The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has returned to power with Narendra Modi as prime minister for the third time. Yet, the critics of the BJP, and Modi in particular, are electrified and abuzz with excitement. The question that has ostensibly puzzled national and international media over the last few days is: why does this defeat taste so sweet?
At one level, this question has a simple answer. Even though there is no major change in the BJP’s vote share, the number of seats won by the saffron party has diminished substantially. While they had set out to add to their previous tally and touch the 400 mark with allies in the Lok Sabha comprising 543 members, their final tally of 240 is much below the absolute majority mark of 272. For the first time in 10 years, the once all-too-powerful BJP under its seemingly invincible leader, who had even projected himself as a divine incarnation during campaigning, is now forced to depend upon coalition partners to form a new government.
Hate versus love
Beyond electoral and political calculations however, there lies a deeper reason for why this moment is being savoured. When BJP came to power in 2014 and 2019, even if its supporters were mobilised in the hope for development, their revelry was charged by resentment and anger which unsurprisingly took the form of aggressive and muscular Hindu nationalism. In contrast, the emotion that is being shared today is one of an inexplicable release and sheer abandon. The distinction between the two sets of sentiments is as simple and as profound as the difference between hate and love.
The two political slogans that stood out in the high decibel campaign season both emanated from the principal opposition leader from Congress, Rahul Gandhi. Alluding to the theme of economic justice, the first slogan indicated that if Modi made 22 people billionaires in 10 years, the Congress was going to make crores of people ‘lakhpatis’ by transferring Rs 1 lakh annually to the bank accounts of poor women in the country. Gandhi contested Modi’s relentless claim of making India the world’s fifth largest economy, based on abstract GDP numbers, by highlighting the concrete reality of the yawning gap in the distribution of wealth and income between the top few industrialists and the millions living below the poverty line.
This disparity has only widened in the aftermath of the pandemic. Images of large-scale human migrations involving the disentitled informal workforce during the lockdown, coupled with the thousands of corpses floating in the Ganges or lined up along its shores for cremation, had become definitive of the times globally. What is baffling however, is that a human tragedy of such a colossal dimension did not become an electoral point, and only featured indirectly through the issue of economic distress.
Rahul Gandhi’s second slogan – nafrat ke bazaar mein mohabbat ki dukaan (to set up a shop of love in the marketplace of hate) – was fashioned two years ago during the Bharat Jodo Yatra. While Muslims were rarely named explicitly in his public engagements, the slogan obviously referred to them since it had come up following the illegal and arbitrary use of ‘bulldozer justice’. These demolition drives resulted in hundreds of Muslim homes and establishments being razed to the ground, as a form of instant retaliation by the government, in response to people’s participation in civil resistance. Starting in Uttar Pradesh, this model of socio-symbolic violence was emulated in other states and became a state-aided successor to mob lynchings, on the pretext of cow slaughter, in the early Modi years.
Interpreting the mandate
As is the case with any election result, it is difficult if not impossible to precisely interpret what the mandate is for and against. Many commentators have suggested that this election was not so much about the big ideas of secularism and communal harmony as it was about local and regional contexts shaped by price rise, unemployment and economic precarity.
However, religion, caste and welfarism were some of the key questions which determined the formation of the two rival national alliances led by the BJP and the Congress. It is equally a fact that regional parties, which shied away from taking a stand on these questions, and focussed only on immediate state-based issues, have all but collapsed. This includes the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha, the Bharatiya Rashtra Samiti in Telangana and and even the Bahujan Samajwadi Party in UP that started out with a radical anti-caste agenda only to cave in later due to compulsions of electoral politics.
In contrast, regional parties that have seen resounding success in this election are ones with greater ideological clarity such as the Samajwadi Party in UP, Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu.
It cannot be denied that mundane issues of governance and economic necessity played a major part in these elections, and rightly so, given the general state of social abjection. However, this must not lead anyone to discount the role of ideology in shapingOnly a Politics of Love Can Counter a Culture of Hate the political imagination. More than a simple endorsement of local politics, the electoral verdict may, in due course, see greater recalibration of regional parties along national lines without giving up their federal differences.
Devotion for the leader and love for the other
While Hindutva will continue to remain a powerful vocabulary in national politics, it now has a serious contender in the form of a reinvented and more secular Indian nationalism. Even by Modi’s own standards, his electoral campaign this time was unprecedented in its open and unrestrained hate for the Muslim minority. To what extent are BJP’s core voters swayed by this politics of hate is anybody’s guess, but for a large section it is devotion for the leader that weighs against all odds and gets them to cast their lot with the party despite acknowledging their enormous economic hardship.
B.R. Ambedkar had famously reminded us in the Constituent Assembly that devotion in the domain of religion may be a path to salvation, though in politics it is a road to dictatorship. It becomes even more dangerous when devotion and dictatorship are combined with claims to divinity. If nothing else, the voters in the Hindi heartland have reassured us that India will not succumb so easily to the egoism and self-love of one leader.
Old style secularism may well have lost its punch and become a worn-out idea in politics, but rather than abandoning it altogether, this election has opened up the possibility for its recreation into a new language of love. Infusing a much-needed emotive appeal to the idea of religious pluralism, it has the potential to displace devotion for the leader with love for the other as a more ethical and universal way of being an Indian today.
A new politics of love
With his turn to a politics of love, we are witnessing Rahul Gandhi’s re-emergence as a distinct and more sensitive avatar which marks a refreshing break even from his party’s recent past. For the longest time, Congress was mostly equivocal on the secularism question, and a few of its leaders also dabbled with Hindutva lite. Its campaign slogan against Modi in 2019, “chowkidar chor hai (the watchman is a thief)”, was sharply criticised for revealing a lack of class consciousness. Back in Rajiv Gandhi’s time, the Congress was very much opposed to the Mandal Commission’s recommendations in favour of low caste reservations in public employment. Departing sharply from this entire history, Rahul is refashioning himself not only by centre-staging affirmative policies but also by becoming more accessible to all sections of society.
Those who expressed their joy on social media, as the election results started trickling in, generously drew scenes and clips from Shahrukh Khan’s movies of the 1990s to celebrate the moment. As the quintessential figure of love in Bollywood, who else but SRK can capture this mood better. However, there is one crucial difference between what was at stake in his movies and the challenge that confronts us today. Khan’s love was a counterpoint to the traditional patriarchal father in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and the disciplinary college principal in Mohabbatein. What we are up against today is hatred that, if not checked, will consume the entire body politic. Only a politics of love can counter a culture of hate, and who with a heart can say no to that.
Dr Moiz Tundawala is an Associate Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School, Delhi NCR, India.
Dr Salmoli Choudhuri is an Assistant Professor of Law at National Law School of India University Bengaluru.
