In 2008, India says ‘Jai Jawan’

By M H Ahssan

Slain ATS Chief Karkare Finishes Close Second In Indian Of The Year HNN Survey Across 8 Cities

There were only two real contenders. The Indian soldier and Hemant Karkare, former chief of the Maharashtra ATS who died during the Mumbai terror attacks, were consistently way above anybody else in almost every city covered in an eight-city survey to find out the Indian of the Year, but which of them was first or second was something the cities differed quite significantly on.

In Delhi and Pune, Karkare was clearly the top choice. In the southern cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad the Indian soldier had pride of place. In Mumbai and Kolkata there was no clear favourite, Karkare being a couple of percentage points ahead in Mumbai but just a tad behind in the other two.

The only cities where anybody else figured in the top two were Chennai and Ahmedabad. In Chennai, the Chandrayaan team got 27% of the votes, well behind the 36% voting for the Indian soldier, but well ahead of the 20% who chose Karkare. In Ahmedabad, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi got the top slot with 26% of the votes, followed not too far behind by the soldier and the slain ATS chief.

There was also a clear gender pattern to the voting. Women were significantly more inclined to pick the Indian soldier or Karkare as the Indian of the Year than men. Thus, while 59% of women chose one of these two, a considerably lower 45% of men did so. This pattern, however, did not hold in the three southern cities, where the proportion of men picking Karkare in each case exceeded the share of women doing so.

One reason for the overall difference across gender in the support for the top contenders was that more men tended to pick sportspersons like cricket stars M S Dhoni or Sachin Tendulkar, businessmen like Ratan Tata or politicians like prime minister Manmohan Singh, Modi and home minister P Chidambaram.

There was, however, an interesting exception to the rule - the sensitive and docile looking Abhinav Bindra, the shooter who brought India its first individual gold medal in any Olympics, was the choice of 6.2% of women against 4.6% of men. Among the politicians too, there was an interesting exception. Support for Manmohan, Modi and Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit was clearly higher among the older age group, 35-55 years, than among those aged 18 to 34 years. In the case of Chidambaram, however, the situation was reversed with his support among the younger lot twice as much as in the slightly older crowd.

That Kolkata remains a city which passionately embraces sports and sportsmen is evident from the survey. A considerable chunk of all respondents, 36% to be precise, backed one or the other of the four sports stars in the top of the list — Dhoni, Tendulkar, Bindra or world chess champion Vishwanathan Anand, in that order.

Despite Indian writers capturing the imagination of the English-reading world, the phenomenon does not seem to have had much of an impact at a mass level even in the country’s biggest cities. Aravind Adiga, who won the Booker Prize this year, thus found nobody willing to choose him as the Indian of the Year except in Bangalore and in Delhi. To put that in perspective, however, we might as well point out that Bollywood’s most successful star of 2008, Akshay Kumar, gathered barely one-fourth of a percentage point of support across all cities among respondents in the 35-55 age group.