Shikha Mukerjee 
Kolkata: The 2024 Lok Sabha election was a contest between the 73-year-old strongman of the Bharatiya Janata Party and a new generation of leaders, born and bred in political families, as familiar with the privileges that come with power and equally aware of how cutthroat the world of politics is in reality. They came up from behind, were sneered at by Narendra Modi as the “shehzade”, mollycoddled scions of political dynasties who did not earn their role as leaders but simply inherited it regardless of merit.
The old order will not yield place gracefully to the new, but Modi and the BJP have been warned that a younger generation of leaders are taking over, having been forged in the same fire. Underestimating the punching power of the new generation, siblings Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, M.K. Stalin, Abhishek Banerjee, Uddhav Thackeray and son Aaditya Thackeray, who led their respective parties and worked together to break the stranglehold of the BJP and its larger-than-life divinely blessed leader, Modi, was an expensive and difficult to recover from mistake.
The error that Modi and the party he leads was misreading the pulse of the people. Ensconced in his position at the top, cocooned in the aura of being the most popular Prime Minister, Modi is out of touch with the reality that concerns 60 crore of the total 140 odd crore population, who are in their prime, between 18 years and 35 years. As the head of the government, Modi must know that his policies, especially the four-year contractual Agnipath recruitment scheme for the defence services has angered the younger generation, who constitute over 25% of the voters in this election. He must also know that a significant share of this generation is not enchanted with his Hindutva politics of religious polarisation and hyper nationalism. As he must know that his ideas about women as domesticated servitors, happy with his handouts, is not the aspiration of the younger women, who are educated and angry about the quality of employment on offer.
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In contrast, the new generation that led their parties are backed up by a slew of others, like Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan, Deepender Singh Hooda in Haryana, Gaurav Gogoi and Sushmita Dev in Assam, Revanth Reddy, now chief minister of Telengana, Supriya Sule in Maharashtra, Misa Bharati and Rohini Acharya Yadav in Bihar, who are far more clued in on what makes the under 35-year Indian tick. The list is much longer because the younger generation of leaders in the opposition to the BJP is drawn from a large pool of political families deeply invested in their specific territories.
These leaders and the scions of founding families speak in the idiom that the people understand, because they are constantly mingling with the masses. The Bharat Jodo Yatra‘s 4,080-kilometres trek changed popular perception about Rahul Gandhi as much as it changed his understanding of what India is. From the disrespectful ‘Pappu’ nickname bequeathed on him by the BJP and its supportive trolls, Gandhi became a mass leader, who is obviously so popular that youth broke barricades to get near him at the Phulpur rally as the video that went viral showed. The consequence was the Congress win in the Allahabad constituency, even though the Samajwadi Party lost in Phulpur by a margin of 4,000-odd votes to the BJP.
And then there are other scions of founding families, who are with the National Democratic Alliance as partners. Not all of them are relatively young. For starters, there is Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party, who took over from his father-in-law NTR, Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, the founder of the party. As Modi will discover, Naidu with the 17 MPs of the TDP is a formidable force, who will bargain hard and has the power to destabilise Modi, who not only heads a party in a minority but has the difficult task of leading a coalition from a position of weakness.
On its own, the BJP’s 240 seats do not automatically qualify Modi to be Prime Minister, a position he obviously believes he alone is fit to fill. It does put him at the mercy of a host of scions of political dynasties, including the Janata Dal (Secular), Rashtriya Lok Dal, Apna Dal (Soneylal), Lok Janashakti Party (Ram Vilas), Nationalist Congress Party led by Ajit Pawar. And then there are scions of political families that belong to the BJP – Karan Bhushan Singh, son of the notorious Brij Bhushan Singh who is accused of sexual abuse by women’s wrestlers, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasad, Ashok Chavan, Piyush Goyal, Dharmendra Pradhan, Anurag Thakur, Suvendu Adhikari to name some.
The difference between the new generation of party leaders from the opposition and within the BJP and the old guard protecting Modi from his misdemeanours is a sense of responsibility. The Gandhi siblings, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, M.K. Stalin, Uddhav and Aaditya Thackeray from the opposition and H.D. Kumaraswamy, Anupriya Patel, Chirag Paswan, Jayant Chaudhari, or even the Chauthalas have that one factor in common, apart from lineage, and that is the responsibility that comes with being descendants of the founding families of the parties to which they belong.
They know that they must lead in a way that their party’s candidates in all the three tiers of India’s elected democracy from the panchayats to the Lok Sabha win. It does not make the partner parties of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance natural allies of the coalition parties of the National Democratic Alliance, but it does set them apart from the BJP’s in-group of leaders from political families. At the end of day, leaders from founding families have to do what is best for the party or lose their leadership positions.
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Mr Modi may not think he ought to retire at 75 years, but he does belong to a generation that 60 crore Indians would generally think is populated by their grandparents. In contrast, INDIA bloc’s most visible leaders are obviously younger, though there are some like Uddhav Thackeray, who is in his 60s. These leaders talk about issues that concern the younger voters from the 18 years to 29 years age cohort, who constitute about one fourth of the electorate. They talk about unemployment and the lack of opportunities for employment, inflation and the cost of living crisis, they talk about short term and long term remedies to these problems.
The Congress manifesto lists what an INDIA bloc government would do for younger and older Indians, a prescription that regional parties have endorsed in their separate campaigns. Regional parties and the Congress, which is now in power in Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, and Telangana, are far more connected to the people, dealing as they do with the day-to-day needs and problems of the constituents and their families. The difference with the BJP and these opposition ruling parties is the command and control structure within which BJP chief ministers are expected to operate so that the heat is taken off Modi and the accumulated anti-incumbency over 10 years of his regime.
Dangling the prospect of a Viksit Bharat, a fully developed India that is number three in the world listing of largest economies by 2047, in front of a currently jobless 19-year-old, who would be 42 years old by then, does not endear Modi. There is, however, a perception that younger voters are uncomfortable with the paternalist, patriarchal style of Modi and his obsession with faux ancient rituals and in his meditations.
The generation gap is probably surfacing and will become more evident in the next round of state elections, starting with Haryana and Maharashtra in 2024 and then Assam, Bihar, Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and others through 2025 and 2026. The test of the generational gap will play out in how Modi handles the state assembly elections this year and in the next year as he comes up against the younger generation of leaders, blooded in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and hungering for more action.
In Haryana, Deepender Hooda, and in Maharashtra, the Thackerays, Sule, and a younger crop of Congress leaders are readying to join the battle with not only the local BJP leadership – obviously shaken by the Lok Sabha results as Devendra Fadnavis’s resignation offer indicates –but also with Modi. The state assembly contests will test Modi’s stamina and his political skills as he navigates between electioneering, keeping his coalition going, a far stronger opposition in Parliament, and running a government where not all the ministers are fully in his control.
Having worked together to make a breakthrough for their parties in this Lok Sabha election, it will be up to the younger generation of leaders to continue to pool strengths and reduce their weaknesses through coordinating their strategies in the states. The younger generation of leaders – Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, the Thackerays, Sule – know through personal experience the cost of going it alone, of broken deals and failed alliances. Unlike their elders, these leaders do not have the same degree of uneasiness, suspicion, and hostility to once rivals-now allies. The Congress is not the behemoth it once was; Rahul Gandhi is more practical and less querulous than the older generation of Congress leaders; he certainly seems to think the Congress is less entitled.
Up against a new generation that is making new rules and changing the way the game is played, the BJP has to think fast and think differently. The question for the party is, is Modi the man who can adjust to the emerging reality and do things differently, or is he so enamoured of the cult that he has crafted about himself as the man who knows best what is good for the nation that he is a liability that the BJP and its parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh need to discard?
There is another problem with the equation between the BJP-RSS that keeps Modi on top: his dependence on the extreme right-wing of his party, the so-called bhakts, who have been built up as the “core” of the party’s support by him and his strategy partner, Amit Shah. Given the size, diversity, and differences of India –= socially, politically, and economically – a single-track Hindutva agenda is a liability. Not all Hindus are moved by the spiel about vote jihad, mangalsutras, madrassas, and mafia, and do not believe that the opposition, including the Congress, are stooges of the defunct Muslim League or anti-nationals, urban naxals, and members of the tukde-tukde gang.
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The popular sovereign in this election has delivered a message, because it stopped short of delivering a mandate. The middle ground where the overwhelming majority of the median voter lives has to be retaken, expanded, and defended from a religious extreme right invasion that almost succeeded in driving out the parties that are secular, liberal, democratic, committed to social, political, and economic justice.
The young generation of leaders represent a new era of middle ground or what used to be called centrist politics, bookended by the Left on one side and the Right on the other. They have learnt to work together without the distrust that marked the relationship of the earlier generation of leaders from the same parties. The retaking of the middle ground is a task that needs to be completed. Modi is not the leader who can steer the BJP to withstand this new war.
Shikha Mukherjee is a Kolkata-based commentator.