When India
waited with bated breath…!
The 18th election to the House of the People
of Indian Parliament (Lok Sabha) witnessed the most virulent campaign ever carried
by the ruling party. Narendra Modi
carried a campaign of calumny, belittling the office that he held, deliberately
avoiding the real issues that mattered to the people. It was a high-pitched campaign
of deception. Not addressing the
hardships faced by the common people and attempting to distract the electorate
by taking public discourse to unimaginably low and facile levels was an insult
to the people of India. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his letter
dated 30 May to the people of Punjab, accused Modi of making “most vicious form of hate speeches…lowering the dignity of public
discourse, and thereby the gravity of the office of the Prime Minister. No prime minister in the past has uttered such hateful, unparliamentary
and coarse terms, meant to target either a specific section of the society or
the opposition.”
This election was not an ordinary election. It was an election
to protect and preserve the constitution and democracy. Thanks to the founding
fathers of the Indian Republoic, India is the only country in the Indian
subcontinent that has survived as an independent and strong multilingual, multireligious
and multicultural state. It is our democratic and secular foundation that has enabled
us to flourish and prevented us from turning into a failed state, like many around
us. And with the Modi government systematically
assaulting constitution and democratic institutions; engineering defections and
toppling elected governments; misusing the central agencies and the state machinery
to coerce and intimidate the opposition leaders; freezing accounts of the principal
opposition party; arresting the sitting chief
ministers of Jharkhand and Delhi - Hemant Soren
and Arvind Kejriwal - on pumped
up charges in the middle of the election; setting a false narrative and turning
the controlled media into an instrument of state propaganda . and the election
commission failing to ensure level playing field – all these have raised genuine
apprehension and concern whether the democracy and the constitution would survive
in India, if Modi, known for authoritarian and dictatorial rule, is returned to
power with a massive mandate yet again.
On 1 June 2024, the last day of the seven phases election,
the ‘Godi media’ s TV channels, that steadfastly remained loyal and committed
to the Modi regime, had carried fake exit polls predicting massive victory for
the BJP led NDA, crossing 400 seats, dashing all hopes of the opposition INDIA
block even remaining in reckoning. This sent a shock wave across the country,
the people concerned about the future of Indian democracy waited with bated
breath, and political temperature rising to a high decibel, for the announcement
of the election results on 4 June. At
stake was the continuing possibility of politics itself.
However, the election results are a great relief from the air of despondency. Sudheendra Kulkarni, a former aide to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, observes: "The days of Modi's politics of arrogance are over. He and Amit Shah will no longer be able to misuse with impunity the Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Income Tax Department and other coercive instruments of governance against their political opponents...Even the media, large sections of which had been muzzled and turned into messengers of the BJP's politics of hate, will begin to reassert its independence. So, too will the judiciary... the verdict has come as oxygen to an endangered democracy that would have been grasping for breath had the predictions of the exit polls come true" (The Hindu 5/6/24).
The BJP is cut down to size, with brand Modi punctured.
Its seats tally crashed to 240, as against
282 and 303 in 2014 and 2019 respectively, with the BJP 240 seats, falling
short of majority by 32 seats; unable to form government on its own, and suffering
a massive loss of 63 seats. The NDA’s
total seats came to around 290, as against 236 of INDIA bloc with the Congress managing
to cross100 seats. A powerful member
of Modi’s inner circle Smriti Irani was defeated in Amethi by a politically naive
Kishorilal Sharma of Congress by a margin of 1.67 lakh votes. Modi himself
managed to scrape through in Varanasi, his victory margin of votes dropping from 4.8 lakhs in 2019 to 1.5 lakh votes this time –
the margin less than the victory margin of Kishorilal – a massive drop of 3.3 lakh votes. And in contrast,
Rahul Gandhi won both Rai Bareli and Wayanad seats with a huge margin of 3.9 lakh
and 3.67 lakh votes respectively.
The divisive communal politics of the trio Modi-Shah-Yogi
is rejected in the Hindi heartland, with Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav emerging
as the single largest party with 37 seats in UP and the BJP reduced to just 33 out
of 80 seats. A veteran SP Dalit candidate Awadhesh Prasad, who contested from a general
category seat, has defeated the two-time BJP law maker Lallu Singh by a margin
of more than 54 000 votes from Ayodhya – the epicenter of Hindutva politics and
the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. The
Ayodhya Ram temple issue did not click for the BJP in cow belt. The party also got a jolt in other Hindi
heartland states liker Rajasthan and Haryana. The BJP has also lost seats
around Varanasi. The much hyped and published and flaunted the consecration of Ram Temple and the construction of Kashi Vishwanath temple corridor didn't pay political dividends to the ruling BJP. The opposition INDIA bloc got good results, improved its vote
share, securing 41.23% votes as against 44 % by NDA, restricting the BJP well
below a simple majority
It is a mandate against Modi and his brand of politics.
As Professor Ashutosh Varshney says,
“the results are a massive disapproval of the prime minister’s hubris, especially
though not only epitomised by his public statement that he was not biologically
produced, but was chosen and sent by Parmatma…a moral and political
defeat… the results are a check on Hindu nationalism… The BJP has been trounced
in Uttar Pradish, the party’s greatest ideological heartland outside Gujarat… lost
the seat of Barmer (Rajasthan) where Modi used for India’s Muslims some truly
vile words, such as ghuspaithiye (infiltrators) and zyada bachche
paida karne wale log (the community that breeds more children) … The BJP
was also defeated in Banaskant (Gujarat) where the prime minister spoke of how
the Congress party would snatch a buffalo from those Hindus who owned two buffalos and give it to Muslims” (IE 6/6/24). So cheap, hateful tone! Modi claimed that
he was the nation and tried to disqualify his rivals by calling them anti-national.
And many politicians, pseudo intellectuals and journalists supported this discourse.
Today, Modi is just another politician cut to size by
the people, says Pratap Bhanu Mehta. The
election results checkmated the unbridled power of Modi that "threatened to
end the possibility of all politics, swallowing up all opponents, and
colonizing all of civil society." It is
a road to redemocratisation of India. The idea of India is reborn.
Christophe Jaffrelot thinks that “this programme has been
clearly articulated by Rahul Gandhi, whose yatras have made him a popular leader,
in spite of poor media coverage… It is
not only because of these marches but also because of the way he defended the constitution
of India, built a coalition of so many parties, the INDIA bloc, as well as the attractive
nature of his social issues- oriented discourse” (The Hindu 6/6/24).
At a press conference, after the election results,
Rahul Gandhi, waving a copy of the constitution, said: “The peopled of India have
saved the Constitution and democracy… and the message is people do not want
Modi and Shah to run the country.” Indeed, it is the poor and ordinary people who
voted for the INDIA bloc that saved the democracy and the constitution, as the middle
class, the educated and rich by and large vote for Modi for different reasons,
preferring to remain in their comfort zone unconcerned about the larger
national cause. And it is the ‘rich and middle-class people who
continue to support the cruel, heartless and unjust regime, allowing it to come
back to power’.
The Congress is revived, and the opposition has emerged much
stronger and effective. I remember the armchair intellectuals, like Sagarika
Ghosh, Ramachandra Guha, and Tavleen Singh (who writes fifth column in IE) writing
obituary for the Congress and saying that the Congress has no future unless the
Gandhis retire from politics and completely disassociate from the Congress. What
do they have to say now about Rahul Gandhi – the man who created a world
history by travelling the length and breadth of the country, covering more than
10700 km, and single handedly carried frontal attack on Modi and his communal politics
and unjust government that benefited only his crony billionaire friends,
fearlessly and courageously, unmindful of several criminal cases registered by
his political opponents. Had he not carried
the Bharat Jodo Yatra and Bharat Jody Naya Yatra, and not come out with the
revolutionary Nyay Patra that seeks to ensure justice to all sections of
society, the INDIA bloc would not have reached the envious position that it has and halted the Mold juggernaut. The political landscape of India has changed.
It is very opt to reproduce the emotional note that Priyanka
Gandhi wrote, on twitter, about Rahul Gandhi, after the results: “You kept standing,
no matter what they said and did to you… you never backed down whatever the odds,
never stopped fighting however much they doubted your conviction, you never
stopped fighting for the truth despite the overwhelming propaganda of lies they
spread, and you never allowed anger and hatred to overcome you, even when they
gifted it to you every day. You fought with love, truth and kindness in your
heart. Those who could not see you, see you now, but some of us have always
seen and known you to be the bravest of all.”
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