Opinion: The liberals may yet create their own Yogi
Politics has a wicked sense of humour. It often gives people precisely what they spend years trying to prevent Look at Germany. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has surged to the top in a state election, winning nearly 44 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt. The old political establishment is horrified. The parties that once believed they could keep the AfD behind a democratic firewall now have to reckon with its growing popularity. Germany is not returning to Hitler. That comparison would be absurd. Adolf Hitler belonged to a different and infinitely darker age. But there is a lesson here which India's liberals would do well to study before dismissing it as another European curiosity. When a large section of society begins to feel that its fears, identity and cultural anxieties are being mocked rather than heard, it does not necessarily become more liberal. It becomes angry. And angry voters have a habit of discovering politicians whom the respectable establishme...
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