Courtesy - Atanu Dey
Not willing to let things alone to chance, the Congress names every conceivable public welfare scheme, roads, ports, schools and other institutions with the name of a Gandhi. Around 4,000 of them so that even the most uninformed voter knows one thing for sure: the name Gandhi is the fountainhead of all that is great and good in the land.
It is a matter of branding. I call it the “McDonalds Effect.” In an unknown place, where one does not know the quality of the restaurants, the safe bet is to grab a quick bite at a McDonalds. There must be better eating joints around but you just don’t know. Given limited information and risk aversion, the prudent thing is to go with the familiar.
So the strategy for the Congress is simple and elegant. Keep the voters ill-informed. Easily achieved since most of their voters are illiterate. Then add “Gandhi” to everything. Daniel Kahneman calls it the “priming effect.” At the polling booth, driven by risk aversion and limited information, the voters choose the party that has a Gandhi face attached to it. Of course, they have to make sure that the face appears in every campaign billboard in every corner of the country.
The person whom the Congress most fears is Shri Narendra Modi. Why? Because only he spells the undoing of the Gandhi-Maino dynasty and by extension the Congress party. The Congress worthies know this and know it only too well. Many people mistakenly believe that the BJP is the Congress’s mortal enemy. Not so. It’s one man: Narendrabhai Modi who is enemy numero uno.
The change that India needs. That’s precisely the problem that the Congress sees. The distress that India has today is entirely due to the Congress. (Of course, there is a root cause which leads to the Congress as a consequence. I will have to put that off for a future post.) So the Congress has to go if India has to prosper. So India’s prosperity is antagonistic to the Congress: you can either have the Congress or you can have a prosperous India but not both.
For the head honchos in the Congress, the choice is clear: if for it to survive, India has to suffer, so be it. For me, for India’s prosperity, I will do what I can to give the Congress and its leaders a quick burial. I wish the BJP had the same goal as I have.
Repetition is a powerful device for persuasion. Successful religions use it all the time. One particular world religion uses it five times a day. One simple idea repeated five times a day by its adherents convinces them that it must be true even though there is no evidence for the truth of the assertion. The Congress understands that idea, the BJP does not. The Congress and the Islamists are natural allies for this reason — but not only for this reason, as I will argue later.
In the next bit I will also explain why focus matters. The short form is this: the Congress’s target is one single individual, while those opposed to the Congress have multiple targets. Paradoxically, the more scams the Congress perpetrates, the less the damage the Maino-Gandhi clan suffers. Like in a chess game, the sacrifice of a few pawns or rooks is no big loss if the end-game depends on whether the king survives.
In this game, the Maino has to lose for India to win.
