It’s clear now that the Hindutva project that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had pursued with uncommon vigour in the past ten years has been buried fathoms deep.
Technically, the outgoing government was a Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance enterprise, but in reality it was a full-fledged Modi-BJP show; the NDA parties, barring sundry minor ones, had left Modi years ago. Modi ran the government as a one-man show, whimsically and brutally, looking only at big business interests and the country’s comfortable classes. The headline news is that his party has lost power. It has fallen way short of the halfway mark.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
If Modi believed in democratic decorum even half way, he should have resigned and urged President Droupadi Murmu to invite the next party or pre-election coalition to take a shot at forming a stable government. Outgoing Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had done precisely that after the 1989 election. His party had won close to 200 seats in the House but he felt he had lost power since his Congress party did not have half the seats in the Lok Sabha. He could have easily formed a coalition government, but declined to do so, rejecting all pressures.
But Modi is a very different political animal. He has roped in lapsed NDA partners like N. Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), seeking accommodation at the local level in their respective states, and with the help of this last minute-NDA, he plans to return to the seat of office as prime minister. Together these NDA parties clear the halfway mark.
Modi has waved away constitutional ethics and political morality. He organised himself a victory oration at the BJP national headquarters when the counting was still on, thumping himself on the back for his third ‘win’ on the trot. For all the contrived enthusiasm, it was a lacklustre event. This was written on everyone’s face, including Modi’s. But the ashen visage of defence minister Rajnath Singh, seated next to Modi, said it all.
It looked as though the Rajput from UP, among the more honourable ones to win his (Lucknow) seat, was kicked in the stomach but just held on for dear life and agreed to take the stage. The outgoing home minister, Amit Shah, flanked Modi on the other side but appeared decidedly subdued. Modi’s other erstwhile cabinet colleagues were either not invited or stayed away. Party president J.P. Nadda, who is clearly Modi’s own marionette, made a falsely rousing speech but no one looked interested.
It was evident that a defeated Modi-BJP was trying to put up a giant-sized pretence.
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The trouble with the whole thing is that Modi’s NDA allies, especially Naidu and Nitish, have been contacted by leading figures on the INDIA grouping which, in number terms, is snapping at Modi-BJP’s heels. If these parties switch for their own political reasons in the event that they negotiate with INDIA and get a deal that interests them, the INDIA alliance would be ahead of the NDA.
It does seem that Modi, like Trump in US before him, is finding it hard to accept that he has fallen from the perch. More, he is trying to brazen it out although he knows that he scraped through his own seat in Varanasi by a margin much smaller than before and that Uttar Pradesh, the land of the Ayodhya temple, until recently thought to be Modi’s ready-made tramping ground, now represents a wasteland for Modi-BJP. On leads, the INDIA grouping is ahead of Modi’s party.
It is hard to get away from the feeling that the entire charade of celebrating Modi’s victory was conducted to bring pressure on Rashtrapati Bhavan to do Modi’s bidding and invite him to be sworn in as prime minister even before the results were officially declared. There can be little doubt that the supposed celebration is simultaneously a tactic to pressure and threaten other senior BJP leaders – as well as the RSS headquarters in Nagpur – not to challenge or even obliquely seek to question Modi’s leadership credentials.
Anand K. Sahay is a journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi.
Read all of The Wire’s reporting on and analysis of the 2024 election results here.
