As I write these words, two phases of the 2024 General Elections have been conducted, and some 190 constituencies have voted to choose their representatives to the 18th Lok Sabha. The country is awash in inflammatory rhetoric, some of it spewed by no less an eminence than the Prime Minister himself. The language used, and the tone and terms of his attacks on the Opposition, suggest an increasing desperation on the Government’s part after the first two phases have signalled that things are not going the way of the ruling party.
The writing has been on the wall for some time, but our media has been reluctant to see it. The public has simply not been given enough reasons to vote for the ruling party a third time. Those who put Mr Modi in office in 2014 expecting that he would generate new jobs have no reason to vote for him again when they still do not have a job. People are acutely conscious that they cannot afford to buy at the market the same items that they could a decade ago. A staggering 80% of our population has experienced a decline in its incomes since 2014. The aam aadmi’s purchasing power and household savings have collapsed.
These are the issues being reflected in the voting patterns so far. There may not be a strong “wave” for or against anyone but there is no enthusiasm for the powers-that-be either. The communalisation of political discourse is failing to create the desired polarisation and has been overused. Mr Modi’s omnipresence and bombast are beginning to leave most people indifferent – which in many ways is worse than the active dislike many already feel.
It seems increasingly clear that the BJP is losing seats everywhere, including in the Hindi-belt states it had dominated in 2019. In the last general elections, it had won every seat in six states, all but one seat in three states, and all but two in two states. In all these states the BJP has only one way to go – down. Even if it retains more than half of its seats, it is staring at the certainty that it will lose its majority in the Lok Sabha. Its humiliatingly unsuccessful efforts to woo the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha and the Akalis in Punjab, both of whom spurned the BJP’s entreaties, makes it clear that finding partners to shore them up will not be easy for the ruling party, which has specialised in offending every potential ally by its arrogance.
The corollary is that, even if the BJP emerges as the largest single party with between 175 and 210 seats (as some psephologists currently estimate), the INDIA Alliance will be in a position to form the government on June 4. Some profess alarm at the prospect of a collection of regional parties around a Congress-led nucleus. Let me remind them that this is precisely the combination that served the country so well between 2004 and 2014 as the United Progressive Alliance.
For those who balk at this alternative of what they see as an unwieldy coalition government in Delhi, let me remind them of what the BJP has wrought that only its defeat can undo:
- The Constitution is being hollowed out, without overtly changing it. Democratic institutions have either been misused or intimidated to an unprecedented degree by the Union government. The autonomy intended by the Constitution (and upheld in the first six and a half decades of democratic practice) of all essential institutions – the judiciary, especially the lower courts, the Election Commission, the Information Commission, the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, the civil service and even Parliament itself -- have been eroded. These institutions have been reduced to subservience, and proved reluctant to perform their duty when the government’s political interests were at stake: thus the Supreme Court did not hear the electoral bonds case for six years, nor the petitions on the EVM-based election method seeking greater VVPAT verification, nor the numerous habeas corpus and other cases filed after the abolition of Article 370 in 2019. At least with the SC in these cases, one can say “better late than never”. The other institutions have been less courageous. The Election Commission’s current inaction on complaints against the BJP’s star campaigners is an egregious example.
- The government has wielded its own agencies and bureaucratic institutions (notably the police and law enforcement agencies, the Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the National Investigation Agency, the Income Tax department) to serve the interests of the ruling party, including by pressurising or intimidating Opposition leaders and their supporters, coercing contributions from businesses to the ruling party, and toppling Opposition governments.
- The electronic and print media have been cajoled and cudgelled into acquiescing in the BJP’s propaganda, furthering its Hindutva agenda and creating an illusion of universal success for the government. Arrests and prosecutions of journalists, and the resort to surveillance software like the notorious Pegasus, have severely compromised individual privacy and freedom.
- For all the talk of “co-operative federalism”, our country’s Centre-State relations have never been worse. Governors have been weaponised to throttle Opposition State governments; ten state governments have been toppled in nine years; and the civility of past relationships across party lines has been abandoned.
- The economy is in disastrous shape as far as the vast majority of Indians is concerned. The wounds were self-inflicted. The demonetisation of 86% of India’s currency at four hours’ notice hit agriculture and destroyed livelihoods across all non-farm micro and small enterprises in the unorganised sector, which employ 90% of India’s workers. The botched implementation of GST, followed by the Covid pandemic with its over-stringent national lockdown also at four hours’ notice, also throttled the economy, reducing GDP. Despite two years of recovery, most Indians have not recovered their 2016 standards of living.
- Finally, let us not forget that the government’s mismanagement of the Covid pandemic killed 45 lakh Indians, that bodies were floated down the Ganga by people who could not afford to conduct cremations, and that vaccine certificates carried not our picture but the vainglorious Prime Minister’s – a stark reminder of who was personally responsible for our misfortunes.
This pattern of misconduct has been noticed abroad. During the Modi years, India has found itself the subject of “concerns” raised by, among others, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (on the treatment of minorities), the German foreign ministry (on press freedom), the UK (on the banning of a BBC documentary on Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom), the World Health Organization (on our government’s unconvincing estimate of India’s COVID-19 death toll), and the US State Department (on human rights generally). We have taken a beating on global indices, from the World Press Freedom Index (which ranks India 150 out of 180 countries) to the Global Hunger Index (which places us at 107 out of 121). India under Modi rule has also been downgraded in the World Bank’s report on Human Capital, the Freedom House Democracy Index (India is now down to “partly free”) and the well-known Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute’s classification of India as an “electoral autocracy.”
The Opposition is fighting to restore an India which will no longer be described internationally as an “electoral autocracy” and where all Indians, in Tagore’s immortal words, can enjoy freedom – an India where “the mind is without fear and the head is held high”. The voters have five more phases to make that India a reality again.
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Apr 28, 2024
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Few Takers for Modi's Bombast
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01.05.2024
As I write these words, two phases of the 2024 General Elections have been conducted, and some 190 constituencies have voted to choose their representatives to the 18th Lok Sabha. The country is awash in inflammatory rhetoric, some of it spewed by no less an eminence than the Prime Minister himself. The language used, and the tone and terms of his attacks on the Opposition, suggest an increasing desperation on the Government’s part after the first two phases have signalled that things are not going the way of the ruling party.
The writing has been on the wall for some time, but our media has been reluctant to see it. The public has simply not been given enough reasons to vote for the ruling party a third time. Those who put Mr Modi in office in 2014 expecting that he would generate new jobs have no reason to vote for him again when they still do not have a job. People are acutely conscious that they cannot afford to buy at the market the same items that they could a decade ago. A staggering 80% of our population has experienced a decline in its incomes since 2014. The aam aadmi’s purchasing power and household savings have collapsed.
These are the issues being reflected in the voting patterns so far. There may not be a strong “wave” for or against anyone but there is no enthusiasm for the powers-that-be either. The communalisation of political discourse is failing to create the desired polarisation and has been overused. Mr Modi’s omnipresence and bombast are beginning to leave most people indifferent – which in many ways is worse than the active dislike many already feel.
It seems increasingly clear that the BJP is losing seats everywhere, including in the Hindi-belt states it had dominated in 2019. In the last general elections, it had won every seat in six states, all but one seat in three states, and all but two in two states. In all these states the BJP has only one way to go – down. Even if it retains more than half of its seats, it is staring at the certainty that it will lose its majority in the Lok Sabha. Its........
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