Tavleen Singh in the Indian Express:

On the day of the election results, I happened to travel on a flight with a leading light of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. When I asked how he reacted to India having an Italian prime minister he spat out the word democracy as if it was poison. “This is what comes when you give illiterate, desperately poor people the vote.” … As for me, for the first time in my life I feel ashamed to be Indian.

Ms Singh’s email address handily at the bottom of the page, I wrote to her (edited slightly here):

You wrote that “this is the first time [you] feel ashamed to be Indian.” There is also Praveen Togadia’s devastatingly revealing quote, “This is what comes when you give illiterate, desperately poor people the vote.”

I wonder if your shame/pride in your country is purely a function of how much your countryfolk agree with your (presumably urban, upper-middle class) beliefs. I also wonder if Togadia would have been quite as contemptuous when these very desperately poor people voted him to power riding a Ram wave in the 90s. This attitude of ‘the unwashed are nice only when they agree with us’ appears hypocritical at best and venal at worst.

To be very fair, I am one of the those for whom India is probably shining, and, had the Election Commission not managed to keep my name out of the electoral rolls, I would probably have voted for the NDA. But, because I come from one of India’s most economically backward states (Jharkhand), by merely visiting my hometown I knew that when faced with bad roads, no water, and little prospects for well-paying jobs, a hoarding that says “India Shining” would provoke anger not appreciation, and to the people there, the BJP spin-doctors who wrote such a slogan may well have come from another planet, as opposed to the Congress President who merely came from another nation.

I do not want to give you the impression that this letter is an unabashed apology for the Congress president. Frankly, I don’t care [about her] one way or the other, and I firmly believe that my opinion carries no less weight than yours. But when you invoke the “people” — as in, already, people have started talking about how embarrassed they are …; wherever I travelled I asked people if they objected..; even people who voted Congress now say they would not… — I feel it is worth remembering that there are people who are so far on their backs that for them the shining streets of Mumbai are as far away as the lights of Turin, and laptop-wielding spin-doctors more foreign than Italians in sarees.

I believe the foaming-at-the-mouth the “foreign origin” issue (examples here) invoked has actually help cement the urban/rural disconnect more than anything else. The BJP was People Like Us(tm), and now these barely educated so-and-so’s have used their vote to take power away from them – Waaah!

Cry me a river. What a bunch of crybabies and sore losers.

Update: I found this comment on a ToI message board particularly telling:

To be an Indian is my birthright and Congress is doing nothing but trying to challenge my dignity of being an Indian. I will never tolerate any foreigner to sit on my head.Shivang, Los Angeles, USA

I somehow feel the Indian voter had a slightly more prosaic view of what their ‘birthright’ entailed (for starters, clean drinking water and decent prices for crops), not some abstract concept of Indian-ness that a (comparitively) spoilt brat in LA has the luxury to think about.