At a recent talk at the Asian College of Journalism, Yogendra Yadav analysed the “moral, political, and personal” defeat of Modi and the BJP, despite their victory in the 2024 general elections. He discussed the pre-election climate, pointed out the likely and unlikely reasons for the BJP’s smaller win, and described the post-election status quo. Yadav proposed building a new democratic India through class politics, grassroots resistance, and cultural ideological contestation, aiming for a better Indian republic.
The following is the full text of the talk, edited lightly for syntax and clarity.
Thank you for this wonderful opportunity to come to this extraordinary institution which has kept the flame of true journalism alive in this country. I’ve met many of your alumni, some very, very bright minds, very good journalists, and therefore you didn’t have to persuade me. You don’t get this invitation every day, and I jumped at it. Thank you for this opportunity, and thanks for enabling me to speak about something which, to my mind, goes much beyond the elections that we are talking about, you know, and that’s what I really appreciate this opportunity for.
In fact, I think I’ll probably end up writing a small book because what we have witnessed recently is not just an election and just one election outcome. This country has seen 18 [elections], but something very unusual has taken place, and we need to learn from that. Thanks for this first opportunity for me to talk about that big picture. Delighted and honoured to see so many friends, some of the best minds in this country amongst us, and it’s always a pleasure to come to Chennai for that reason. Thank you.
The question is simple, the answer is not. Are we back to democratic politics? I think we need to ask at least six questions in order to answer this, and I’ll try and ask those questions one by one and answer them one by one.
The first question is where were we? Back to democratic politics assumes that we were in something other than democratic politics. Indeed, that was the case. So, where were we? Second, what was this election all about? I would argue that this was not an election. Third, which is to say, what exactly was at stake here? Fourth, what was the outcome? All of us know the numbers, but what’s the overall outcome all about? Fourth, what led to this outcome? Why? Fifth, where are we now? Sixth, what’s the way forward?
Sorry, it’s a very classroom kind of a thing, but that’s the way I think. As I said, some of these questions are not really just questions about an election; these are questions about the future of this country, the very future of our Republic, and the very possibility of maintaining our Republic.
Where were we?
My one-line description for that is India had very rapidly become, for the last seven or eight years or you could say ten years, someone could say five years, India had become what should be described as competitive authoritarianism. Now, the point to remember is that this simple binary between democracy and dictatorship does not capture even 10 to 20% of the countries in the world. In order to describe most countries in the world now, we have to think of hybrids. One of those standard hybrids is competitive authoritarianism, where the government holds elections, there is some element of competitiveness about those elections, but there’s very little democracy outside those elections. Elections themselves are structured in such a way as to give the ruling party a structural advantage.
Without getting into the details of it, there’s a lot of technical literature now on competitive authoritarianism throughout the world. India had become a textbook case of competitive authoritarianism. Instead of simply calling it a dictatorship or simply calling it a democracy which was flawed, I think we had moved much beyond being simply a flawed democracy. We’ve been a flawed democracy for 70 years, but in the last ten years, we had crossed to something else. It was competitive authoritarianism mixed with non-theological majoritarianism. That is to say, countries which do not declare themselves to be officially a theological country. My sense is that India was unlikely to declare itself into one, but for all practical purposes, it was a majoritarian country.
Please remember these words: competitive authoritarianism, non-theological majoritarianism. This is what we had become, and we were very rapidly sliding towards a full-blown 21st-century style authoritarianism, where competition was beginning to become a formality, and we were sliding towards a de facto Hindu Rashtra. Please remember, no dictator in the 21st century wants to be seen to be a dictator. There was a 20th-century model of dictatorship where someone would wear a uniform, come to the radio in those days (there weren’t televisions), and say you have martial law and censorship. Dictators have become smart, like everything else, like smartphones and everything. Dictators now know that it’s silly to do those things. So, every dictator holds elections in the world. Putin also holds it, for your record. We were quite like this 21st-century style dictatorship, where you don’t officially do things like censorship, but someone who opposes you, that television channel somehow closes down in three or four months or is bought over. You don’t officially put martial law, but somehow all the dissenters find their way to Siberia. So, this is what’s happening. This is Russia, this is Turkey, this is Hungary, and this is happening in so many parts of the world.
We were very rapidly sliding in that direction. We had reached the end of the First Republic of India. It’s a harsh thing to say, but the fact is that the Republic of India, which was inaugurated on 26th January 1950, actually has come to an end. It came to an end around 2019. We are not used to those things. In France, they are more used to it, so they have the First Republic, Second Republic, Third Republic. So, our First Republic is pretty much over. We were headed towards a new constitution without a new formal document called the Constitution. A constitution need not be written. You just have to bring in a new amendment to change it completely. It happened in 1975-76. Just one amendment could change everything in the Constitution. We were headed in that direction.
So, this is where we were before this election.
What was at stake in this election then?
What was this election all about? What was the significance of this election? In one word, I would say this was not an election; this was a plebiscite. The difference between an election and a plebiscite, as you all know, is that in an election you choose your representatives; in a plebiscite, there is one question that everyone answers. Brexit: yes or no? So, this was about seeking public endorsement for dismantling of the Republic. In the 21st century, you need the public to dismantle the Republic, and this election was about ensuring public stamp of approval on dismantling of our Republic. More specifically, “Modi ki guarantee” was a catchphrase to legitimate all that this regime had done in the last ten years and anything that it possibly could do in the next five or a number of years to come.
Mind you, this election was nowhere about this entity called NDA. Did anyone hear about it before the election results? NDA did not exist before the election results. This election was not about NDA. It was not even about the BJP. It was about the Supreme Leader seeking unconditional approval for his regime. “Modi ki guarantee.” BJP was in small fonts throughout the country. I’ve seen thousands of BJP hoardings. BJP would be written, BJP symbol was there, of course, but BJP party’s name was in tiny font towards the end, as if it was just one of the sponsors of the hoarding, no more.
Every plebiscite has its own conditions of what would constitute a majority. Some plebiscites have 51%, some plebiscites put it higher than that. Because this particular election was a plebiscite which was meant to get popular endorsement for virtually rewriting the real constitution of this country, formalities apart, the threshold was pretty high, although somewhat unspecified. “Chaar Sau Par,” or “400 plus”, was indeed a gimmick. Probably the BJP knew that they were not going to get it. That was definitely the upper end of the threshold. But my sense is that the regime felt comfortable in expecting a substantial improvement upon its tally of 2019. So, in a sense, the unstated threshold was that we would do even better than 2019, and if BJP had done one seat more than 303, that certainly would have meant “yes” in this plebiscite.
For the last ten years, I don’t know if you noticed these things. In any television discussion, ask BJP spokesperson any question on Earth, it could be about demonetisation, it could be about MSP to farmers, it could be about Umar Khalid. The answer would be, “People are with us.” You know, and this is what was most important. This election was about being able to say that people are with us, and 303 plus was that threshold which would have given that. My sense is that the ruling party very much expected this to be the case. This was not merely a plebiscite; it was a carefully controlled plebiscite. Given the high stakes, the regime left nothing to chance. To eliminate the possibility of any real contest. All legitimate, semi-legitimate, and completely illegitimate means were deployed to ensure that the plebiscite produces the desired result.
Ram Temple was to do in 2024 what Pulwama or Balakot achieved in 2019, perfectly timed two months before the election. You know, I mean, it’s sort of part of the electoral calendar, perfect orchestration around that. I don’t know if that frenzy reached Chennai very much. Fortunately, many bad things stop much before they reach Chennai, but in this case, I suspect it did reach Tamil Nadu as well. But perfect orchestration of a kind which is unprecedented, careful strategizing.
In the light of the results, many of us may not wish to believe in what I’m saying, but you see, I keep saying this, Mr. Ram, very often that all political commentators must listen to cricket commentary very seriously because I find cricket commentary is so nuanced and political commentary is so crude. No cricket commentator ever says that CSK won because their fielding was good, their batting was good, their bowling was good, their pacers were good, their spinners were good, their fielding was good. No. You always come up with a nuanced thing to say. Okay, in the middle overs, the spinners did this, and that really turned the game around. So, cricket commentary is always nuanced, but in political commentary, whoever loses got everything wrong and whoever wins gets everything right, which has always amazed me as a piece of such poor commentary and poor understanding.
So today we know the results, but please do not forget that the Ram Mandir bit was orchestrated perfectly. That they probably overreached is another matter, but timing, you cannot fault them for timing. The kind of massive reach out to the country, very few events, let’s call it an event, very few events in the history of post-independence India had the kind of footprint that that particular event did.
BJP had a strategy, a strategy where a few years ago they had started thinking about Odisha, they had started thinking about what to do in Tamil Nadu, and as a part of that strategy, towards the last few weeks, they did the unthinkable in Andhra Pradesh. You know, went and tied up with TDP, which was unthinkable a few months before. So, it’s part of an overall strategy that you need to have a huge organizational machine and something I was mentioning to Mr. Murali right now, something that we all forget, there is now a very large industry of political intelligence and political consultancy. These are thousands of professionals. I believe BJP employs about 2,000 on a salary basis every month. 2,000 full-time professionals are doing nothing except gathering political intelligence and doing consultancy. This is the army being deployed to win elections.
BJP had it all. The communication was focused, the dominance, the less said about mainstream media, the better it is, with a few exceptions. And is that a surprise that most of those exceptions come from English language, which doesn’t fetch you many votes, and come from outside Delhi? The Hindu, Telegraph, Deccan Herald, and the Indian Express occasionally don’t fetch your votes.
You know, the interesting thing I’ve discovered in the last five-seven years is that the BJP had put an informal ban on me from appearing on Hindi television. English, they don’t mind. Angrezi mein kuch bol lo, kya farak padta hai? [Say things in English, how does it matter?]. Hindi is where they have a problem. So, all the exceptions come from English media, and since I have the misfortune of reading Hindi papers every morning, I can’t tell you the kind of things Hindi media was doing. I mean, you know, even BJP’s official papers would not stoop to those levels to which they were stooping to support this. Anyway, that’s a separate thing, and people who know this much better than me are here. I shouldn’t waste my time on that.
The interesting thing is that BJP worked hard and managed to almost match the dominance in social media as well, which they couldn’t do with their ideas but with enormous money infusion. Even social media was matched. Unlimited money, you know, this was not from a scale of 1 is to 2. I know of several constituencies where BJP candidate spent more than 100 crore rupees per constituency, which includes some in Tamil Nadu. More than 100 crore rupees in one constituency was being spent. I needn’t speak about the misuse of official machinery—CBI, ED, all that is such standard stuff that I wouldn’t take your time in talking about all this.
A special word, of course, must be reserved for the utterly disgraceful conduct of the Election Commission of India. You know, Election Commission of India has not, it’s not that Indian Election Commission has always been independent. Many of us would remember that before the 1990s, Election Commission was not all that independent. But even the not-so-independent Election Commission would not do the kind of thing that these gentlemen who occupy those three chairs today have done in this election. I say all this with a lot of pain because there was a time, a phase where I was the self-appointed ambassador for Indian elections, and I used to preach to the world about the beauties of Indian elections. And I would tell Americans, “You can’t get your Florida right. Why don’t you come to India and learn a thing or two about how to conduct elections?” And then when you see this being done, it truly brings me to shame. But anyway, that’s all, this is all distraction.
The point I was making was it was not a competitive election; it was a controlled plebiscite where almost everything was controlled. All was set for a formal endorsement. While 400 plus for the BJP was a public gimmick, something around 325 plus for BJP and 375 plus for NDA must have appeared a very real possibility to the rulers. Everything was prepared for that. This is what the supreme leader not merely hoped, he expected it. Something like 325 plus for the BJP and something like 375 or more for the NDA is what they truly expected. I mean, all this preparation, control, and everything was for that. And if anything of that kind was achieved, you know what would happen next day. Public humare saath hai [Public is with us]. So then, you know, everything would be bulldozed because the people are with us.
What was the outcome?
The trouble is that in a plebiscite, there are only two outcomes: yes or no. That’s the problem with plebiscites. You know, in Quebec, you’ve had plebiscites which have produced 51.5% vote for retaining Quebec and 49.5% votes for exiting and Quebec being a separate country. So, the trouble is that in a plebiscite, you either have a yes vote or no vote. In this case, the result was a clear no, and that is what is so remarkable about this election. With all this control, everything was done, script was ready, yet something went wrong. Let’s not be deceived by numbers, 240, you know, because if it was a normal election, anyone would say and should say that, look, a ruling party which has had two terms, you are in your third term, things do get wrong. So even if you manage to somehow scramble a majority, well, that’s creditable if it’s a third term. But that if it is a normal election and if it is a fair competition. This was neither.
Let’s remember what this contest was all about. It was about unconditional popular endorsement. Let’s remember the threshold. Threshold was 320 to 350 for the BJP. Let’s remember the conditions under which the elections were held. And then look at the numbers. Numbers do not make sense otherwise. Anything below 303 would have been a moral defeat for the regime, and this is not something I’m saying after the election. This is something I wrote and said throughout the election. Anything below 303 would be a moral defeat for them. Anything below 272 would be a political defeat for the BJP, and anything below 250 would be a personal defeat for the Prime Minister, for the supreme leader. That’s what happened. It’s a moral, political, and personal defeat.
Someone might say, well, the BJP actually improved in so many places in the entire southern and eastern coastal belt. Yes, it did, but remember, number one, Mrs. Gandhi did very well in South India in 1977 after the emergency. She almost swept it. How do we remember that election? As a defeat for the emergency. So, number one, it doesn’t take away from the overall character. Two, yes, in fact, that’s what hides the extent of BJP’s defeat because but for that, BJP was not down only by 63 seats or so. It’s actually down by more than 80 seats. It’s Odisha and other places which have kind of concealed it. But more importantly, BJP’s good performance in some other parts of the country, actually strengthens my point.
Remember, BJP has done well only in those places where it has improved, only in those places where BJP was the challenger. BJP was anti-establishment. It’s a regional party which is anti-establishment. It is so in Kerala, it is trying to be so in Tamil Nadu, it was so in Andhra Pradesh, in Telangana, and above all in Odisha. So, wherever BJP has done well, it is not an endorsement of the political establishment of the last ten years; it is actually an anti-establishment regional force which is coming up.
Someone might say, well, they may have lost seats, but they’ve lost only less than 1% votes. That again is a distraction because this 1% vote is a net outcome of plus and minus. But please don’t forget that in this entire area from Karnataka to Bihar, the sort of, or let’s say, west and north of India, there has been an almost uniform swing away of votes from BJP. Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have produced very different outcomes, but in all three states, there was an almost identical swing away from BJP: 7% in all three cases. Places where there was no loss to BJP have seen huge swings. Himachal, Rajasthan, and Haryana have had huge swings. So, the fact remains that a very large geography of this country has shown a very significant swing away from BJP, which needs to be explained.
In any case, as I keep saying, this was under controlled situations. As Mr. Sashi Kumar said, we played some thought experiments, some computer simulations. And I said what? Let’s imagine for a moment since we are in a media college, let’s entertain an illusion. Let’s imagine that the media in this country had said at the beginning of this election, if the media had said this appears to be a close contest, we don’t know which way it’ll go. That’s all. I’m not expecting them to have said BJP is losing UP, nothing of that kind. If the media of this country had inserted this, had entertained this suspicion that this could perhaps be a close contest, that this was a contest to begin with, that would have easily moved one or two or 3% votes away from BJP.
I asked my friends to play this game on a computer to see what 1% would achieve. I said don’t take away that 1% from Odisha or from these places where BJP is going up. Only in places where it went down, what would an additional 1% vote do? 1% additional vote would take 30 seats away from BJP. BJP would be down to 210, and 2% of the national vote concentrated in these areas would take 54 seats away from the BJP.
In both these situations, in the first situation, NDA and India would be tied. In the second situation, India would have a clear majority. NDA would be 40 seats below the majority. This is the artifact. So, let’s not take these numbers as some gospel truths. These numbers have been produced by this artifact of a controlled situation.
In other words, there is no way to evade the conclusion that while the NDA has the numbers, it does not have the mandate. NDA has managed to cobble together numbers to form the government, and no one should quarrel with their constitutional propriety in forming the government. The president did the right thing. They deserve to form the government. I personally think that it almost was a boon in disguise that the India coalition was not called upon to form the government at this stage. But anyway, they had the numbers, but this was no unconditional approval. This was not a popular mandate.
It is a government without ‘iqbal.‘ ‘Iqbal’ is a word that comes from Mughal courts, a word for sovereignty in those days. But in a modern context, ‘iqbal’ would mean not just power, but authority, not just control, but a certain aura, not just a legal title, but legitimacy. If I were to put it in the language of modern political science, basically, the hegemony of this regime has been fractured. That is what this verdict has done, and that’s why it’s such a major verdict.
Also Read: Verdict 2024: Despite Some Losses, Modi 3.0 Thrives on Unchallenged Hindutva Hegemony
What led to this outcome?
Now, that’s a very complex story, and I would just skim through that very quickly. The only one thing I would alert all of us against is a very routine temptation. In politics we tend to read consequences back into intentions. We assume that something that must have helped secularism must have been done with secular motives. Something which helps democracy must have been done with voters gunning against dictatorship. That’s a simplistic reading. That doesn’t happen because any plebiscite passes through multiple layers. Layers of people respond differently to the proposition, not just because they have different opinions, but because they are different persons, because they are located differently, because they read the question differently, because they bring a different set of parameters to answer the question. So, the entire sociology of Indian politics, the geography of Indian politics, everything comes into play. As I said, since that’s not my real focus today, I would just make a few remarks. I wish to write about it, as I did after 2004. These are complex issues.
It is tempting for me; it would be tempting for someone like me to say people of India voted against dictatorship, people of India voted for secularism. But the story is not as simple as that. Yes, what has happened has actually strengthened secularism or at least opened space for secularism. It has strengthened democracy. But let’s not be so simplistic as to read that these two things have been achieved, that people of India have voted for that.
You know, the things we say in political rhetoric, we say these things because if that were to be the case, then much of our job in the future would be so much simpler. But I’m going to propose that our job is not so simple. It would be a mistake to assume that people voted on authoritarianism or on dangers of majoritarianism or on the supreme leader. It would be equally a mistake to think that the main reason was BJP’s strategic mistakes.
BJP is into analysing it in the last one week, and this is the interesting thing about all dictators in the world: they look for every reason other than their own conduct. You know, you made a technical mistake, this candidate was bad, Yogi was bad, no, Maurya was good, or some such stuff that keeps going on. Somehow the assumption is that BJP made some small strategic mistakes in the course of elections, which is not the case. I mean, they only made mistakes that all dictators always make in the world, which is hubris and losing touch with the people. But that’s not a special mistake. I think it would equally be a mistake to credit opposition leaders with great political virtues. Their real virtue was that they stood up and they were there.
And that’s no mean achievement given the conditions under which they had to fight this election. That they were standing there, that they were there, that they stood up, and some of them even gathered the courage to say that secularism is a virtue, that there should be some, that ‘mohabbat’ [‘love’] is something that can be talked about in the public arena and so on. All these are big virtues. But by and large, it would be a mistake to assume that the opposition won this election by a great campaign or something of that kind. Frankly, I think the opposition could have done much better than they actually did in the last one year.
My only problem is that because the conditions under which they were fighting the election were so strange that I don’t know how much to blame them or how much to expect from them when you don’t even know whether your own candidate tomorrow morning is going to be your candidate or not. I mean, remember what happened in Surat and Indore. I mean, these stories you used to hear about panchayat elections in Bihar, this never happened for a parliamentary election. You know your candidate is walking away with someone from the BJP. The collector is calling candidates, which they did in Indore. The collector was calling all the independent candidates to say, look, the Congress candidate is about to withdraw. I mean, the Congress candidate has withdrawn, everyone else has agreed, come and withdraw, there are only two hours left. This is what happened in Surat. This is what was going to happen in Indore. The trouble in Indore was that there was a left candidate, a small party called SUCI. They had a candidate, and he said, no way, I will not withdraw. That’s why you had elections in Indore; otherwise, everything was set.
So, in that sense, I don’t know how much to expect from the opposition when they did not even know whether their bank account is their own bank account, whether their candidate is their own candidate, and things of that kind. But anyway, I don’t think we should start imagining that the opposition did everything right. That again would be the kind of mistakes that cricket commentators don’t make, and we should also not make.
To my mind, the biggest reason is that people refused to treat this as a plebiscite. They refused this invitation to a perpetual state of siege, anxiety, almost frenzy that we were kept in the last ten years, where they would give up every other consideration except Modi. Basically, what happened was a return to normal politics, which is what the BJP did not want. They wanted anything other than normal politics. Because when you have normal politics, you say, why has this fellow not come to my locality for the last five years? Why is this road not working? Why is this hospital not working? And the name of the game from the BJP’s point of view was to bypass all such things and to get people to vote.
To my mind, the most important thing that happened was people said, wait a minute, we’ve done it for ten years, Ab Nahi [“Not Anymore”], now we have to ask. That’s exactly what people said in Uttar Pradesh to me again and again. Look, we’ve done it for ten years, now we have to ask, what were they doing? And that is the return to normal politics. People converted this proposed plebiscite back into an election, a seat-by-seat election of representatives in which routine considerations play their role: performance of the incumbent, everyday livelihood issues. And that is what began to matter.
And when that happened, two or three things became very important. One was the state of the economy, which was truly in a very bad shape for ordinary people and continued to be in a very bad shape. Unemployment and what people called “mehngai” [“rising prices/expensiveness”]. I keep saying for my overeducated friends that what ordinary people call “mehngai” is not inflation. There’s a difference between price rise and inflation. You know, what people call “mehngai,” because a lot of economists say, but you know, our inflation levels are so low, what’s the problem?
When ordinary people say there is too much “mehngai,” what they are saying is, I cannot afford to purchase things that I really need to. They’re talking about the lack of purchasing power. They’re not talking about what the economists call inflation. That was the real issue. So “mehngai,” unemployment, and in general, the state of the economy, that was a very major reason. Then there were specific anxieties of some specific sections among the minorities, de facto being reduced to second-rank citizenship. What would you do if that’s what’s happening to you? You would come together; you would vote in a strategic way. What option do you have?
Although I must say that there is enormous mythology built around Muslim votes and the idea that somehow Muslims of this country have ensured BJP’s defeat. A, they don’t have the numbers to do so. B, for all that mythology, the turnout of the Muslims is still lower than the rest of the population, notwithstanding the entire mythology that you get about this question. And three, yes, they strategically came together in many states, and they were one of the factors.
Among Dalits, for the first time, at least for North Indian Dalits, North Indian somewhat educated Dalits, the message was reservation can be challenged. You know, it’s like the farmers’ movement. In the farmers’ movement, the unspoken message was that your land can be taken away. Now, what land is to the farmer, job and educational reservations are the same to Dalits. And the unspoken message was this is under threat. And the moment that gets touched, that of course had repercussions. But these were sectoral things. I think it may not be correct to say that there was widespread anxiety about the Constitution being taken away. That was very specific sectoral anxiety. Same in the case of Muslims.
And there was a small slice of generalized unease about authoritarianism. Now, I’m partly contradicting what I said earlier. I said we should not simply assume that because an authoritarian ruler has been defeated, therefore people voted on authoritarianism. For the first time in travels, I heard the word “tanashahi,” which is the Hindi word for dictatorship, spoken by ordinary people and even BJP workers being somewhat uneasy about the kind of things Mr. Modi’s government was doing to the opposition leaders, to chief ministers, to, you know, the kind of attack on centres that was being done.
Just one last thing about the causes, because many of us have now started saying, look, money did not matter, BJP’s media control did not matter, all the manipulations did not matter. Unfortunately, all of them did matter. That’s why the BJP has 240, you know. So, what appeared as severe reverses were actually potential disaster for the BJP, which was managed and limited since this was a controlled election. Money, media, and Modi myth did work, and they managed to salvage the BJP numbers. But for that, this would have been no different from 1977. But the reason why the numbers don’t look like 1977 is this: that money, media, all this actually did work to the BJP’s advantage.
Where are we now?
Return to democratic politics? Not quite. We are poised at a very critical moment in the history of our country. When I started, I spoke of the end of the First Republic of India. If you ask me, where are we now? I would say we are in no man’s land. I would say we are in no man’s land between the first and the second Republic of India, and that is what makes this situation so critical, so fraught with dangers and potential possibilities.
Therefore, it’s necessary to separate, you know, hope can be very treacherous, and we can slip. And I see so many of my friends slipping on false hopes, hopes like BJP RSS have a tussle. There’s no tussle. It’ll be resolved, and if it is resolved, it’ll be to this country’s disadvantage. So, these are false hopes, or the idea that somehow NDA allies are going to really prevent the BJP from doing what it is doing. Unless the BJP is stupid enough to launch an onslaught against South India, which I think now they won’t. One of the few very nice things about this election from BJP’s point of view is that they are beginning to develop vested interest in South India, which is good news for democracy, you know? So, unless they do something as stupid as that, I don’t think TDP is going to do very much. I don’t think JDU is in much of a state to do anything. That’s not where your hopes should reside, and I personally don’t think institutions are going to change their character very much. The stranglehold that the regime has over our institutions is not going to change.
I have mild hopes from media and judiciary. Very limited hopes. With media, my limited hope is while they would continue to be the spokespersons of the ruling party, they may stop hounding the opposition, which is what they specialized in the last five, seven years. If they were to stop just this little bit, I would see that as an important course correction. And judiciary, occasionally, we can find slightly better judgment on a few things, just minor course correction. I don’t expect any major change from judiciary either.
Where do I reside my hopes? My hopes are, one, in the opposition. The opposition has found its voice, as was evident in the last parliamentary session. Second, in resistance movements. Just watch the streets carefully. If democracy, you know, republics are saved never inside parliaments, republics are always saved on the street. So, watch the streets carefully. Next few years, I expect resistance, protest movements to gather courage because, in many ways, politics is like the stock market. It’s all driven by sentiments. Are you going up? Are you coming down? The message today to anyone who wants to stand up to this government is they’re going down, and that changes the character completely. That’s my second hope.
And my final hope is, this might look romantic, but actually the people. In this election, I travelled thousands of kilometres, spoke to thousands of people because by the end of March, in the middle of March, I was so depressed, and just to, I think, cure my own depression, I started traveling. I spoke to thousands of ordinary people, and one thing I’m sure, Indian people will not accept dictatorship. That, to me, was the deepest faith I came back with, and I said even if BJP gets the majority they want, if people know their democracy is being taken away, they will not allow that to be.
Finally, the last question. I know I’ve exhausted my time, so I’ll just quickly go over it.
What’s the way forward?
Is it the beginning of the end of Mr. Modi? I’m afraid that would be too rash a conclusion to draw. One thing you can be sure about Mr. Modi, he will not preside over the meltdown of his government. Unlike Mr. Manmohan Singh, he will deploy every trick in the book, outside the book, wherever. Most of these would be dirty tricks. We have already, in the last one month, witnessed that the government hasn’t learned almost anything. Look at the president’s address, as if they’ve got 350 seats. Look at the manner in which the speaker has been elected. Look at the speaker’s conduct after that. Look at the manner in which the ruling party has behaved. Look at the lynching on the streets. Look at the bulldozers being used. Look at what’s being done to Arundhati Roy, to Medha Patkar. I suspect the regime will be even more repressive than it has been because Mr. Modi has to recover his “iqbal.” He has to demonstrate that I’m as strong as you always thought I am. And because the numbers are down, he has to be even more repressive. So, I don’t think it’s a very easy story.
His institutional stranglehold continues. Misuse of state power would be even more than before. So, something will have to be done. There are two readings here, and that’s the final point I would want to make. I think many friends would agree that, yes, political opposition has to do much more. Opposition has to be proactive. You cannot simply wait for this regime, the decline and fall of this regime. That won’t happen. You have to work for it on the street.
There are two possibilities here. One is that, okay, there are elections coming. In coming elections, work to defeat Mr. Modi’s government. Gradually, the government is pushed, allies start rebelling, things start happening, and the regime goes out. Which is to say, you fight a battle to reclaim democracy in the electoral political arena. Somehow, I think there is another possibility. I don’t have the time today to explore that in detail but let me just mention that. To my mind, in India, a battle to reclaim the Constitution and democracy by itself may not succeed. A battle to reclaim the Constitution and democracy has to be combined with a social radical agenda. And this moment in history offers one of those rare opportunities, opportunities that come only once in 25-30 years, that you actually combine political and social agenda.
What do I mean by social agenda? Economic front. Basically, the way to take on the BJP would be to create a social coalition of the bottom of the pyramid, of the poor. In fact, strange as it might seem, and it might tickle my friend sitting here, this is actually a moment for class politics in our country. I’m not one of those who say it all the time. I say there are moments which come and go. This is the moment for very sharp class politics to actually talk about redistribution. I mean, somehow we have made redistribution into a cuss word. You know, the allegation is these people talk about redistribution. Sir, the Constitution of this country talks about it. There is directive principle of state policy that talks about, you know, preventing concentration of wealth in this country. So, this is the moment. So, the point I’m making is that the way for recovery of democracy is not merely through political battles for recovery of Constitution and democratic norms. It is in and through struggles on the question of class, on the issues of caste and patriarchy. If you push these three struggles, it is in and through this that you can actually recover democracy. This is one of those rare moments, radical moments in our history.
What would it mean? Specifically, it would mean three kinds of actions. In the electoral contestation domain, ensuring that BJP’s defeat continues because BJP, Mr. Modi, and this election machine would do everything possible to stall this series of defeats, which they’ve had even in the by-elections a week ago. I think the next ten by-elections in UP and particularly the three assembly elections that are going to happen, BJP would put in everything to ensure that they are not seen to be on a losing streak, and the challenge is for the opposition is to ensure that the ruling defeat streak continues.
But more important than that, there is the question of strengthening resistance on the ground. The farmers’ movement has already given a call for a nationwide struggle on the issue of MSP. There is the question of caste census. Adivasis have been drawn towards the BJP, and the one segment in which BJP has increased its vote share this time is the Adivasis. A very significant movement is required there. So, the second domain would be working on resistance on the street.
And the third domain would be cultural ideological contestation. I have zero time left now, but I would just mention what to my mind that cultural ideological contest would be. People like us must concede that we have lost a cultural ideological battle. We need to regain it, and in order to regain, we need to regain three things: nationalism, civilizational cultural heritage in its multiplicity, and religious traditions of this country. We cannot turn our back to either three of these things, which we have. So that’s the third domain where we need to operate. To my mind, what looks like what has been a very grim moment in our country’s history, which has led to the collapse of the First Republic, need not be somehow an attempt to recover some fragments of the First Republic. We shouldn’t try that. That’s impossible. You do not go back in history. It has to become a battle to create, to reimagine a second Republic of India, a second Republic which redeems the constitutional pledge contained in the preamble to our Constitution.
Thank you very much.
The talk was followed by a question and answer session.
Transcribed by Faiz Ahmed.
