Bearing NaMo

I am puzzled by what Rohit means to say in his comment in which he links to statement by Shivraj Singh Chauhan that hanging of Afzal Guru was not an election issue and implicitly concludes Narendra Modi is somehow responsible for BJP defeat.

There are two problems here, first assertion that hanging of Afzal Guru was not an election issue,which is true but made trivial by the fact that, neither was economy or terrorism an election issue. When I say this, I don't mean that no one bothered to debate about the issue although it is to large extent true, but that public was unresponsive to the issues as evidenced by the fact that Congress won even though its performance on both the issues was non stellar at best. Therefore unless Rohit is willing to assert neither economy or terrorism should be raised because electorate is indifferent his implication about Afzal Guru simply doesn't make any sense.

Of course one can argue that Afzal Guru is an electoral liability and hence shouldn't have been raised, however there is no evidence it is true. Of course one can argue this issue is not fit for election, but it is different from claiming that this issue harmed the prospect of BJP.

Coming to Narendra Modi, one can make an argument that Narendra Modi is not fit to be projected as Prime Ministerial candidate or that Narendra Modi is saddled with too many controversies to prove a net liability on National stage, with which I happen to agree . However it is simply erroneous to claim Modi caused BJP's, while he was acerbic he was more projected more for development and to best of knowledge didn't cause any polarization. Which is why the statements of defeated candidates should be taken with a pinch of salt. The problem that I have with these kinds of assertions unsupported by any hard data is that this kind of personal biases projecting into reality interferes with identifying the problem and solving it.