Narendra Modi will keep winning national elections, here’s why..
Since 1984, a freak election, no party had ever managed to secure a majority on its own. All that changed it 2014, due to one man — Narendra Modi. But this was different, more impressive than ever before — because during the several decades of Congress sweeps, there was no real Opposition party in the country. Modi’s achievement was to win a majority for the BJP when the Congress was in power, and no party apart from the Congress had managed to secure even 200 seats on its own before.
For five years, most of us thought 2014 had been a freak election too. We ignored the minority of pundits who told us this constituted a fundamental shift for Indian democracy. When Narendra Modi and Amit Shah repeated, nay, improved upon their performance from 2014, at least some of us realised the minority had been right. The others remain in denial, full of angst, outrage, and….full of elitist disdain for the very voters whose lot they claim to represent, when they talk about “saving” Indian democracy and liberalism.
I will go further — 2014 constituted not merely a fundamental shift in the Indian democratic calculus, but a watershed moment for the people, at least the majority, of the country.
2014 was the first time the country had a truly popular, mass leader who had emerged from the Hindutva right-wing. The previous ones — Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi (I do not count Rajiv) were from the centrist to leftist Congress.
Nehru sought to interpret secularism as a separation from religion rather than as an equal embrace of all religions (an interpretation I agree with, but that is beside the point). Unfortunately, though fully predictably, the axe fell on only one religious group, the majority and its sister communities, while the country’s largest minority continued to resent and resist assimilation into the mainstream.
This was tolerated, meekly accepted, by a country whose people had little to eat, and who were mostly illiterate and unemployed except in subsistence farming. In fact, in the modernist era, this did not matter so much — questions of identity could be set aside, nay, overcome, if only the liberal promise of material progress and the resultant happiness could be realised.
This promise was not realised, partly because of poor policies, accentuated by rising corruption within the Congress that eventually reached intolerable levels by the end of the century. However, the index of human development did improve significantly over the decades, bringing with it education, jobs, aspirations, and a revival of the old feelings of hurt and disappointment.
All the while, secularism, in the sense of a separation from religion, was the unwritten law of the land for the majority. For the rest, it meant an embrace of their religion. This hypocrisy rankled for ages, the water continued to flow under the bridge even as Congress leaders after Nehru became less and less aware of the problem.
Incidentally, this dichotomy has startlingly become the basis of “secularism” the world over now, and with the benefit of hindsight, one can trace the beginnings of this toxic postmodernism in the hypocrisy of mid 20th century Third World democratic politics. It is painfully obvious (for those not lacking common sense) why a right-wing wave has swept the world.
Anyhow, to return to base, the self-created cracks in the Nehruvian liberal edifice were keenly exploited by the Hindu right-wing, which capitalised on the Congress’ increasing disconnect with the masses, political blunders and corruption to establish its base. It rose from 2 seats to 85 in the space of five years on the basis of Hindutva, and then proceeded to capture power in another nine.
So how could a party that emerged victorious in the name of Hindutva, win a majority on its own on the anti-corruption, pro-development plank a mere 16 years later, in 2014? At the time, pundits would say this marked the mainstreaming of the BJP, which had supposedly moved away from Hindutva. It marked the mainstreaming of the BJP for sure, but through the (then invisible) embrace of the “cause of Hindus”, which was realised only in 2019.
The point is this — the BJP, seen as an undesirable reactionary party even by many conservative Hindus in the 20th century, managed to mainstream its ideas enough by 2014 so that it did not require the Hindutva plank to win the polls handily. It was assumed that the BJP would promote the “cause of Hindus”, and therefore, people focused on Modi’s development message.
2019 was proof of this fundamental shift in public aspirations — it was, in fact, partly a victory for the “cause of Hindus”. It was a rebuke to the wise men and women who told us that the economy was in tatters, that unemployment was at a 45-year high, that an agricultural crisis was in the present. Most of this was true, but it simply did not matter in 2019.
2014 was a sigh of relief for the majority — it could finally trash the TINA (There Is No Alternative) factor that had favoured the Congress for at least 25 years. The water that had flowed under the bridge finally caused it to collapse when a giant stepped on it.
2019, on the other hand, was an assertion of the fact that India has changed, that the same old party which had apparently deceived the majority in the name of secularism for decades, could no longer stage a revival based on economic promises.
But the BJP has still had to cloak their Hindutva with nationalism, because secularism remains the official “religion” of the country and is likely to remain so for a while. Meanwhile, there was an attempt on the troll half of social media to start a maddeningly dangerous debate about Sati, but perhaps the time was (thankfully) not ripe yet.
The Congress, or at least the same old Congress, will not return to power in 2024, or even 2029, at least as long as Modi remains, or intends to remain, the leader of the government. However, Modi’s second term, especially in its latter stages, could see a deliberate attempt to shift the narrative from the personality of one man to that of another, or of an ideology, that is, Hindutva in its pristine form. After all, Modi is a human being, and ideologies far outlive them.
A mention has to be made about the rapid pace of decision-making within the Modi-1 government, continued by the Modi-2 government when it announced a series of sops for farmers and families of deceased soldiers within days of coming to power. There is no doubt that the Modi dispensation has been far more efficient than its immediate predecessor, even if some of its decisions were blunders. After all, the public remembers the past policy paralysis and excuses the blunders as sincere efforts at strong decision-making. Meanwhile, the Congress cannot prove a Rafale scam, and there is little else to accuse the central government of corruption.
For the people to realise that big decisions are not OK if they are blunders will take decades, because the collective psyche of the majority will have to wash off the memory of the Congress years.
So, what next for the “others”?
For the Congress to have a shot at power 10, 15 years from now, short of dissolving itself, it must do the following:
A) It must retire the whole Gandhi-Nehru family and all its potential successors. The family, which once was a vote magnet, has now become a vote-loser. B) It must find a new ideology. Its ideology of anti-colonial nationalism is no longer relevant…when corruption and nepotism and neglect set in long ago, a vacuum was created and eventually filled by the BJP’s religious nationalism. C) The days of secularism with double meanings must end, and quickly. The days of secularism as a separation from religion are also, sadly, over, and the Congress is itself to blame for this. The Congress must find a new, truer, more honest meaning of secularism that is inclusive of religion and non-religion. D) The party must give up its embrace of the postmodernist, or neo-Marxist, Left. It must distance itself from the likes of Kanhaiya Kumar and the JNU “Azaadi” bunch, and re-embrace the inclusive patriotism it was known for long, long ago.
After all, patriotism may be a construct, but it is a reality in the world of relations. Nationalism exists in the here and now, though boundaries may have been drawn by white imperialists and may be constructs themselves. This is a shout out not to the present-day Congress, for whom I don’t care, but to liberals who have fallen into the wicked embrace of the postmodernist Left. Let go, bring your liberal brand of nationalism back, understand the people at the grassroots, give them aspirations, embrace real progress before you cry hoarse for the fake “choice” narrative, and propagate true secularism.
And yes, embrace commonalities, not differences. Do not treat those who voted unlike you as bigots. Treat them as Indians with a common destiny. Then, and only then, shall we return to a place of power, not just in the governments but in the public mind.
P.S.: Do read this too: The Rock That Broke Liberalism. Even our Muslim-majority neighbours seem to have realised it.
