The real winner in this Indian Lok Sabha election was democracy. And I personally couldn’t be happier. On both sides of the divide there were campaigns trying to undermine democracy. From the Indian side there was endless talk about how unfair the election was and how the Election Commission and the Election Commission were trying to ensure another stunning victory for Narendra Modi. Modi himself campaigned as if he was a man sent by God to save India, not an ordinary politician seeking mandates. The choice before the voter was between bad and even worse.
On the night of the results, the prime minister made his customary appearance at BJP headquarters to address party workers, who, as always, draped him with a huge garland of orchids. They showered him with rose petals as he walked onto the stage, and he tried to pretend he had made history as only the second man ever to be elected to three consecutive terms. But something had changed in his body language. He looked frail, as did Amit Shah and JP Nadda, who sat behind him on stage and tried to look happy.
The impact of what happened was so great that the BJP’s malicious social media trolls were momentarily speechless. And the party’s spokesmen on television appeared remorseful and humbled. This is a good thing. The BJP has flown too high and Modi has spoken too much about one nation, one leader and one people. Modi should know that this kind of talk is fine in an autocracy but not in a democracy. Hopefully, He will be sworn in for the third time tonight. You’ll remember that he didn’t really win.
On the other hand, it would have been heartening if we could have chosen from among real leaders. But what we have now is a collection of what Prashant Kishore calls “potted plants” because they all inherited their political careers from their fathers and mothers. They are an uninspiring bunch. And they are full of grievances who are always trying to denigrate Indian democracy. Rahul Gandhi has been claiming internationally and publicly for months that democracy is dead in India. And there have been endless complaints about EVM manipulation that ended as soon as it was realised they had done better than expected.
This election proved that Indian voters are smarter than our leaders. They deserve better. They deserve leaders who don’t try to divide voters along caste lines, and they deserve better than BJP leaders telling them that Muslims are a plague that needs to be eradicated. In his second term in power, Modi has shown that he is more interested in selling himself as India’s savior than he is in saving India. Somehow, everything he does is always about him. Because of him, 800 million Indians get free rations every month. Because of him, people have homes and clean drinking water (still not entirely). Because of him, rural Indians have toilets in their homes.
His problem was that he was surrounded by kowtowing ministers who lied to him about what was really being done. They didn’t tell him that at the bottom of the pyramid there are millions of very poor Indians who struggle to get two meals a day and don’t understand that huge amounts of money are being spent on roads and airports and the huge temple at Ayodhya, without anyone going out of their way to help them. These things appeal to middle-class Indians and wealthy Indians, but the problem is that to win an electoral majority you need the support of the people at the bottom who have nothing.
I have read many analyses of the election results and no one mentioned the migrants who were forced to walk hundreds of kilometers home because of PM Modi’s sudden and draconian lockdown. No one mentioned that horrible Covid summer when people were dying in hospitals due to lack of oxygen. Or how the Indian government did not order the vaccines we need to protect us from the pandemic. PM Modi being the good politician he is, he used the situation to his advantage by putting his picture on the certificates and conducting a mass free vaccination drive. A poll conducted by a leading magazine reports that people think the vaccination program is the best thing the Modi government has done.
Which people? That is the real question. If you polled the people who had to bury their dead in the sands of the Ganges, they might not have said that the Covid-19 response was a great success. As he takes his third oath of office, PM Modi would be wise to remember the real people of this country. He would be wise to remember a few other things too. He needs to stop making everything a Hindu-Muslim issue. It hasn’t worked. And he needs to get out of the circle of followers he surrounds himself with and remember that he is a normal politician, not a savior. Then he will be a better PM this time around.
© Indian Express Ltd.
First uploaded: September 6, 2024, 7:44 AM
