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Theatre of the absurd in Indian polls

It all only goes to show that a long, drawn-out, high-stakes election in India's searing heat can bring out the silliest in us all.

From ugliness the Indian parliamentary election has entered the silly season, capped by a newsday this week in which a top story was the army's discovery of a footprint of a Yeti, the Himalayan "abominable snowman" of Tibetan folklore. To many his fame comes from Tintin in Tibet, which notably features panels from the Yeti's point of view. To India's literary-minded he also featured in 2018's Latitudes of Longing, Shubhangi Swarup's novel in which the Earth's geological nature is also a character: in it, an Indian scientist working in the Himalayan glaciers hallucinates (or is it hallucination?) about a yellow-eyed Yeti wandering about elusively on the ice outside.
The Yeti leaped from fiction to the front pages the same day that the Election Commission was deciding whether or not Prime Minister Narendra Modi had violated the "model code of conduct" with his questions about Congress president Rahul Gandhi's choice of Wayanad in Kerala for contesting. (The EC said not.) Also that day, former Supreme Court staffer withdrew from an inquiry into her sexual harassment charges against Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi. Also that day, China indicated it is no longer going to block at the UN the listing as a global terrorist of Yeti-like Masood Azhar, who India accused in the February 14 attack in Pulwama, Kashmir.
We can thank the Indian army which saw the footprint back on April 9. An army mountaineering expedition team in the Barun Valley, near the Makalu base camp, measured it at nearly three feet long and over a foot wide. However, the army's photo showed only a single footprint in track, leading naturalists to speculate that it may have been of a Tibetan brown bear walking in its own track. The army officially claimed that evidence for the Yeti included "on-the-spot narration", though presumably the Yeti wasn't narrating.
The Yeti caused an avalanche on Indian social media. It comes in a late surge of internet parody: though Indian literary authors are too cautious to satirise the modern situation, particularly the last five years, the current election has inspired much creativity. For instance, following a "non-political" interview of Modi by Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar, there is a YouTube parody by comedian Shyam Rangeela whose mimickry is uncanny and also ROFL.
Several posts on social media claim that the Indian election mirrors the current global box office rage, Avengers: Endgame: they say Modi is like the powerful and arrogant Thanos, and the Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) opposing him are like the collection of meta-humans comprising the Avengers. Similarly, after last weekend's Game of Thrones episode, several on Indian twitter likened Modi to the Night King, mainly because his followers behave like an Army of the Dead; about Arya Stark, though, your guess is as good as mine. And I haven't even begun to mention the innumerable Indian TikTok videos.
The Yeti got a lot of mileage: former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav tweeted that though Modi's much-promised acchhe din (good days) had still not been spotted, a Yeti had; someone posted photos of large potholes and called it evidence of the Yeti visiting Srinagar; another claimed that the Yeti had come down to vote but could not find his name on the electoral rolls . Rightwingers were incensed that anyone should poke fun at the army's claim, no matter how spurious the claim was in the eyes of naturalists around the world who have been searching for the Yeti since 1832. (Rightwingers likened it to the unpatriotic questioning of the body-count in India's retaliatory airstrikes in February-end.)
The Yeti sighting was only marginally more absurd than maverick BJP MP Subramanian Swamy's petition to the Home Ministry to look into the allegation that Rahul Gandhi, an MP since 2004, was a British citizen (and hence be barred from elections). This allegation was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2015, and has been repeatedly ignored by Parliament's ethics committee, headed by former deputy PM LK Advani. The Home Ministry began an inquiry into the allegation, though a red-faced Home Minister Rajnath Singh explained that it was routine procedure for his ministry to probe any allegation made by a parliamentarian.
It was so pointless a distraction, and so cheap a shot, that a foreign academic who writes on Indian history tweeted that Swamy ought to be investigating the citizenship of the Yeti, while a journalist tweeted that Swamy's next claim would be that Rahul Gandhi was the Yeti. (Not so outrageous: in 2014, Swamy claimed that by 2019, the rupee would equal a dollar. It now stands at 70 to a dollar.) It all only goes to show that a long, drawn-out, high-stakes election in India's searing heat can bring out the silliest in us all.
Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist in India, and author, most recently, of 'India Unmade: How the Modi government broke the economy'