When the winning candidate is a loser

There is something truly subversive about a person who excels in losing. A contestant of many elections past, this year’s independent candidate from Tamil Nadu‘s Dharmapuri Lok Sabha constituency, K Padmarajan, is the epitome of that quixotic line of Samuel Beckett, ‘Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ This tyre repair shop-owner – in posher districts, he would have been an ‘entrepreneur’ – is everything that not just politicians but also humans dread: losing. And, yet, that is exactly what Padmarajan has been doing with precision since 1988.

From star candidates to newbies, in elections or on the roulette table, facing defeat can be terrifying, humiliating. Padmarajan upends this very notion by not just accepting defeat but extolling it. This twist on Robert the Bruce’s dictum of ‘Try, try again’ should be deeply destabilising for those whose very purpose in participation is to try and win. By celebrating defeat, Padmarajan puts out of order the very fundamental purpose of contest and competition. Being a loser – not perchance but by choice – becomes a veritable rebuke of the cult of winning, undercutting the very value in being a winner. In this sidestepping of the very purpose of a contest by participation and loss, Padmarajan is way ahead of the curve – or, as a post-loser/winner, radically behind it.