India a lot like dating?

Rule number one of dating so basic that its left unsaid is that you hold your frickin horses and play it cool The more desperate you lookseemsound the less likely you are of ever landing a date in your lifeDoes the same rule reverse when it comes to voting Given that the more aggressively inyourface a political party appears in terms of campaigning for sure the greater its chance of eventually wooing the voter Charting the stellar rise of BJP in national politics ever since 2012 in particular one might be tempted to think soBut looking at it this way you might be missing the bigger BJP success story in urban India at any rate For as a party its followed another maxim that perhaps applies equally to pursuing the opposite gender constant engagementWherein like a seasoned Test player you dont always look to hit a flamboyant boundary every time you face a ball or go on a big nightout but slowly steadily progress towards winning the heart mind or the gameAn old grouse of citizens in any democracy is that the partiescandidates they vote for during elections simply disappear once they get into power and reappear half a decade later only when they have to seek votes initiating a shootandscoot sort of campaign yet againSome of this is inevitable Its hard to engage with voters of a constituency one represents on a regular basis Therere far too many of them to keep going back to even while politicians are the most hardworking lot we know They anyway have no lifeHow does a political party solve this problem Im told Rajnath Singh once asked this question to his media advisor back in 2007 when he was BJP president and social media platforms Facebook and Twitter were hardly a year oldThis is how BJPs IT cell was born engaging with the partys supporters roundtheclock spreading its wings and gradually turning a huge mass of onetime voters into fulltime followers through the year regardless of electionsWhen the time comes they dont vote for BJP They are BJP Clearly the offline world works no differently if you consider that during the 2019 general elections there were apparently no less than 40 lakh BJP polling agentskaryakartas in one state Uttar Pradesh aloneAnd yet getting a vote is obviously a lot harder than landing a date To start with there are all kinds of people to please And in a country like India every vote still spins around the most existentially fundamental question of em all Whats in it for me There will never be anything in it for all How does the voter solve this problem He stands behind a group more often than not defined by caste or religion and hopes to extract a better deal seeing the candidate from his community through regardless of individual merit let alone past performances Favours follow One hopes so anywayThis plays out as coalition politics The welloff look down upon it as cheap identitypolitics But there is no other formula yet to ensure Indian diversity is adequately represented At the ground level such strong affiliations chiefly centred on ethnicity sometimes going back generations make it harder and harder for the regular folk to enter politicsDemocracy is effectively a closeddoor group Youre more likely to succeed as a rocket scientist than a newbie electoral candidate in India The advent of AAP in November 2012 was first seen as a fresh aberrationexperiment And so the rest or rather all of us once in five years watch the elections play out from the sidelines Some travel to sense which way is the wind blowing Others generally ask around Surely you did too The answer to that my friend is that its impossible to get beyond the tip of the iceberg Even the deepest sampling for the most expensive exitpoll manages to touch at best a handful of folk in little over a third of the number of constituencies in IndiaGiven the circumstances whats a good way to gauge public mood I suspect this follows a dating rule too If heshe likes you youll know right away We call this the wave If not youll be confused How do people solve this confusion since like with voting as with dating one wishes to remain hopeful still Well you let hope cloud your judgment always Yup think thats whats been happening for the past few months depending on who you speak toMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomCatch up on all the latest Mumbai news crime news current affairs and also a complete guide on Mumbai from food to things to do and events across the city here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates