Now here’s an advertisement many of us missed:
Yes the bestselling author/ dance show judge was now going to offer electoral analysis. Remember, this is the same man who has also written as a woman and as a Muslim, so pretending to be something he’s not, is not something that really challenges him.
So what happened on results day? Bhagat, it turns out, may be no Prannoy Roy when it comes to election analysis, and is clearly a big picture person. When the BJP headed for a landslide victory, Bhagat showed that he’s not a man concerned with minor details.
So Akhilesh Yadav won in 2012? “Then you can say caste consolidation or whadever…”
The BJP won 71 seats in the 2014 polls? “71 or whadever…”
He declared it a clean sweep of the kind no one had ever won in UP, then quickly corrected to say “in a long, long time” .
He also spoke of why BJP kept its chief ministerial candidates secret:
He had insights on how the BJP wasn’t just winning in the north, south, east and west of UP but all of the state. How the state’s map was like a ‘saffron tablecloth’ with other parties winning a few seats and if you zoomed in on that or whadever you’d see that.
He wondered if there’d be a stock market rally thanks to the poll result and argued briefly when a panelist said that Narendra Modi would need to do more to prove the success of demonetisation.
And like a good television pundit, he was also tweeting his observations on the poll results that got more eyeballs than the show perhaps:
“Mom, mom! I lost again.”
“Koi nayi baat kiya kar”#ElectionResults— Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhagat) March 11, 2017
All in all, the writer was the sort of political analyst best suited for the viewer who wasn’t in it for nuance or analysis. Where the numbers didn’t need to be specific and the analysis could deals in ‘whadevers‘.
This may be the glorious beginning of a long innings by Bhagat as political anchor and if Indians can make peace with whadever he says, he may be here to stay.