Sanjaya Baru | Ideology or competence: What do the voters want?

There are many versions of Murphy’s Law. Among the many versions the oldest one is attributed to a British merchant, engineer and owner of ships, Alfred Holt, who told his fellow engineers in 1877: “It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later.” That proposition became popular as Murphy’s Law when an American aerospace engineer, Edward Murphy, declared: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” From the sea to space, engineers devised systems that could be as failsafe as possible, forewarned by Murphy’s Law. Consider the fact that in the United States, Donald Trump secured more votes in the 2020 election compared to the 2016 election even though every medical professional in the United States will vouch for the fact that his administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was “incompetent”. Many public health experts believe Kerala is an exception, but it is interesting that the Left Front’s competence in dealing with the pandemic has not been an overt political issue in the recent elections. As more and more evidence mounts up of administrative and political incompetence in dealing with the pandemic, it remains to be seen if Indian voters will just shrug their shoulders, throw up their hands, point to the gods above and quote Murphy’s Law.