The price of surprise

Rajdeep Sardesai’s new book is a gripping election post-mortem that offers candid glimpses of Indian politics

- NAVIN J. ANTONY

IN EARLY 2023, journalist Rajdeep Sardesai began work on a book analysing the anticipated results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Convinced of a predictable outcome, he tentatively titled the book Hattrick. “Like so many others,” he writes in the introduction to the now-published book, “I, too, was swayed by the ‘Modi ki guarantee’ drumbeat and the event-driven ‘spectacle’ of his politics, convinced that the resource-rich BJP’s election machine would overwhelm all else.”

The actual results, Sardesai says, served as a wake-up call. Though it retained power, the BJP won only 240 seats, falling far below predictions and at least 40 fewer than Sardesai’s conservative estimate. “We journalists don’t put enough statutory warnings when we throw numbers at our readers,” Sardesai tells THE WEEK. “We say, ‘[This candidate] is winning, and this is the margin,’ and the viewer or reader is expected to believe that we know everything, when the truth of the matter is that we, too, at times, are struggling to unravel what’s really happening.”

The results, he says, was also humbling. “It’s time for a mea culpa,” he says, “so that we (journalists) can reboot… and refocus on what we do best, which is reporting.”

Retitled 2024: The Election That Surprised India, Sardesai’s new book offers a gripping account of the intense lead-up to this hard-fought election. Organised into fourteen chapters and an epilogue, the book boldly explores Indian politics, blending frontline despatches from election battlegrounds with candid glimpses of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring and a touch of light-footed punditry.