Swami wants to know what I think of this article by Swaminathan Aiyar. It fears that Narendra Modi is India’s future Prime Minister. I don’t share Aiyar’s fears. Why? Because of this:

I have no doubt that the temple attacks greatly aided Modi’s victory in Gujarat, just as the Pakistani attack on Kargil ensured Vajpayee’s victory in the general election of 1999. In India, the quality of governance is so indifferent that incumbent governments tend to be voted out. But when a major security threat arises, when the state seems under attack by foreign forces, the incumbent is suddenly in a strong position to rally support provided it sends out an appropriately jingoistic message. The BJP is fully capable of this. The Congress is not. The Marxists are not.

There is one thing wrong with the logic: Kargil. Even winning the Kargil war did not hand a comfortable victory to BJP. What are the chances that an increase in terrorist strikes will move a sufficient number of Indians to vote for it? Gujarat was supposed to be an “experiment”, but if it was they used the wrong test data. Jingoism will appeal to the hardcore BJP voter – there are a lot of them in Gujarat. But the hardcore BJP voter will anyway vote for the BJP. If he is very very pissed off, he will probably stay at home. But he will never vote for the Congress. BJP’s problem is that there aren’t sufficient numbers of such voters. People are concerned about terrorism, but not everyone is concerned to the same extent and when the crunch comes, this concern jostles for space with other issues.

Narendra Modi is useful to the BJP – because his rhetoric ensures that the Hardcore BJP Voter won’t stay at home – but he won’t become the PM.