The morning of the fourth of June found India’s non-bhakt citizens curled in a fetal position. Braced against news of the four-hundred-foretold by the exit polls, sapped by a decade of electoral defeats, they had decided not to suffer the drawn-out torment of a televised count. Better to get the bad news all at once when the counting was done.
Then the WhatsApp messages beeped in. “Oye, are you watching?” “Watch, na!” “Arrey, it’s mad.” For me, it was my daughter in Brooklyn. She sent me a screenshot of a docile television channel’s early leads. The pixelated numbers on my phone’s screen were so unlikely that they seemed a cross-connection to an alternate India, a leak across the metaverse. Hooked, I turned the TV on. The rest is history.
The largest effect of Narendra Modi’s comprehensive failure to win a majority for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was psychological. Over a decade, the pan-Indian invincibility of the BJP led by Modi had congealed into a given. Over an extraordinary electoral career, Modi had always won a majority for the BJP in every election he had contested, both provincial and national. This aura of an all-India juggernaut immune to both disasters like demonetisation, and defeats in provincial elections in Bihar and Karnataka, had demoralised the BJP’s opponents in politics and civil society.
It had become hard to read the daily newspaper because the political flux that livens up the news had been stifled by the BJP’s iron grip on politics and political discourse. The 24×7 ‘news channels’ had been unwatchable for years, fronted by death-eater anchors with advanced degrees in performative sycophancy. Absurd though they were, they reigned unchallenged, as the rare island of dissent like NDTV was neutered through acquisition.
The deranging thing about the ‘normalcy’ that died on the 4th of June, was that the regime’s popularity seemed immune to material and physical suffering. A stagnant agriculture, distressed farmers, massive youth unemployment, the failure to ‘Make in India’, the carnage of Covid, the spectacular failure to even address day-darkening pollution and climate change, none of these seemed to make a blind bit of difference when it came to elections, like the assembly election in Uttar Pradesh (UP) which saw Ajay Bisht, aka Yogi Adityanath, retain his chief ministership with a massive mandate. The occasional Opposition success like the election in Karnataka was invariably overset by serial defeats, as in the assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in December last year.
This ability to seemingly levitate, immune to the laws of political gravity, suggested that Indians at large had drunk the BJP’s Kool Aid, that fermenting brew of bigotry and aspiration, death and development. The ultimate instance of Modi’s success in remaking India in his own image was the instatement of the infant Ram in the new temple in Ayodhya. This was the apogee of Modi’s ascent, this symbolic inauguration of a Hindu Rashtra, where the prime minister of India was the jajman at the installation of Ram Lalla’s idol in a mega mandir built on the site of a razed mosque. The vandals of 1992 were celebrated as heralds of the Hindu turn, and Modi basked in his costumed persona as India’s Hindu regent.
It was this triumphalist balloon that was pricked by results that trickled in on the 4th. The BJP lost the Faizabad seat that is home to Ayodhya and its bhavya mandir, to the Samajwadi Party, which had nominated a Dalit to contest a non-reserved seat. It lost the majority of UP’s parliamentary seats to the INDIA alliance, led in UP by Akhilesh Yadav and quarterbacked by Rahul Gandhi. And in the unkindest cut of all, Modi’s majority in Varanasi, his assiduously nursed constituency, was reduced by two-thirds to a mere lakh and a half. The Modi-Yogi double act blazoned on billboards across the country, was routed in the Hindi—and for the BJP, the Hindu—heartland.
The symbolic significance of this is incalculable. The BJP had been humiliated in India’s largest state, even though it had delivered Ayodhya, beautified Banaras and literally demolished Muslim homes and livelihoods. The Hindutva agenda had been systematically implemented in this overwhelmingly Hindu state by the two high priests of Hindutva, India’s prime minister and a publicly sectarian Hindu monk; in return, the BJP had reaped local humiliation and lost its parliamentary majority.
But it was the practical political implications of the BJP’s lost majority that created a sense of deliverance. It set a precedent: the BJP could be knocked off its perch, it could be checked at a pan-Indian level by the politics of a united front. Most importantly, this united front could survive the assault mounted on it by the Union government: the frozen bank accounts, the arrested chief ministers, the weaponisation of the Enforcement Directorate and the unrelenting propaganda of the lapdog media….
https://www.outlookindia.com/elections/the-great-escape-when-indias-political-landscape-shifted
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