Are you confused about who to vote for? Congratulations, what a luxury

Many less fortunate people will have less trouble deciding

Less than three weeks from now we will once again witness the great marvel of Indian democracy, in which hundreds of millions of Indians demonstrate that they are perfectly capable of forming orderly queues. Just kidding! But not really — I don’t know of any other situation in which we patiently wait our turn instead of treating the line like an obstacle race. That’s comment enough on how dear we hold the right to adult franchise.
 

Anyway, we will all troop in to elect the next central government — and not a day too soon. I think it’s safe to say that whichever button we end up pressing, we’re all heartily sick of the politicking, sick of the ugly discourse, and sick of the chidiya dekho tactics that pass for campaigning.
 

Delhi is agog with one burning question: “This government sucks, but who else can one vote for?" Maybe it’s just me, but that is a daft question. We have dozens of opposition parties, big and small, and no matter who you end up voting for, the idea that there is no choice is utterly specious. No choice will be perfect, but if you’re smart, you’ll cast your vote in the direction of a preferred bigger picture. If not, well, it’s a free country, dummy.

The BJP occupies the largest part of the national headspace, flush with funds (including electoral bonds, the opacity of which has generated a stunning lack of outrage) and propelled by fabulous tailwinds from its mouthpieces in the media. But it is also, therefore, the target for the largest part of blame for the national headache. By most performance indicators — the economy, unemployment, law and order, public safety, social justice, data gathering and analysis, accountability, and due process inside and outside Parliament — it has its back to the wall. So it spends a lot of time telling people not to be so “negative”, and a frankly ridiculous amount of time talking about the failures, mistakes, and general loser-liness of the Congress Party in the past.
 

The Congress, as the largest opposition party, has dusted itself off, though it is tragic that, less than three weeks to the election, it still hasn’t got as much as a snappy campaign tag line to counter the BJP. Snappy campaign tag lines do not governance make, as we painfully learned from “Sabka saath, sabka vikas” and “Achhe din”, but they do handily increase mind space. The BJP has a very clear vision, if a toxic and jumla-ridden one; it shouldn’t be impossible for the Congress to put some brains together in a room to come up with a catchy distillation of its own vision.
 

Having said that, it seems to me that all this wailing about a lack of electoral options and nitpicking over media strategy is a luxury given to people whose economic, social, and personal security and freedom are only marginally, if at all, diminished by the Modi Sarkar. Many other people will have far less trouble deciding how to vote. And although the noise encourages us to believe — happily or reluctantly — in a BJP victory, I am unconvinced that it is a foregone conclusion.
 

Why? Because, like all the other inconvenient data sets generated under this government and its media bullhorns, public sentiment has also repeatedly been fudged — either with a media blackout or PR spin, or sometimes, (“1.25 crore Indians feel that…”) entirely imagined. That, and a talent for brazen denial, is what explains Arun Jaitley saying, without batting an eyelid, that there has been no social unrest or major protest in the last five years. He’s watching the wrong Republic.
 

The fact is that there is much public dissatisfaction, and that over the last five years there have been many, many protests — some of them enormous — from groups of farmers, Jats, Dalits, workers, and women. Only the tip of this iceberg filters through the media; we learn of it only by the algorithm-driven whimsy of social media. (Just this Friday, while Caravan magazine was breaking an explosive report — which the government disputes — on the Yeddyurappa diary, noting payoffs of Rs 1,800 crore to the BJP’s top leadership, government-friendly channels maintained a laser-like focus on India boycotting Pakistan Day, and Karan Johar liking a tweet that called Shah Rukh Khan gay. And yet, violent social unrest that can be leveraged by the BJP is given wall to wall coverage — for instance the Karni Sena protest against the film Padmaavat, or the Sabarimala temple violence. As @RoshanKrRai put it on Twitter, the media is Mr Modi’s real Z+security.)
 

The bottom line is that voting day is the one day on which every adult Indian speaks at the same, unmediated volume. Until then, the field is open.