Discussing political happenings

On December 1, the manager of a rickety tea shop in Srinagar was rolling up a newspaper to kindle his rusty coal heater, when an elderly man, muffled up in several layers of clothing entered the shop, and sat on a chair. After burning the heater, the manager brushed the coal dust off his hands and asked him that who he thought to win the recently held assembly elections in crucial four states—Madhya Pradesh (MP), Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Telangana. The elderly man paused for a split second and said : “Modi”. The voice was so firm that it hardly matched his age.

“He would wrest control of at least three state”, he said and the conversation was followed by a radio silence for a few seconds.

The manager breathed out on his eye glasses and wiped them clean with a soft piece of cloth.

Soon the waiter came and put a hot cup of tea on the elderly man's table. The clatter of the cup and saucer—striking against each other—broke the rather brief spell of silence.
The manager put on his glasses and said that he was keen to see the results. He switched on an old television set fixed on the decrepit wall of his shop and began watching a debate hosted by a

belligerent anchor, shouting down an Indian National Congress( INC) leader. Two days later, the election results in all the four states were declared. In three of the four states, the Bhartiya Janta Party ( BJP) romped home.

While the BJP's spectacular victory sprang surprise for political analysts, it equally blindsided the INC. The television channels ran exhaustive debates, inviting psephologists and political analysts to discuss the election results with bellicose anchors hosting these debates.

The welfare schemes like Laddli Behna, free ration, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's charisma, INC's alarmist campaign were cited as contributing factors to the BJP's victory.

The non-BJP political parties, on the other hand, attributed the INC's defeat to intra-party politics and factionalism, particularly in Rajasthan.
The lNC leaders looked at the election results in their own way—focussing on their overall vote share; defeat of some BJP's sitting LoK Sabha members; number of votes bagged by the INC candidates in all the five states so and so forth.

They now draw their solace from the overall statistics, which suggest that more votes were polled in favour of the INC than the BJP in all the five states including Mizoram.

The reasons of INC's defeat aside, in Kashmir—hundreds of kilometres away from Hindi heartland—the ordinary people watched the election results with a keen interest. The excitement of the outcome kept them on the edge of their seat and the final verdict spurred a debate among them. While for some people, like the elderly visitor, the outcome was on the expected lines, many others found it to be quite unusual. The significant political happenings, taking place in and outside the country always piques a strange curiosity among the people here—whether it is the recent outcome of the elections, the

Palestine-Israel conflict or the Russia-Ukraine war.

They keep their eyes open, have ears to the ground engaging in thorough discussions, which unfold in the space ranging from saloons to tea rooms to modern coffee. The people almost have their opinion about each political development. Sometimes they express them openly, sometimes in closed groups and there are times when they are uttered sotto voce.