A prime minister with a clear majority in the Lok Sabha leads his party to seek the mandate for another five-year term. The electorate deny him a majority. In the best of parliamentary traditions, that leader loses the moral right to rule as voters have clearly refused to renew his license.
But during the past ten years we have developed a fashionable contempt for value-based political practices. We have promulgated a ‘Naya Bharat’, with new expediencies and opportunisms dressed up as a “new normal.”
So, no one should be surprised if the ruling coterie resorts to every kind of trick and treachery to ensure that Narendra Modi stays in that corner office in South Block. But at the same time, no one needs to be in any doubt that Modi stands rebuffed.
No one, in and out of the Bharatiya Janata Party, can dispute that he had made the 2024 Lok Sabha battle a personal project. He vigorously and valiantly campaigned throughout the length and breadth of the country, trying to dominate the narrative, sitting down for interviews with this or that newsperson, offering himself as the tireless servant of the people, someone who had nothing but the welfare of the masses uppermost on his mind.
No one had any doubt that this was an election for Prime Minister Modi to lose. And, no one should be in any doubt that he has lost it. There can be no two opinions about this.
Nor should anyone be in doubt over what India has rejected in rebuffing Modi. That too cannot be much of a mystery.
For a start, he left no one in doubt that he stood for the sharpening of the Hindu-Muslim divide in the country. He was crude, coarse and cunning in widening the gulf; he did not care if he offended the Muslims’ sensitivities and sensibilities; he contemptuously referred to the largest minority in the country as “infiltrators.”
And, no one need have any doubt that Modi was deliberately, cynically and calculatedly stoking the anxieties and animosities of Hindus, so as to consolidate the BJP’s Hindu vote bank. The country watched in amazement as day after day the man who had been prime minister for 10 years stooped down to dog-whistling in the most unbecoming rhetoric.
Also read: Narendra Modi Is on a Hindu-Muslim See-Saw in an Election Without Thrust and Thunder
So, no one need to be in any doubt that that kind of divisive politics stands rejected. Narendra Modi – and his two principal fellow-dog-whistlers, Amit Shah and Adidtyanath – managed to frighten away the most stable part of the new social coalition – the middle classes. The business community, too, became uneasy as the prime minister himself donned the role of disrupter-in-chief, recklessly jeopardising social peace and harmony. By voting as they did, India’s Hindus have gently turned down Modi’s invitation to a permanent civil war.
Without doubt, the not-so-subtle message of the 2024 vote is that the polity will not find stability and an inter-locking equilibrium unless a meaningful partnership is offered to the largest minority. Ten years of Modi rule had seen the Muslim community living in smouldering resentment. Today, his approach to India’s collective arrangements stands rejected. The country is in no mood to allow the Modi-Shah-Yogi trio to keep on poisoning our collective solidarities.
Let there be no doubt that the 2024 vote is also a vote against Modi’s in-your-face crony capitalism. For ten years, the prime minister had kept the country in thrall of something called “vikas” and ensured that the corporate sector remained solidly in his corner. That model of “vikas” stands discredited and devalued because the massive vote against the BJP can only be attributed to the anger and hopelessness among the unemployed and under-employed youth. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, they thronged to Akhilesh Yadav-Rahul Gandhi’s election rallies.
Above all, undoubtedly, the BJP’s failure to secure a majority on its own is an unambiguous rejection of Narendra Modi’s prime ministerial overlordship. The people of India have had enough of his ‘strong’ and ‘damdar’ government; there is a yearning for a strong and forceful Opposition that can pull back the ruling party and its leadership from its infatuation with waywardness. The voters by now understand that the BJP’s politics of money and muscle is anchored in the most corrupt of practices.
By denying Modi’s party a clear-cut majority, the electorate has fired a warning shot: enough of unaccountable governance; enough of misuse of the law and its coercive instruments in pursuit of political gains; enough of this personality cult and its legions of bhakts; enough of personalisation of the processes of governance; enough of bizarre showmanship; and, enough of this silly invocation of a divine mandate.
Let there be no doubt that the experiment with prime ministerial overlordship is over. The Modi mystique is over. There is no Modi magic. If Modi and his cabal refuse to come to terms with this message, then it will be for other stake-holders to bring them to heel. The country has rejected the politics of hate, abuse and violence; it has, in denying Modi a clear majority, opted for decency and old-fashioned constitutional values and practices.
Above all, in denying Modi the kind of overlordship he wants, voters have reminded one and all – from the President of India to the Supreme Court to the armed forces to the bureaucracy – that the constitution of India remains the only source of legitimacy and authority in this country. Notwithstanding the earnestness of this or that ‘strong’ leader’s beliefs. In taming Modi, the voters have begun the process of giving India back its democracy. Amen.
