Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari had said that the algorithm is the most important word of the 21st century. But another word that is giving it a run for its money during the electoral season is ‘anti-incumbency’. Psephologists are now fond of explaining (without understanding?) a lot of things that happen as a part of anti-incumbency. They almost speak of it the way cricket commentators speak of averages. Even in cricket, it often makes no sense to say that a team won at a venue for ‘n’ number of times, which often has no correlation or causation with the result in the next game. In cricket, this could add to the entertainment quotient, but to reduce elections to a law of averages is to completely miss the thrust that needs to be there in foregrounding the key issues that matter to people, and why they turn out to vote in such large numbers.
A displacement of the focus
What such anodyne language of anti-incumbency does is to shift the attention from the issues that matter and reduces it to averages and the business of prediction (like Nostradamus). Even more dismaying is that such language tends to normalise discontent. For example, the Congress lost in the Rajasthan Assembly election because that has been the trend for the last 30 years, which displaces the question why are people perennially unhappy with their governments and what are the issues that have been going unheard for 30 years. Had the Congress won in Rajasthan, the debate would be about the Congress having beaten anti-incumbency, and in terms of how the trend was broken. Or, it could then be argued that there is a trend of pro-incumbency, as seen in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
