As the poll bugle has been sounded by the election commission for the 2024 General Elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked his cabinet colleagues to prepare a roadmap for the first 100 days of his anticipated third consecutive term at the helm. His second in command, home minister Amit Shah has set a lofty target of 400 seats for the ruling NDA (National Democratic Alliance) at the hustings. These are exercises in mind games of the highest order. It is a hallmark of psychological warfare. It is one thing to exude confidence and put faith in the people’s mandate but this type of pushy brouhaha is reeking of a bully on the playground. While such tactical demagogy is expected from the Modi-Shah duo, the self-proclaimed “mainstream” media, for instance, at the India Today conclave, claiming that the “opposition is absent” and prejudicially foretelling an election verdict even before a single vote is cast smacks of utter mockery of democracy.
A government so confident of victory should run on its track record. Yet Modi and Shah are bragging about parliament seats and victory margins without alluding to anything concrete they have done to alleviate the travails of the poor people. There are several fanciful names and schemes thrown around such as “Make in India”, “Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana”, “Vikasith Bharath”, etc. but no perceptible improvement in the living conditions of the people that need the government the most. In the make-believe world of Modi, we are to be enamoured in awe of the multi-trillion dollar economy that he has supposedly built and hyperventilate in the thrill of the country joining the ranks of the top five world economies.
Also read: BJP MP Says Party’s 400+ Seat Goal for 2024 Is So it Can Change Constitution
Statistics and indices are doctored at will to make it look like Modi has thwarted poverty in India. But some truths cannot be hidden and they just show their ugly faces as much as you want them vanquished. Take, for example, the staggering 50 lakh applications received for 67,000 constable positions advertised by the Uttar Pradesh government. No whitewashing can cover up the desperation and pent up unemployment among the youth that this incident highlights. For all the clamour about “double-engine sarkaar”, if this is the state of affairs where BJP has been in power since 2017, one would much rather prefer a “no-BJP-engine-sarkaar”.
Almost every Modi speech is a bundle of contradictions, a concoction of half-truths and sometimes blatant lies. He addressed a public meeting in Palnadu area of Andhra Pradesh to kick off NDA campaign in the state with his newly re-minted ally Chandrababu Naidu (Telugu Desam Party) and actor Pawan Kalyan (Janasena Party). He had the audacity there to claim of a “Modi Guarantee” while the state has been denied their “special status” promised time and again by Modi himself in his 2014 campaign speeches in the state. This special status was part of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganization Act promulgated by the Parliament in 2014 and not a mere sop. Yet he reneged on it for 10 full years exposing the hollowness of a “Modi guarantee”.
File photo of Chandrababu Naidu with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on August 25, 2014. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Prime Minister’s Office, Government of India/GODL license.
To make things worse, his allies on stage, both Chandrababu and Pawan Kalyan went to the nook and corner of the state in the run up to the 2019 elections criticising Modi for denying this special status for Andhra Pradesh and ostentatiously made it an election issue then that purportedly led to their parting of ways with BJP. Come 2024, these “allies” are back with Modi without a whimper and have developed collective amnesia about the special status for the beleaguered state. In spite of such about-faces, Modi had the nerve to claim in the same speech that NDA political allies are a class apart from the INDIA coalition and that they exist only to selflessly serve the nation!
He claims that the entire country is a “Modi family”. What kind of a patriarch would subject his “family members” to the harshest lockdown in the world during COVID with barely a four-hour notice? Why did he force his hapless “family members” to walk thousands of kilometers in mass migration by imposing the strictest shutdown of basic public transport in the history of the world? Which family head would sit mum when his “family members” become labeled migrant workers overnight and rendered homeless resulting in dehumanization and death? Would a family-man let a part of his house burn unabated for months like Modi did in the case of Manipur? Truth is that only a certain upwardly mobile, apathetic and cushy section of the population belong to “Modi family” and the Hindu Hriday Samrat only has those family members in mind when he speaks loftily. Fortunately for him, it is this section of the population that is able to step up on to the bully pulpit and influence the uninformed and weave fanciful Modi legends. He takes up the issue of destination weddings as if there is a dearth of real issues to speak about and urges his followers that can afford these weddings to display their wealth at home rather than escape abroad. He has given even global celebrities a run for their money when it comes to choreographed photo-shoots and dazzling, monogrammed attires but would brazenly call himself a “fakir”!
At the recent India Today conclave, Amit Shah bragged that Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MLAs separated from their parent parties in protest against nepotism and that the NDA somehow is cut out of a different cloth. In making such an inane claim, he assumes that people are incognizant of the laundromat scheme that he is now famous for where tainted politicians all of a sudden become spick and span as soon as they adorn a saffron scarf. He somehow wants us to look the other way when he allies with abhorrently nepotist parties such as Telugu Desam, Lok Janashakthi Party, Pattali Makkal Katchi and Biju Janata Dal to name a few – height of double-speak!
With all these efforts and many more, Modi and his loyal brigade want to make it seem as if we are in a presidential form of election and bulldoze any formidable threat from the opposition. However, what we have in the country is a parliamentary form of democracy where it is in the best interest of the disadvantaged to have an amalgam of voices and forces that can unify and work for the common good rather than get subdued by a larger-than-life majoritarian force aka Modi.
It is too early to give up on the yearning that the collective verdict of this unimaginably diverse Indian population will belie expectations and throw up a challenge to Modi’s 10-year rule and thwart a hat-trick. To muster some hope, we only have to look back at the 2004 “India shining” debacle when a seemingly unstoppable Vajpayee had to bite the dust even though the opposition of the day had no concrete shape or form until the people’s verdict showed a path.
G. Naveen is a physician profession, and has been writing articles on politics with special social justice for over 20 years.
