Kerala & TN, to Assam & Bengal, each of the four big states where voting has concluded is a perfect example – via language, culture, politics – of India’s innate ability to live with differences
Amusingly, electoral outcomes in eastern and southern states are far less surprising to those who live in them, than to those who interpret them, from Delhi. The ongoing contests in Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam and Kerala underscore an uncomfortable truth: a wide chasm persists between how India’s politics and history are presented in textbooks, and how they are lived and narrated, in the east and south. The upshot is, a systematic failure, to grasp the appeal of social democracy grounded in distinctive vernacular forms of modernity.