Books and ballots

Many of us will be glad that these apparently interminable elections are finally over. It will now be possible to have conversations about things other than voting percentages and air strikes. But it is also possible that, for some of us, there will be withdrawal symptoms. Electoral politics has been discussed threadbare for months — and now, suddenly, we are supposed to stop thinking about it?

Let us not despair! For, even if the daily newspaper now turns to such trifles as a slowing economy or a trade war, there is always the bookshelf. If your preferred party was humiliatingly trounced, then lose yourself in an imaginary election in which you can pick the side that wins; if your party instead scored a famous victory, then reading a spirited description of another election might keep the euphoria going. 

And no description, no election, is surely more spirited than that of the borough of Eatanswill, to which Charles Dickens’ Mr Pickwick repaired in order to observe mortal, electoral combat between the Blues and the Buffs. Dickens, who based this joyously corrupt election on a real one that he witnessed as a journalist, to the constituency of Northumberland North is at his cynical, amused best in this passage. There is no trace of the sentimentality that weighs down much of his work; instead, here he is positively Mark Twain-esque in his savagery, and there is no greater compliment. The parties have divided the town between them, he explains; he parodies the vicious tone that partisan newspapers take with each other, and has the candidates’ agents gleefully list the various breaches of ethics in which they intend to indulge. 

Dickens observed his bye-election in 1835; and it is amusing to note how, some decades and much reform later, little had changed when Anthony Trollope came to write about elections in turn. He too had observed elections close at hand, but as a candidate, in 1868. He came dead last in an election so famously corrupt they actually dissolved the constituency. He mined that experience in Ralph the Heir;  but his books are chock-full of parliamentary and political chicanery, and deeply observant about the compromises that men without means of their own must make to rise in politics. Yet, as befits a man who seriously sought to enter Parliament, his cynicism is tempered with a deep respect for the democratic system that Dickens or Twain never would have shown. “When a man lays himself out to be a member of Parliament,” Trollope declared in Doctor Thorne, “he plays the highest game and for the highest stakes which the country affords.” 

The notion that elections are corrupt, that voters are bought, that honest outsiders cannot take on the machine of money and influence, is as old as representative democracy itself. But there are few better descriptions of how machine politics works — and of its limitations — than a now little-remembered novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edwin O’Connor. The Last Hurrah was written in 1956, and it tells the story of a veteran machine politician seeking re-election as mayor in an American city obviously modelled on Boston. The mayor, named Skeffington, is an instantly recognisable figure for Indians. He is the arbiter of claims between religious and ethnic communities, the dispenser of patronage, both destination and source of the illicit gold that keeps the wheels of commerce and politics turning in a large town. Yet The Last Hurrah tells the story of how he is defeated by a handsome newcomer with no record but a telegenic presence. Patronage mattered less in a country that had begun to see big national welfare schemes. And the spread of television to every home — O’Connor was in fact a TV critic — meant that suddenly, the telegenic  challenger with a vacuous message had an advantage over the grand old party. This story of a changing political landscape feels almost painfully relevant to today’s India. 

But, for Indians, there is surely only one novel in English that perfectly captures the many nuances of our vast and complicated electoral process: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Most readers might remember Seth’s masterpiece as a book about a girl choosing between three men. But the other thread of the story, the other choice, is the Republic of India’s first election in the winter of 1951-52.  No other book about India has ever approached Seth’s ambition here: He tells us of the Hindu nationalists hoping to capture power and the Muslim aristocracy trying to hold on what influence they have left; of the war being waged by Nehru for the soul of Congress, and the battles being fought by zamindars against land reform. Preparations for India’s first great democratic choice run through the novel alongside Lata’s evasion of her own choice of husband, and the two stories reach their climax together. But the election story is in many ways finer: there is a twist at the end which reminds us that we never can predict how elections will turn out, and also that we might never know the full story of why.