To make someone wait is the ancient prerogative of power, wrote Roland Barthes: the age-old pastime of humanity.
You need to wait if you are not important. The lover waits at the cafe, the subject waits in the anteroom. Kerala’s electorate, it turns out, waits in front of the television, refreshes the web page or shares memes about their own fate.
Like the ones on Mr Bean in a field of swaying grain — looking at his watch, scratching his head, lying flat on his back, and staring at the sky.
Kerala returned a verdict with clarity: 102 seats for the UDF, Congress alone commanding 63. A week has passed. And yet the Chief Minister’s chair sits empty while three men – KC Venugopal, VD Satheesan and Ramesh Chennithala, the warring Nair musketeers – await the High Command decision in Delhi.
The MLAs have spoken, says one. Allies want me, says the other. My seniority speaks for itself, says the third. All three seem like characters in a Beckett play, waiting for a diktat, perpetually “expected by evening”.
A neighbouring state which witnessed a hung Assembly, witnessed a Chief Minister take oath after cobbling a post-poll alliance on Sunday, May 10.
Delhi, meanwhile, dispatches observers, conducts solemn one-to-one meetings, receives authorised resolutions and chastises the three leaders for throwing tantrums as their flex-burning, sloganeering fan bases turn wild. All this when their legislature party, which has the majority, could have decided who the CM is.
The CPI(M), the largest party in the Opposition, has also not picked the Leader of Opposition as there are voices against nominating Pinarayi Vijayan, who led the Left front campaign. The party says Politburo will decide.
This could have been bearable if we were not in an era that almost abolished waiting in every other domain. A generation raised on nine-minute deliveries and ten-second reels finds itself suddenly, bewilderingly, trapped in a political process that operates on its own sweet time.
Our anxiety carries the belief that the outcome matters. As the process itself turns farcical, boredom sets in. The anxiety of ‘what will happen’ erodes, ceding ground to the stupor – Thenga udaykku, swami (break the coconut, you loafer) – of when will something, or anything at all, happen?
For Kerala’s TV news cycle, which keeps recycling the same three sentences on the status quo, the buffering becomes the content.
The deepest irony is, what is truly tragic is not that a wrong decision might be made, that someone unworthy might be picked. It is that by the time the decision arrives, it has already been drained of meaning. That the culmination of a ‘democratic exercise’ under the shadow of a power centre would present itself like a forwarded message.
Important, perhaps. But you’ve lost interest.
Like a lover who kept you waiting.