Doubts are already emerging can someone with the political makeup, pugilist outlook, and self-aggrandising tendencies of Modi be tempted to come in the way of the peaceful transfer of power.
Views may differ but let’s still not call it an election in a banana republic, where the man who calls the shots tries to ensure that his opponents are effectively put out of the race before it begins. However, if to the leader’s frustration the best laid plans fail, and the game does indeed manage to begin, then a peaceful transfer of power – should the situation surprisingly arise – is brought into question.
In less benign cases, of course, opponents vanish or are done away with, in a seeming accident or are openly attacked by armed men, who are mercenaries one way or another. In the end, the leader gets nearly all the votes, since a dummy contender typically also runs to foster the claim of a democracy.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
In perfectly benign cases, the leader wins handsomely anyway. Everything needed to produce such a result is programmed. Voters are conditioned to accept their fate. The authority that conducts the polls is in the government’s confidence.
India’s Lok Sabha elections underway may be said to be a variant of the second case – but in a way that makes it not quite a poll in a banana republic. Evidently, the desired outcome was carefully fleshed out. The poll authority was neatly rigged. The law was changed just months before the election process was to begin to ensure that those conducting the polls behave, stay within limits, and not offer even a hint that they were an independent constitutional authority, as they used to be.
The bank accounts of the main national opposition, the Congress, were frozen so that it may be prevented from doing any work at all, leave alone election work. Two opposition chief ministers were thrown into jail without trial, on accusations that raise questions about the government’s motives.
And, India’s version of the dreaded secret police of some countries – created here by the regime through the simple expedient of converting legitimate investigative authorities into praetorian guards of a corrupt autocracy through an inter-locking process that has subverted established institutions of governance of every kind, and made them bow to the wishes of a coterie who have the gumption to declare that they will be in power for 50 years.
This is a sterling performance by the standards of a dictatorship, but the protagonists did not contend with the people. India is composed of peoples of many languages, religions, cultures, customs and mores, social systems, and indeed social, cultural and political histories.
It is the struggle for independence from colonial rule that brought this diverse land mass together into a coherent system of political thought and action through the freedom movement, and then wove it into a cogent governance system through a sincerely – at times hotly – debated constitution which emphasises the importance of regions and states, and grasps the intrinsic value that attaches to religions, cultures and languages, and empowers them, while melding them in a federal structure.
Such a complex web has features that will resist the dictatorial tendencies of a party or leader as many kinds of parts make up the whole here, and these parts will not tolerate an imposed oneness.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ideological mentors understand this only too well, hence Modi’s frequent calls that, cleverly and hypocritically, and in the name of the country’s functional and emotional unity and strength, underline oneness of everything that falls within India’s boundaries – such as one nation-one election, one nation-one ration card, one nation-one supreme religion, in order to bring about a non-federal Hindu Rashtra as an initial step to more sweeping changes.
This has been lampooned as ‘one nation-one leader’– which indeed appears to be the unspoken ambition of the current leadership – and people are catching on. Such a belief and desire, when paired with untrammeled political power, can pave the way for a full-blown dictatorship – which is exactly what seems to be on the minds of the duo, trio, or quartet, which are at present riding high.
The likely shape and direction of such a regime, in which absolute power is made a plaything in the service of the richer classes, more specifically big business, will be that of a single party-single leader dictatorship.
Even the devout Hindu will then be forgotten, much to their chagrin as they would have expected Hindu Rashtra to be something else, a land of the Hindu pure of their imagination, much as Pakistan was advertised as a land of the Muslim pure by the big propertied classes of Muslims in order to attract the attention and support of the ordinary Muslim in undivided India.
(They were, incidentally, not fooled. Scholarly writing shows that the most enthusiastic participants and subscribers to the new country were a spectrum of the middle and upper classes, rather than the humbler folk. Ironically, something similar seems to be happening in the context of the call for a Hindu State being given by the Modi afficionado. )
The fascinating diversity of the Indian people is becoming an obstacle in Modi’s dream project. Various parts of the country have demonstrated their allegiance to their dominant regional parties. The more significant of these have agreed to be a part of a broad opposition umbrella, the INDIA grouping, conceived and operationalised at the behest of the Congress party with a specific aim – to push back and oust the Modi regime in order to turn the country away from the dangerous economic, social, cultural and political direction being imparted by Modi.
Congress leader and the party’s former president Rahul Gandhi, in his re-incarnated emergence, is widely seen to be the vigorous provider of the impetus that’s brought about this change, until very recently thought so unlikely an event that a third time Modi victory was being seen, across the country, as an inevitability – with few recognising the distinct possibility of such an event tilting the country in the direction of a dictatorship, and possibly even a fascist push, in the not distant future.
With wide sections of the people coming together, and broad sections of the political opposition coordinating its effort to challenge Modi’s policies across-the-board, and in light of the enthusiastic public response that has followed, as gauged from the political look of things with some two thirds of the polling done for the Lok Sabha election under way, serious doubts have surfaced even in the senior echelons of the ruling party, and the ruling establishment as a whole, to say nothing of the movers and shakers of the market and the economy itself.
The question then suggests itself: In such a sliding situation, can someone with the political makeup, pugilist outlook, and self-aggrandising tendencies of Modi, who has accumulated vast resources, some of it through means called “unconstitutional” by the Supreme Court, be tempted to come in the way of the peaceful transfer of power, if the poll outcome proves an undue setback?
For now, the answers may only be speculated, but one thing seems certain. It is not only Modi’s political opponents who will be doing the arithmetic, and the political sums, based on the poll outcome and the various scenarios and possibilities that may be thrown up, but also some of the leading lights of his own party or clique who may be eager to step into his shoes, forestalling the political opposition. Observers in India and around the world are likely to be setting up a watch.
Anand K. Sahay is a journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi.
After two consecutive terms in office, and in spite of the propaganda unleashed in the past 10 years through an ultra-favourable press, the country is face-to face with a leader who chooses petty politics as his core campaign material over his governmental record.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the ongoing Lok Sabha election is that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appears to be losing steam when the game still seems quite fresh. Only two rounds of polling have been completed and the party has high stakes, especially in the third phase on May 7 and to some degree in the fourth phase as well.
After that, however, the BJP’s rank and file may only have a flagging interest left.
Of course in the country’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, the election exercise carries on till the end. The state – which elects 80 MPs, the highest in the country – has been a BJP stronghold in recent times. But here’s the thing. Keen observers say that in the first two phases, a listlessness and an unwonted dispiritedness marked the camp of the saffron brotherhood which is known to take the load of the BJP’s electioneering.
This is being speculated because of the visibly lower voter mobilisation and turnout this time as compared to the 2019 general elections. The Election Commission data released after the polling showed voter participation in the first two phases was down 4-6% over 2019 in the key Hindi states where the BJP had won nearly 100% of the seats last time.
A spectacular win in the Hindi belt in 2019 had led the BJP to win 90% of the nearly 200 seats countrywide in which it clashed one-on-one with the Congress, which, by then, was depleted organisationally, principally on account of leadership shortcomings.
However, this time in the Hindi belt, a different ‘feel’ is being reported in states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh where the Congress and the BJP are pitted against one another, while in UP, Bihar, and Delhi, the opposition INDIA alliance parties are seen as meeting the BJP’s challenge squarely.
Are the BJP’s fortunes likely to receive a setback in the electorally vast Hindi zone?
Naturally, one should not read too much into the reported drop in the voting figures, which works out to tens of lakhs of voters not showing up.
It’s prudent to wait for the results and not go by preliminary data, even if dressed up as “approximate” by the poll body 10 days after the first voting. But the political disenchantment with the ruling dispensation is hard to miss in areas where the saffron party had reaped its ripest harvest in 2019.
Across the Hindi heartland, there is fear among the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and the Extremely Backward Caste (EBC) groups about reservation benefits. They fear that the BJP would significantly alter the constitution, which is the source of their rights and reservation benefits in education and employment.
In Bihar, for instance, where chief minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) is partnering with the BJP, the “social justice” party seems less than enthusiastic to bend its energies to support the BJP campaign on account of the increasing anxiety among people that it will scrap reservation if it had a two-thirds majority in parliament.
In light of the message regarding the constitution, it is no surprise that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah, defence minister Rajnath Singh, BJP president J.P. Nadda, and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, are now speaking in concert to retrieve what they can. Much is at stake.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the BJP had secured 47% of the Dalit vote, a big jump compared even to 2009. Since the 1992 Ayodhya campaign, a sizeable section of the OBCs and EBCs have voted for the BJP for a variety of state-level considerations. If this trend is even partially reversed, the electoral gradient is likely to become steeper for the ruling party. No wonder, the BJP is going all out to assuage anxieties.
And yet, the buzz won’t go away that the BJP is likely to drop a chunk of its seats from its most crucial election zone and cannot make up for the loss outside the Hindi belt. A noted psephologist-politician has gone to the extent of going on record about the ruling party taking a noteworthy hit in UP.
While we must await overall data to reach a firm conclusion, it will be unwise to imagine that the rising summer temperatures have deterred BJP’s voters, as some are saying in the political circles. The Hindu has published figures that put paid to the facile assumption.
Against this backdrop, anything beyond a marginal (or correctional) bumping up of the official polling figures from what was initially given out is apt to raise eyebrows, not least when the figures for the total electors in a constituency are being suspiciously held back. Voter preference manipulation begins to look likely in such unusual circumstances.
Unease, therefore, continues to persist among the public and in political circles about the late publication of the polling data for the first two phases.
This unease stems from the fact that the Election Commission is nominated by the government after the change in law last November regarding the constitution of the panel to determine the EC’s composition.
If the EC itself derives from a questionable provenance, how will its actions not be in the arc of suspicion, unless demonstrably shown to be otherwise? Regrettably, on a range of issues, such as letting the prime minister’s communal remarks in election speeches go unchecked, the EC has failed to live up to its glory in the days of T.N. Seshan and James Michael Lyngdoh.
Far from being ‘normal’, as noted in certain quarters, the election underway is shot through with another striking oddity. Never before in 75 years have we seen a prime minister acting so slippery, seeking to change the narrative in the long election season every few days, quite literally.
There seems to be no principal narrative, no subordinate narrative, but a succession of dodge-and-weave manoeuvres, going to the extent of falsifying elements of the published manifesto of the Congress party with casual nonchalance, without the EC batting an eyelid. This is accompanied with a sustained communal barrage of petty points and laughable personal attacks on the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and his family, going back generations.
Modi is perhaps only living up to his reputation and potential for vituperation, which is perhaps recognised better inside his own party than outside. His equanimity has evidently been disturbed by the fairly effective coming together of the INDIA bloc in spite of early hiccups. This was not the case in the previous two elections.
After two consecutive terms in office, and in spite of the propaganda unleashed in the past 10 years through an ultra-favourable press, the country is face-to face with a leader who chooses petty politics as his core campaign material, ignoring his governmental record. This is an oddity difficult to reconcile with the dictates of democratic governance and the tradition in democracies.
Anand K. Sahay is a journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi.
The counter-revolution has been in the making for a considerable time, though this wasn’t quite realised as events unfolded. However, it’s important that the highest court and institutions intervene when needed.
From the soundings an observer may take just before the first polling for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls on April 19, politically, the chips look to be down for the ruling clique. This could be the perfect trigger to energise the processes that add up to the staging of a counter-revolution against the Constitution of India – meaning democratic order and its values and virtues, even if these have come under frequent strain in India.
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, adding energy and speed to that process is needed even if he falls prey to his own propaganda that the polls are a cakewalk for him. He can take no chances and must quell every obstacle in his path – and there are many.
The truth is that the election is far from being a done deal, although that is the refrain of the mainline media.
It can now be seen that the counter-revolution has been in the making for a considerable time, though this wasn’t quite realised as events unfolded. People tended to attribute dangerous, egregious and extreme approaches, and the relentlessness of communal politics and polarisation, to a zealot’s bigotry.
But, under the surface, the leader was aiming to win religion-based majoritarian sanction from the populace for a longer-term project.
Lately, some BJP leaders have said that the objective of jettisoning the constitution can only be realised if the Modi-led BJP returns with something like 400 seats in a Lok Sabha of 543 – a goal which the prime minister adverts frequently.
The media has been overpowered and made to kowtow and facilitate the spread of propaganda and hide the truth. Criminal laws were changed to suit regime objectives. Staggering sums of party funds were collected from the electoral bonds scheme, declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court after an unconscionable delay.
The destination of the PM CARES fund, which the government has placed beyond scrutiny, may only be speculated about until an impartial inquiry reveals the insides of this mystery-filled coffer.
An important manifestation of the deeper ideological processes underway is the pampering of the ultra rich in the Modi raj and the tilting of the policy balance in their favour.
The direct support and influence of this class will need to be harnessed, especially in the evolution period of the regime after the 2024 poll, should Modi secure a third consecutive term with a constitution-bending majority.
Without that support, the counter-revolutionary outcome runs the risk of collapse, as it does not seem to enjoy people’s trust.
Therefore, people’s trust has to be manufactured, as if by a machine tool corporation or its electronic counterpart. Crucial to this enterprise is the nominated Election Commission of India (ECI), charged with the superintendence and conduct of the election.
This new brand, regrettably still called the ECI, was brought into being by changing the law to enable the government to have a majority in the selection panel.
By any measure of assessment, the much-vaunted ECI, once admired around the world, has been rendered hollow and turned into an adjunct of the Modi sarkar. There were many things wrong with the ECI before the advent of the ‘bulldog of democracy’, T.N. Seshan. However, none of these could be said to be a part of the toolkit to overturn the democratic system in the country.
But it seems clear that the ECI in its present avatar will henceforth be required to berate the opposition parties, overlook their harassment at the hands of the government and its coercive agencies, ignore their valid complaints while flagrantly favouring the governing party, and further disenfranchise larger segments of voters who threaten not to fall in line – in short, do everything to make the poll process one-sided and asymmetric.
At the level of instrumentality, it is the electronic voting machine (EVM) that will be the ECI’s go-to accessory. It is widely suspected to not accurately reflect, and to distort the outcome of, the vote in favour of the establishment in New Delhi through the manipulation of the VVPAT – the paper trail.
For some eight months, the ECI has refused to hear opposition parties on this complaint, and is going about as if everything was normal and that there was full public satisfaction with the EVM system.
The matter has landed before the Supreme Court at this late stage.
Casualness by all concerned is on display here. When the case is due to be heard next on April 16, the first polling on April 19 will be only three days away. The people of India must watch in anxiety, for the time seems too little for effective intervention unless a radical course can be conceived.
Meanwhile, Indians have reason to wonder if they are destined to be presented with the fait accompli of a counter-revolution to democracy for want of timely and effective intervention by the highest court in the most urgent business imaginable. The regime’s record in the protection and upkeep of democratic values and culture is a sorry one – and that written all over it is the making of a totalitarian, one-party state with core values that favour a dharma sansad or a religious leadership council, rather than institutions to protect personal liberty and a secular, liberal state.
There is a strong flavour here of Integral Humanism espoused by Deendayal Upadhyay, a former president of the Jana Sangh – the BJP’s parent – who is the Sangh parivar’s lodestar in matters of politico-philosophy.
The instruments are stacked in the government’s favour – the institutions of governance have been subverted, civil society has been made to cower through tactics of intimidation, the supposedly independent mainstream media conducts itself as an extension of the regime and the ruling party, and the opposition is being reviled on an everyday basis and its senior figures jailed.
The enormity of the threat posed to democracy at such a conjuncture can hardly be minimised.
For the government, however, this was the perfect launch pad for a sweeping poll victory, enabling it to amend or mangle the present constitution, born in the crucible of anti-colonial struggle, in order to meet the needs of authoritarian or fascist power – depending on the exigencies.
But the regime seems surprisingly insecure and fearful.
Therefore, it is likely to do what it takes to be determined about executing its counter-revolutionary vision and agenda – and to win the election at any cost in order to be able to do so.
It is important for the top judiciary to retreat from its past lackadaisical framework.
The reasons for the government’s nervousness are understandable. Quite separate from the very poor economic performance in the ten years under the present prime minister – to wit, the worst unemployment data in 40 years, the worst household savings figures suggesting acute financial distress at the level of the family, the untamed prices of essentials, widespread dissatisfaction in agriculture and the rural economy, and with the employment-generating small and medium enterprises sector going to the wall on account of policies aimed at pampering big businesses – the political picture emerging in the recent months is apt to fill the ruling party with worry.
The BJP’s efforts at corralling regional parties to partner with it as subsidiary allies in the election has come a cropper by and large, the most conspicuous case being that of the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha where its leader, chief minister Naveen Patnaik, first nodded ‘yes’ to Modi and then left him high and dry.
It is unusual to see the “all powerful leader” being stood up who, in January, had the temerity to have a photo issued (hastily withdrawn) which showed him leading Ram Lalla (the child Ram) to his partially constructed temple in Ayodhya.
In Bihar, as a ‘catch’, chief minister Nitish Kumar may in fact prove a negative factor as he has morphed into a jelly-like figure with no spine left and has become a butt of condescension.
The much enfeebled Telugu Desam Party leader Chandrababu Naidu has gratefully accepted a deal with Modi in Andhra Pradesh, but what the BJP gains from this is unclear.
In Karnataka, a bargain with the Janata Dal (Secular) is causing anguish to leaders and the rank and file in both parties.
In Maharashtra, there is a revolt of sorts brewing in the Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena. This faction had manipulated all the institutions of the land with the Modi-Shah benediction to grab the state government from Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray.
In Tamil Nadu, even the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam factions have decided against partnering with the Modi regime.
In Haryana, the BJP’s old allies have departed.
In Uttar Pradesh, Modi gave the Bharat Ratna to Chaudhary Charan Singh in exchange for the support of his grandson Jayant Chaudhary, who ditched a done deal with the INDIA bloc to grasp the BJP’s hand.
However, the disgruntled Jat farmers of western UP, who form Jayant’s core base, are not amused.
Much depends on the top court at this late stage, but what can it do to prevent the country sleep-walking into a counter-revolution? Photo: Pinakpani/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
For Modi, the pre-poll alliance scene looks bleak. Willing regional allies were Modi’s strong suit in 2019. After the stage-managed and dramatised Pulwama-Balakot affair (as lately disclosed in public pronouncements by former J&K governor Satyapal Malik), the regional entities had rushed to grasp Modi’s hand.
This time around, the regime looks friendless. This highlights the leader’s declining graph. Outside of the Hindi belt, his hunting grounds have shrunk. Is the EVM magic going to answer his prayers?
In contrast, the BJP’s INDIA alliance opponents have held together practically everywhere, though they were jeered and mocked by the prime minister and his coteries and the mainline media, and harassed on a daily basis by oppressive arms of the state in the shape of the Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau of Investigation, and others.
The arrest of chief ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Hemant Soren, and under Income Tax pressure, the freezing of the bank accounts of the Congress party, the regime’s ideologically significant opponent, proved to be a galvanizing factor for Modi’s political opponents. It also played a role in swaying world opinion that something strange was happening in democratic India before the national election.
The arrest of chief ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Hemant Soren, and under income tax department’s pressure, the freezing of the bank accounts of the Congress party, the regime’s ideologically significant opponent, proved to be a galvanising factor for Modi’s political opponents and in swaying world opinion that something strange was happening in democratic India before the national election.
Evidently under international pressure – with adverse comments emanating from Germany, the US and even the UN – the regime has backtracked a little for now. The clamps have been removed from the Congress accounts, but with the threat that coercive action will re-commence after the election. A prominent opposition leader has been released on bail after many months.
Much depends on the top court at this late stage, but what can it do to prevent the country sleep-walking into a counter-revolution? This is an onus of unbearable severity on a single institution.
However, what’s pretty clear should not be done in the name of correcting the malady is to increase the sample size of VVPATs at a polling booth for examination to a statistically significant level, as goes a well-meaning suggestion advanced from respectable quarters.
The whole point of dissatisfaction is that the votes are not always registered for the party for which they are cast by pressing a button on the EVM. The point is: how to change the method in order to convince voters that the election system will honestly reflect their choice and that there is no jiggery-pokery?
It simply is of no consequence that the counting time for votes will have to be extended. The aim is to have a clean election for a healthy democracy, not a vote count in record time.
Anand K. Sahay is a journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi.
Why so? Because Watergate was not about fundamentally altering the political system of democracy in the US, as seems to be the case in the instance of the Indian government preventing the Congress party from using its own funds to fight the upcoming national election.
As derail democracy projects go, the Watergate scandal of the early ‘70s, which forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon, is exceeded in its egregious import by the blockade imposed on Congress party funds by the Narendra Modi regime four weeks before national elections. This seems plausibly a part of a wider plan to ensure a thumping victory at any cost for the Modi regime in the upcoming Lok Sabha election, so as to enable it to and take a shot at changing the look of India’s constitutional democracy.
In the Watergate affair in Washington DC, revelations showed the Nixon administration sanctioned the burglary and stealing of sensitive political information from the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters. After the defeat of fascism in the Second World War, this was the first instance of putting election processes out of kilter in the world’s most important democracy.
A major Hollywood film brought the disgraceful Watergate saga to viewers around the world, underlining what unscrupulous rulers could do to retain power even in an advanced democracy such as the US.
But Watergate was not about fundamentally altering the political system of democracy in the US, as seems to be the case in the instance of the Indian government preventing the Congress party from using its own funds to fight the upcoming national election.
The Congress is the largest and the most significant national opposition party in the world’s largest democracy, and is historically credited with ushering in non-discriminatory parliamentary democracy of the Westminster type after leading the effort to end colonial rule through a non-violent national upsurge that came to fruition 77 years ago. India’s case has been an example to the world, especially at a time when the footprint of autocracies is expanding around the globe.
The roll-back of the democratic ethos in India could seal the fate of fledgling democracies outside of Western Europe and the US, and possibly in parts of the former too where atavistic tendencies seem to be on the rise.
Bully tactics against the Congress that ab initio mar its chances of giving Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party an effective fight at the head of a national coalition suggest that the ruling clique would stop at nothing to keep its hold on power. Deploying corrupt political practices, and the indiscriminate use of various questionable devices to disrupt parties and discredit opponents with a view to putting them out of the race, seem par for the course in India these days.
The brazen government effort to stop the Congress from contesting the election effectively comes along with a bunch of moves, including the imprisonment of opposition chief ministers on corruption charges that appear to be of dubious intent, aimed at changing the basic schema of India’s election process while retaining the formal panoply of things.
Topping these is the recent change of legislation to appoint an Election Commission (EC) which can no longer be deemed independent as appointments were made after the new law took effect. In any meaningful way, this change in law can only be interpreted as a lunge by the Modi dispensation to win a third consecutive term at any cost to legislatively enable it to make effective changes to the Constitution in a politically authoritarian direction and ideologically aimed at diminishing India’s minorities and curbing their civic space.
It is not without significance that for the past eight months, far from seeking to assuage the opposition parties, the EC has blocked their efforts for a meeting to discuss widespread suspicions among the people about the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) not recording their vote accurately, and favouring the ruling party instead.
Election held under the superintendence of the present EC cannot be deemed to be free, fair and transparent by any acceptable definition of democratic practice. In the conduct of the last parliament election in 2019, the previous EC, under its chief Sunil Kumar, was also mired in controversies on account of ignoring opposition parties’ complaints and blatant favours shown to the Modi regime, enabling it to surpass its win of 2014. However, the constitution of the Commission had been under an independent process and the opposition parties had to lump it when their vociferous objections went unaddressed.
In the Indian Constitution, the EC is a constitutional authority, much like the Supreme Court. The poll watchdog has to be guaranteed total independence to shield the process of elections for the national and state legislatures and keep it uncontaminated from governmental control in any form. Disregarding this requirement, the Narendra Modi government has not demurred from dropping the Chief Justice of India from the selection panel for Chief Election Commissioner and two Election Commissioners who make up the EC, and loading it with government ministers.
The latest and most dramatic of government actions to dispirit the opposition is the arrest on March 24 of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, the founder of the Aam Admi Party (AAP), once a political adversary and now a Congress ally in INDIA, the opposition front cobbled together to defeat the ruling party’s perceived design to push for a religion-based, majoritarian order and foist authoritarian rule with the undisguised aid of big capital and its international financial and political allies.
According to the Association for Democratic Reforms, political parties registered with the Election Commission of India are exempt from paying income tax under Section 13A of the Income Tax Act, 1961 although they are required to file annual returns and a statement of income and expenditure.
All of Congress’s 11 bank accounts have been frozen, with the Income Tax Department discovering in the weeks and months before the Lok Sabha polls that the party has received unaccounted money. India’s largest opposition has thus been crippled with the Lok Sabha election season unrolling. In fact, it is mind-boggling that tax demands with penalty should go back to the 1990s. Typically, all parties have traditionally collected donations from individuals and companies. In the absence of state funding of elections, there can be no other way.
The Electoral Bonds Scheme introduced by the Modi government seven years ago was found by the Supreme Court to be “unconstitutional” in a recent order, although the top court had declined to stay the dubious EB scheme shortly after it was launched.
It is now being revealed through careful journalistic work by relatively small news organisations that companies that have routinely been raided by the government have then been into paying the BJP through election bonds, and big favours and contracts, and favourable policy changes, have been granted to corporate entities that funded the ruling party through this channel.
The ruling BJP, with its bulging coffers that represent magnitudes probably way larger than the incomes of all other parties taken together, does not pay income tax. Leave alone the Congress, any official move to trouble any registered party on the tax front stinks, given BJP’s election bonds-related activities which appear to be blowing up into being the country’s biggest ever political and financial scandal.
In spite of its numerous organisational weaknesses which have led to poor electoral performance in recent times, the Congress party is the RSS and BJP’s biggest ideological adversary and bug-bear on the national level. In spite of sustained efforts to harass it, the party continues to command over a fifth of the national vote.
Small wonder that when he came on the scene in 2014, Modi had made it his mission to make India “Congress-mukt” or free of the Congress. That project seems to be in gallop mode on the eve of the 2024 parliament election. The rulers seem to have got a scare with Rahul Gandhi’s two journeys across the length and breadth of the country which have been met with rising popular enthusiasm, discomfiting the regime.
For the parliamentary election to be credible this time, Congress’s frozen bank accounts need to be restored and all income tax proceedings kept in abeyance till the polls are over, arrested chief ministers of Delhi and Jharkhand (on the eve of his arrest, the latter CM had quit his position) released forthwith, Enforcement Directorate, CBI and IT proceeding dropped against opposition leaders at least for now, and opposition demands as regards EVMs met without delay. In short, vendetta against political opponents must end.
Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator based in New Delhi.
The pilgrim, the true Ram devotee, stands stupefied by the sights and high-decibel tawdry sounds of a construction and religious tourist capitalism in the first gear.
The mystique of religion flounders here; spirituality hurries to take a back seat in New India’s new Ayodhya. Today the most striking visual of that ancient town where the devout have thronged for centuries can said to be unabashed contractor capitalism running hard to make it count in case the bubble bursts all too soon.
Unseen hands of contractors and management from the state of Gujarat appear to be just about everywhere in the jobs to be executed, overriding local sentiment, with the river Sarju as a mute witness. On its banks are now moored cruise boats for the anticipated rush of the fancy tourist, not the paddle boats of the humble Kewat, the tribe of fisherfolk and boatmen who once had the ear of Lord Ram, the King of Ayodhya, as the Ramayan suggests.
Although this cannot be formally acknowledged, it is quite plain that the sovereign body in Ayodhya is not the government of Uttar Pradesh – even if the chief minister is a mahant (Hindu priest) – but the Sri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust or SRJTK. It is an autonomous body created in 2020 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s guidance in line with the Supreme Court ruling of November 2019 which handed over the title of the land under the demolished Babri mosque to the same set that was castigated by the apex court in sharp terms for destroying the mosque.
This trust is charged with overseeing the construction of the Ram temple around the site of the former Babri Masjid, pulled down with human hands in 1992 by surcharged mobs high on the opium of religion and guided by the BJP’s then top leadership. It is also entrusted with the improvement of Ayodhya with an eye to turning it into a Hindu Vatican or Mecca and a mammoth tourist attraction. Bulging tourism revenue is on the government’s and Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s mind.
VHP vice-president Champat Rai is the SRJTK general secretary and calls the shots in the new temple’s management. The VHP is an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The most influential entity for Ayodhya, however, is the chairman of the construction committee of the SRJTK, Nripendra Misra. He served as the principal secretary to the prime minister in his first term and is now serving, in post-retirement capacity, a post of exceeding importance which involves dealing with the country’s top engineering and consultancy firms rather extensively. In effect, Modi’s PMO runs Ayodhya, a very special project high on the regime’s ideological and potential revenue-index.
The sums projected are impressive. According to a Mint report of January 23, the brokerage Jefferies “has recently estimated that a $ 10 billion makeover of Ayodhya with a new airport, revamped railway station, township and road connectivity will likely drive a multiplier effect with new hotels and other economic activities. It could attract 50 million tourists a year.” Activities under the Ayodhya Masterplan have a time horizon that extends to 2031. Real estate is the name of the game. It has rarely had it so good.
There is probably no way to test such an exuberant projection, but context helps. Agra’s world famous Taj Mahal nets some six million tourists annually in contrast, and there are other sites of historical and architectural wonder in its vicinity. If Ayodhya were to raise eight or 10 times that number, it will probably have to upstage the tourist arrivals of several leading international destinations taken together.
Faizabad district – now renamed Ayodhya in a burst of religiosity – with its principal town of the same name, was the original seat of the Oudh (Awadh) nawabs, who later transferred themselves to Lucknow. The city thus has a flavour of that past. Otherwise, the entire district and those around it constitute the agricultural hinterland of this region of Uttar Pradesh. In this backwater, industry (MSME and large included) has an annual turnover of under Rs 25 crore, according to relatively recent data of Union MSME ministry, and a workforce of about 30,000. A generally poor area has been dragged into the 21st century, as is the story in most of India.
Can a standalone, modern temple of a particular faith, thus lacking universal appeal, in a relatively less developed part of the country, sustain the massive multiplier effect projections that are based on international tourist arrivals, presumably made up in large measure of well-heeled NRIs? Fancy hotels, glittering airport, and a very modern large railway facility, in a backward region that may offer little demand support, appear somewhat incongruous.
The government has drummed up support to transport people to Ayodhya from various parts of the country in the weeks following the Ram temple consecration by Modi on January 22. The buzz is that ruling party MPs ad MLAs have been assigned quotas to send to Ayodhya.
The railways have laid out fast trains called “Astha” (faith) specials. Many passengers seem genuinely simple, religious folk, others like mobilised political cadres. Members of a VHP group from western India said each of them paid Rs 1,800/- for the train journey both ways and one day’s stay in a comfortable tent city, erected to meet the needs of state-inspired religiosity. The railways have slashed all concessions in fares, including for senior citizens. But the neo-pilgrims mobilized for the Ayodhya campaign appear to have benefited from moderated fares. Hundreds of trains are expected to run till the end of the financial year.
Probably the most conspicuous local grumble this writer encountered during a recent visit to Ayodhya concerned the contractors. Perhaps this was a more vocal grumble than the vociferous complaints of people’s homes and small businesses bulldozed to widen roads in the entire temple complex of Ayodhya.
We came across guards of a security company from Gujarat called “Kavach” charged with managing a section of the river ghat. According to one complaint, even labour (who appeared to be tribal people) were transported from Gujarat to work on some cable-laying beneath roads. Has Uttar Pradesh exhausted its capacity to supply even the basics to mount an effort to modernise itself? The question and its implication hangs in the air.
Guided to its final moments on January 22, Modi inaugurated an unfinished temple, practically on the eve of the national elections, with a rousing speech linking religion with nation in the presence of India’s business, film, and sports stars. Those who were noticeably absent were the ordinary Ram devotees of the ancient town of Ayodhya. The project that surreptitiously commenced in 1949 with the insertion of an idol of Ram inside a 500-year old mosque was at last complete.
History reminds us that Hitler too had ordered a “one thousand year Reich”. But where does this leave Ram? This is a moment of small triumph for political Hinduism – the unveiling of the unfinished temple, touted in BJP’s national convention in New Delhi last month as a singular “achievement”, an unleashing of the (doubtless Hindu) nation’s “consciousness”, a harbinger of “one thousand years of Ram Rajya”.
The story of Ram is traditionally cherished in every Hindu home. His love of all beings, his poise even in war, his thoughtfulness for his people, even at the expense of disregarding his wife Seeta, his glowing beauty, and the beauty of his actions which gets culturally underlined as the metric for performance of duty, are celebrated as popular theatre in the form of Ramaleela across the villages, towns and cities of North India.
In recognition of this, the Muslim poet and future philosopher of Pakistan, Mohammed Iqbal, had given on Ram the title of Imam-e-Hind. That Ram appears to have gone missing in Ayodhya in the time of Modi.
The pilgrim, the true Ram devotee, apt to have been brought up to conjure the gentle, almost boy-like, divine image of Ram in the manner made immortal by the sage Valmiki in his Ramayan (probably around 2000 years ago), or the much later Ramcharitmanas of Goswami Tulsi Das (late 16th century), stands stupefied by the sights and high-decibel tawdry sounds of a construction and religious tourist capitalism in the first gear.
In an article, Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram, theatre scholar Anuradha Kapur writes: “Icons seek to represent what are believed to be the essential features of a deity. Traditional iconography tended to represent Ram, Janani and Lakshman smiling serenely. Emblematically, the figures represented tranquility, compassion, the shanta rasa. The images now available…Whatever else it might be, the rasa in these images is not shanta. [But] so far as iconographical features are concerned, there are certain commonalities of representation…..what these several Rams share are the attributes of a sympathetic god, attributes which are his alone….he is serene and ever-forgiving; he is ever-youthful, boyish almost, with a conspicuous lack of masculine power; and yet, he is the lord of the universe, the maryada purushottam.”
The pilgrim cannot but also regard with some anxiety – and with thoughts of deviation from the path – the New Ram in the New Ayodhya of New India, presented on the new walls as murals depicting a ferocious Hindu warrior, possibly even a hunter, the defender of a ferocious nationalism. In 21st century India, is Ram going to be cyclostyled as a politician?
Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator based in New Delhi.
Despite securing his chief minister’s post, Nitish Kumar now wears a crown of thorns. It is the young Tejashwi Yadav who stands to gain to position himself as the real alternative to a growing BJP in Bihar.
On sober reflection, after ditching the Rashtriya Janata Dal-led Mahagathbandhan and switching back to the BJP’s side just before the upcoming parliament election, in an opportunistic move that brought him widespread opprobrium, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar may find that his side of the ledger is now wholly in the red – and that it is the BJP which is in the driver’s seat.
This is as far as the NDA goes, not the overall politics of Bihar. In the wider politics of the state, it is the young Tejaswi Yadav, RJD leader and until recently the deputy chief minister, who has emerged yet again as the icon of the youth. Tejaswi has come to mean the harbinger of jobs.
In the Assembly election of 2020, the young Yadav, then still wet behind his ears, had run a high-voltage campaign, promising jobs. He came up trumps, leading his party to the number one position in the legislature, with the BJP a very close second. Nitish Kumar was a distant third, after having been comprehensively undermined by the BJP through Chirag Pawan, the ambitious but in many ways hamstrung son of the late LJP leader Ramvilas Pawan.
In 2020, Nitish fared distinctly worse than in 2015 when he had partnered RJD, then led by the redoubtable Laloo Yadav, pushing the BJP to the third spot. Tejaswi delivered the goods practically single-handedly in 2020. His stalwart father was in prison. Fortunately for the army of the Bihar unemployed, Tejaswi, as the deputy CM, also delivered on jobs – recruiting some four lakh youth. This is important political capital. It is the subject of conversation in the state.
Tejashwi Yadav. Photo: X (Twitter)/@yadavtejashwi
The BJP and its dreadfully opportunistic – and stale – ally Nitish do not have an effective counter. The Modi regime at the Centre was extravagant on job promises, but has not much to show on that count in its ten years in office. In Nitish’s long innings as CM, the record is, if anything, worse. The issue is likely to matter in the Lok Sabha election, which is around the corner, and in the state Assembly polls too.
These are due next year but the speculation is that Nitish would like it this year so that he can continue being CM since it is amply clear to him that, in the company of the BJP, he is out of the race for Prime Minister – his long-nurtured ambition. The BJP has evidently gone along with the idea of early state polls in order to make him defect. Some think this factor was a key reason for Nitish’s somersault.
When he was in the mahagathbandhan with RJD and Congress, it was all too clear that the deputy CM would take over from the CM at the first opportunity and the CM will make a bid for PM. Nitish’s shelf life as CM was rapidly shrinking. Nitish leaving the opposition INDIA alliance in a hurry, in a volte face of comical proportions, owes to the fact that some elements in that grouping – such as Mamata Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal – had negative interest in the Bihar CM angling for PM, and they made this plain at a meeting of the alliance principals.
We don’t know whether the plan is to hold the Assembly election along with the parliament polls. But no matter when the state election is held, the BJP is likely to push for its own CM and not this time prop up a politician whose brand value has long faded. This will amount to double-crossing Nitish, though such a manoeuvre no longer appears to carry a cost.
Bihar is the only major state in North India where there has never been a BJP chief minister, although the party has a sizeable urban base. Overall, it has grown on a sustained basis. Therefore, its ambition may not be wholly misplaced, although the RJD under Tejaswi, with Laloo Yadav as talisman, remains Bihar’s first party with a sturdy social base and sturdy allies in the Congress and all shades of Left.
As voting blocs go, Nitish’s biggest loss would be the loss of the Muslim support this time around. At 15 to 16 per cent of the state population, the Muslim voter is important. For a variety of reasons, it respected Nitish earlier in spite of his association with BJP and voted for his party’s candidates. That period seems to be historically over. The absence of a substantial chunk of traditional support can raise questions among other supporters whether they should waste their vote on Nitish’s party. EBC for instance, a section of which (for example, the Koeris) are already linked to BJP, are evidently Nitish’s hoped for catchment area – but this time around their allegiance is unlikely to be fully assured.
On January 28, CM Nitish Kumar dived into bed with BJP and is already thought to be having difficulties. The two BJP deputy CMs named may be seen as having the least affection for him (past angst) among the BJP leaders of Bihar. There should be no surprise if a section of Nitish’s JD(U) defects to the BJP, finding no purchase in being on the losing CM’s side. Something similar could hold for some Lohia followers who may find greater appeal in RJD, given the overall situation. Altogether a difficult time for the CM of Bihar. He does indeed wear a crown of thorns.
Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator based in New Delhi.
There is a stark difference between the Ram of Tulsi and the Ram of Modi and his RSS cohorts who invite an assembly of some of the wealthiest Indians to witness the inauguration of the temple of Lord Ram in Ayodhya.
A state-sponsored temple to Lord Ram may have been inaugurated in Ayodhya on January 22, but the show was, really speaking, dedicated to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the chief patron or yajman – with Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat also brought in to fill the photo frame.
Adityanath quite simply could not have been kept out the way other BJP-RSS bigwigs were. If excluded, he has enough firepower to be able to cause trouble and Modi is well aware of this. They tried to push him out after Covid ended but had to beat a hasty retreat.
A truce was struck, else the result of the 2022 Assembly polls in UP could have looked uncertain for the BJP. A below par outcome in that large state had the potential to prejudice the party’s standing nation-wide, specially the image of the half man-half God of the ruling party’s pantheon. Adityanath’s power cannot be trifled with in UP. He has state power as well as the power of his Praetorian guard, the Hindu Yuva Vahini, behind him.
As for Bhagwat, he does, after all, head the lathi-wielding, millions strong RSS volunteer force although he is a wholly non-charismatic figure. Modi is known to treat him shabbily, but is aware that the BJP election machinery is run on the strength of RSS cadres. BJP cadres, such as they are, lack the RSS’s experience, ideological agility and guile honed over the decades.
The reasons may only be guessed at but Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP chief J.P. Nadda, as well as L. K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, dutifully kept away from the function lest they become distractions, underlining the wholly political nature of the event, designed meticulously to project the exalted one in the run-up to the national election. Advani, especially might have been a special draw. It was his rath yatra of 1990- in which Modi had played a part from the wings as a hewer of wood and drawer of water that set the stage for Monday’s temple inauguration.
The cult of personality has been in full bloom for some time but on Monday it reached its apogee. Underlining the loss of the vaunted neutrality and non-political nature of India’s armed forces, the Indian Air Force was made to shower flower petals on the pseudo-religious event.
One thing looks certain: had the Prime Minister not been the master of ceremonies, and were the event genuinely religious in nature, catch the likes of the Bachans and other Bollywood stars, the Ambanis, the Tendulkars showing up in dusty old Uttar Pradesh.
After Monday’s event, Modi has become at once temporal and spiritual authority, the Dalai Lama or the medieval era Pope, casting aside the Constitution of India which lamely still proclaims itself a “secular” republic in which the state has no favoured religion.
Modi’s actions will rub off down the line, on the Union government, all BJP-run state governments, and the dozens of uncivil civil society organizations nurtured or spawned during Modi rule that kill, burn, bulldoze at will, with the acquiescing silence of the Prime Minister.
Modi is matchless when he hits the stage, and he has now cultivated a swagger as well. His preening was on display as he walked toward the sanctum sanctorum and while walking back after prostrating himself before the deity installed on Monday. He pushes in every garb he dons, but most of all the saffron robe, which is the dog-whistle to mobilize people of a certain faith (and usually also against another faith).
In his first term in office, when he first visited Nepal as PM, he dressed in saffron as the Hindu Pope might, and carried with him tons of sandalwood for the famous Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu. But the state of Nepal rebuffed his Hindu bait; they wanted state-to-state relations, not entente between predominantly Hindu countries. In any case, no state runs on religion. Religion is always only a trick to grab and keep power – a “dikhawa” as they say in Hindi, to dupe the people.
Modi’s saffron robes were on view at the temple of Kedarnath in 2019 as news cameras clicked and videos rolled while the Prime Minister of India meditated. The robes were also seen when Modi performed puja when the new Parliament building was inaugurated. Puja, religious clothing, mythological referencing have become the middle name of this prime minister.
In this scheme, Parliament is no longer a place to deliberate and legislate but to carry out the wishes of the maharaj who is also rajrishi, to flaunt the PM as the natural leader of the Hindus of India, “the Sole Spokesman” to borrow Ayesha Jalal’s description of Jinnah. Ambedkar would have blanched at the puja stunt. Nehru would have thrown an angry fit and called in the police to remove the impostor. Gandhi may have sighed, whispering “Hey Ram!” and sat on fast to end the tamasha.
But we know the end result of that Parliament House puja: 146 opposition MPs suspended for showing the temerity to ask questions of the government when the security of Parliament was compromised by disgruntled unemployed youth, and MPs having their membership cancelled for raising the vexed Adani question that seeks answers directly of the Prime Minister.
It was again in this Parliament building, constructed to etch Modi’s name in the sands of time, that the question of Manipur, a border state in flames for many months, was glossed over by the PM – to the sorrow and dismay of the country.
The Supreme Court should be asked how the shadow of the Prime Minister’s rituals and religious garb has come to fall on the Ayodhya question. The top court gave its verdict on the Ayodhya issue in November 2019, and not long after, the presiding Chief Justice of India was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, courtesy the Modi regime.
One element of the verdict bears repetition: That the demolition of the Babri masjid was “egregious”- a “criminal” act, that there was no evidence that the mosque dating to Babar’s era had been built by destroying an existing temple, and yet the space occupied by the demolished 500-year old mosque should be handed over to the so-called Hindu parties to construct a Ram Mandir. This is where the temple now stands, inaugurated not by priests but by the Prime Minister.
In a recent interview to PTI, the current Chief Justice of India, Justice D. Y. Chandrachud, who sat on the five-judge Bench that issued the Ayodhya verdict, said without elaborating that the judgment was based on “the law and the Constitution”. To less naive minds it might seem that while the Bench sat down to rule on a title suit in respect of the land on which the mosque had stood, it ended up responding favourably to the pleas of those for whom building the temple right where the mosque had stood was a matter of “astha” or “faith/ religious belief”, and therefore not negotiable.
The CJI might well ask himself in what direction a country is headed when the Prime Minister puts on the religious robes of a particular community in a flash, and the Chief Justice himself gets photographed wearing religious colours and waxes eloquent on the binding force of temple flags. Does this prepare the ground for justice, especially against excesses of the state? Can a non-denominational polity and Constitution, so needed for the world’s most diverse land, be upheld in such a state?
Perhaps it is time to seek solace in the life and work of Goswami Tulsidas, great Ram devotee, great poet and contemporary of the Emperor Akbar, poetic friend of the court literary genius Abdul Rahim Khanakhana, and author of the revered Ramcharitmanas, also known as the Tulsi Ramayan, which has done more to popularise the life and ideals of Maryada Purushottam Ram among the masses than any other work. Tulsi knew Sanskrit, but chose to write the Manas in a mix of Awadhi and Brajbhasha. The work is also replete with words from Bhojpuri, Persian and Arabic.
When his fellow Brahmins forced him to flee Kashi, he lived in mosques and is thought by Hindi literary scholars and critics to have completed his now famous work on the life of his revered God-figure Ram while staying in a mosque.
Maang ke khaibo, maseet mein soibo (I will beg for food and sleep in the mosque), writes Tulsi in his Kavitavali. He generally lived in Kashi, Ayodhya, Chitrakoot, according to the century-old work Goswmi Tulsidas by Shivnandan Sahay, since republished by Bihar Rajyabhasha Parishad. Tulsi had abandoned home life and lived as a wandering mendicant, living on alms and writing away. His writings show empathy for the poor and the marginalised people. He wrote of farmers’ lives and famines.
There is a stark difference between the Ram of Tulsi and the Ram of Modi and his RSS cohorts who invite an assembly of some of the wealthiest Indians to witness the inauguration of the temple of Lord Ram in Ayodhya. This was a live show fit only for VIPs who are the principal beneficiaries of the policies of the present regime.
Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator based in New Delhi.
If anything, differences within the BJP camp appear more searing than differences on seat-sharing within the INDIA coalition.
Regardless of some dissonance in the INDIA coalition in the context of seat-sharing for the Lok Sabha polls in some states, and in spite of the industrial-scale propaganda on the upcoming inauguration in Ayodhya of a half-constructed temple to Lord Ram – which Hindu scriptures and tradition forbid – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP is likely to face an uphill task in the upcoming parliament election.
Positive results flowing from the false religiosity and communal spirit being sought to be engendered in quest of electoral gain through the construction of a temple seem unlikely, as we shall see in the discussion below.
For the BJP, there is another disquieting probability – the tactical surfacing of deep dissatisfaction in sections of the party with the arrogant and presumptive attitudes, actions and style of functioning of the clique at the top that is seen to be dismissive of the opinions of leading party hands outside the charmed circle.
This is fairly evident in some parts of the Hindi belt, which is crucial for the Modi BJP.
In most parts of the country, and for many Lok Sabha seats, it seems that the BJP may find it hard even to name viable candidates. This situation is likely to be the exact opposite of the situation in states where the Modi BJP seems the master of all it surveys.
These are states, bar a couple, where the saffron party has its own chief minister – namely Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Assam. These yield 179 Lok Sabha seats and are the BJP’s best bet.
The BJP also has its CM in Haryana and Uttarakhand (together 15 seats), but in these it is apt to face a lively challenge.
In Maharashtra (48 seats), the BJP is in power in an alliance government and could win about half the seats.
In Karnataka (28 seats), the party was ejected from office by the Congress last May but enjoys a widespread presence, though its organisational abilities appear to have suffered in the wake of the stinging defeat in the assembly election. The party here also seems to acutely feel the absence of an acceptable leader.
The states named above make up 270 Lok Sabha seats out of a total of 543; that is, about 50% of all seats.
In the best category of 179, where the party seems beyond effective challenge, it had won nearly 80-90% of the seats in 2019, and there is not much scope for improvement. If the INDIA parties – in the context of these states, the Congress, the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal – are smart, they have the potential to snatch some seats, but not many, here.
In this effort, the election of Mallikarjun Kharge – a stalwart figure of Dalit background – as Congress president and INDIA coalition chairman, is a decided plus. Elsewhere in the country, including the other states where the BJP enjoys salience, the Kharge factor can become a force multiplier for the opposition grouping.
The east-to-west Nyay Yatra, recently launched under Rahul Gandhi’s leadership and supported by the INDIA parties, may also be expected to be a key booster, including in UP, which sends up the most MPs.
It is noteworthy that in the Hindi belt and in Gujarat, largely through his own orchestration, Modi has assiduously been built up as a cult personality, and in the Ayodhya context even been conferred the status of a semi-deity by acolytes. His image as a dominant figure guiding the child-Ram to his half-built abode in Ayodhya is flooding social media and the airwaves.
But there is a catch: Throughout the regions where the BJP matters in substantial measure, the sustained BJP-RSS propaganda, the communal cultural penetration and the seats won by the saffron party in the last election have already reached a saturation point.
As such, there seems little scope for the propaganda and the hype associated with the January 22 inauguration in Ayodhya yielding significantly more parliament seats.
In the INDIA camp, the differences within parties on the allocation of seats to contest are real, but these are chiefly limited to West Bengal, and possibly Punjab and Delhi.
But these are unlikely to impact the consolidated kitty of the INDIA parties in terms of seats won. Of course, the smoothing over of difficulties will have a positive national effect in projecting to the electorate a combination with a purpose.
The differences in the BJP camp, if anything, appear more searing. Open evidence of this is the apparent resentment of former Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan at the manner in which he was eased out.
In fact, the mood is said to be sullen among the most important BJP leaders in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh too. They had been pushed aside by Modi in the recent assembly polls. In UP, the unhappiness of the key players of the state government with the presiding duo at the Centre is no secret.
The Election Commission and the EVM factor, widely thought to be weighted in favour of the establishment; the vast money resources in the grasp of the Modi BJP; and the wind that the mainstream media puts in Modi’s sails distinctly discomfit the opposition. But the pre-election political landscape is not any more a one-way street.
Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator based in New Delhi.
This piece was first published in The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
A failure on the part of the INDIA alliance parties to recognize the magnitude of the historical moment they are navigating is poised to leave each of them isolated. Unity is, therefore, an existential imperative. Are they aware of this reality?
We are in a time of momentous transition. Recent events suggest that as a nation we could be headed for life-altering turbulence. Separately, each episode is of high impact, and together they have the potential to accelerate a process in the direction of an open autocracy that could betoken, for all practical purposes, a one-party state apparatus – bidding adieu to the constitution we have nurtured for 75 years – if circumstances remain supportive.
Predictably enough, in the short run, the most critical of these would be the return of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to office in the next Lok Sabha election, five months away. Whether as a propaganda trick or not, Modi has recently declared that a third straight win for him was a foregone conclusion.
Looking at the country’s political map, it is a no-brainer that an effective coming together of the significant sections of the opposition in the major states will block Modi’s further advance, and that may result in his relegation to the background. He appears to have way too many adversaries within the saffron universe who could turn vengeful if power slips from his grasp.
The top shots in Lucknow, and not a few in Nagpur, the city of the RSS headquarters, or in Delhi, Bhopal and Jaipur, to say nothing of the second or third string players in elsewhere, who now pretend to be obsequious or dutiful, are likely to lose little time in getting even for real or perceived slights.
On the other hand, A failure on the part of the INDIA alliance parties to recognise the magnitude of the historical moment they are navigating is poised to leave each of them isolated. Unity is, therefore, an existential imperative. Are they aware of this reality?
If anything, the recent assembly polls in the northern states, which the BJP won decisively, showed that the local Congress satraps were blissfully unaware of the great political significance of these particular elections and carried on as though it was business as usual. So was the Congress leadership, else it would have rapped the three erring chieftains on their knuckles for their tunnel vision when there was still time.
Rahul Gandhi was candid enough to bring up the subject in the December 21 meeting of the Congress Working Committee but, with the Congress, there is no knowing that the party won’t fluff its lines again when it deals with partners and allies to prepare for the parliament election.
After being displaced from its high perch 30-odd years ago – when the party was indeed a gargantuan enterprise – it has not quite figured out how to operate the philosophy of working in tandem with entities some of whom may well have a chip on their shoulder, being state parties that have made space for themselves by edging out the Congress over time. Working in genuine partnership with the Congress is a lesson that the state parties of the INDIA alliance also need to learn – and in quick time. There is not much time left.
Comparisons of the present situation with the Janata experiment do not hold water. The entity that regional parties of the day (including the BJP’s precursor, Jana Sangh, was also just that at the time) were called upon to ally with was not the Congress but a disgruntled Congress rump.
Modi played a high-stakes game in the recent elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. He would have been acutely conscious that in the event of a serious setback in this battle, the wolves within the BJP would be out, baying for his blood. They would question his ability – or even credentials – to lead the party in the forthcoming Lok Sabha election. These polls were close to being a point of reckoning, if not a make or break moment, for the prime minister, although this was not apparent. Inherent in them was the potential to bring the 10-year Modi rule to a turning point, whether history marked a turn or not.
It is not clear the prime minister’s Congress opponents figured any of this. They did not discern the sensitivity of the moment. They went about as though this was just another poll battle. They didn’t understand that a positive result would give Modi the leap and momentum in advance of the key election in 2024 and help him set the field for the main battle ahead.
Though Modi was taking his chances, he was not playing blind when he forced the BJP’s key state leaders – the architects of its past wins in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh – out of the reckoning, appealing to the electorate to cast their vote in his name. He was aware that the wind of communalism was in his sails. Two important considerations would have weighed as inordinately powerful factors – Ayodhya and Kashmir.
After a long four-year wait, the Supreme Court decided to take up the Kashmir case – the challenge to the Union government jettisoning the constitutional autonomy of J&K. The arguments being reported in the press gave ample indication which way things were going. To many it seemed that the timing of an event of such magnitude may not be unrelated to the electoral timetable. The judgment came on December 11, 2023, after the recent assembly election results were announced, but forms a prelude to the parliament election due early next year.
Arguably the most crucial event in setting the narrative of the new nationalism espoused by Modi and his party was the November 2019 Ayodhya judgment of the Supreme Court, which called the destruction of the Babri Masjid a “criminal act” but also, defying logic and common sense, handed over possession of the site on which it had stood to the so-called Hindu parties, meaning a clutch of Hindutva outfits.
PM Narendra Modi takes part in the bhoomi pujan for the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya, August 5, 2020. Photo: PIB
Since then, activities associated with the construction of the new temple to Lord Rama have been flooding the newspapers and social media. They have also found a regular mention in the BJP’s speeches during the assembly elections. The inauguration of the temple scheduled for January 22, 2024, is the primary news in the Modi calendar, and is dutifully reflected in the mainstream media.
This background became the setting for the win in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, which has unbound the Prometheus of Hindutva, who is portrayed as a heroic figure – greater than anything that has happened to the Hindu supremacist ideology since its inception. To add more grist to the mill, the temple disputes of Varanasi and Mathura appear to be continually stoked in the direction desired by the new nationalists by various levels of our judicial system, not excluding the Supreme Court.
Senior BJP leaders now routinely refer to Modi as the ‘best’ prime minister India has ever had, clearly surpassing Vajpayee and not to mention the great leaders of the freedom movement, such as Nehru, who is just about recognized as a former prime minister – and sought to be made less than significant. The already-established Modi cult owes not a little to its forceful promotion by Modi himself, who seeks to portray himself as larger than life and all-conquering. The G20 meet in Delhi this year was an illustration.
It is in the reign of this cult figure that a senior functionary of the Ayodhya temple administration has declared the upcoming inaugural of the temple on January 22 as an event of history on par with the independence of India from British rule in 1947. The new chief minister of Madhya Pradesh has said that the prime meridian, the internationally recognised zero degree longitude line, will now be made to pass through Ujjain in his state, which is the seat of the Lord Shiva as Mahakaal (the Great Time). The currently recognised marker is Greenwich near London, and the international time zones are calculated in relation to Greenwich to arrive at Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
Modi is the “strong leader”, the Hindutva forces hanker for, veritably the current avatar of the “Chakravarti samrat” of ancient India, a mighty, conquering ruler who cannot be accountable to his subjects, and who is beyond questioning or reproach.
Then it is no surprise that the prime minister declared to a newspaper in an interview, ignoring the parliament which was in session, that the December 13 incident, which saw the breach of the security system in the new parliament building and the entry in utterly dumbfounding circumstances of some youths, shouting slogans and letting off smoke-filled canisters, into the Lok Sabha chamber, was “serious”, but “there shall be no debate.”
What followed was predictable enough as the presiding officers of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, in a space of three days suspended nearly 150 opposition MPs because they made a ruckus and showed protest placards when their demand for a statement by the Union home minister was ignored by the Chair.
For all practical purposes, the prime minister’s statement about not encountering a debate became a diktat for those who run the chambers of parliament.
It is plain that while Prometheus may have now broken free, thanks to multi-sided institutional capitulation, the institutions of modern India are themselves now in chains, waiting upon the will of the master. After this, if the next engagement is in the bag for the ruler, we may only anticipate a turn of enormous magnitude in our constitutional and political history.
This is the inverted reality the INDIA opposition alliance can overlook at its own peril as it goes about in its inscrutable meandering fashion to chart out an electoral battle plan. Grand upsets are a part of history, including our own not so distant electoral past. But it is not chance that brings it about.
Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator based in New Delhi.
Voting numbers in thrall of Modi’s ‘New India’ have grown steadily, but they are outdone in collective strength by a wide coalition of interests. The appeal to these powerful sections must be made by the alliance parties acting in tandem and coordination.
The questions are important: After the Congress party was blown away in the recent assembly elections to the three north Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan when, for the most part, it engaged the BJP in straight fights, is it finis for the party in the 2024 Lok Sabha election?
And as a consequence, is it over for the ‘INDIA’ alliance in the joust for power at the Centre against the ruling BJP, since the Congress is the largest component of the bloc?
Also, a related question: Will the anti-BJP forces in the crucial north Indian states of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar be able to successfully take on the BJP helmed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi without the effective and absolute support of the Congress, no matter that in recent decades this party has weakened considerably in these states?
Put another way, are the pre-eminent state parties of UP and Bihar self-sufficient in tackling the BJP in the way that the DMK is in Tamil Nadu or even the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal?
The record does not seem to suggest that. Nevertheless, in ordinary conversation and in general analysis, it is all too commonly assumed that the BJP’s regional opponents in the INDIA alliance are strong enough to hold their own against the BJP, but the Congress is not.
The Congress has frequently been called the “weak link”, although it is acknowledged by the INDIA parties that there cannot be a national challenge to the BJP by keeping the Congress out.
Bihar chief minister and JD(U) founder Nitish Kumar was most explicit about this when he broached anti-BJP parties to come together to challenge Modi rule before the alliance was officially announced earlier this year. Has the situation changed since then?
When looking at the utility of the Congress for the alliance in UP or Bihar, it’s useful to consider that even at its weakest, the party has summoned close to 10% of the popular vote in a parliamentary election in these states. Though usually scattered, this vote is sufficient to fill important gaps in an alliance.
Indeed, in the 2009 Lok Sabha poll, the Congress pulled off as many as 21 seats in UP, just short of SP’s 23 and ahead of the BSP (20 seats). It would appear that while long past its finest hour, the party still has latent votes (given historical associations) that can come good when the political alchemy is right.
If we look at the overall score-line in the recent polls, the Congress did notch a sensational win in Telangana. However, this was against the BRS, a regional entity and, crucially, not against the BJP, which has formidable strengths that cannot be overlooked in any assessment.
The ruling dispensation at the Centre has demonstrated ideological expansion, sturdiness and clarity. It has a superb organisation that no party matches, and massive money and muscle power on account of its control over every organ of the state.
Besides, it has the unerring tendency to be vengeful and vituperative against opponents and dissenters, and in untrammelled fashion uses the coercive apparatus of the state against them. In addition, it has near-total sway over the media through a carrot-and-stick policy honed over a decade.
The short point is, has the hill the Congress and its allies must climb become higher after the recent state polls? Are the possibilities that looked attainable after Karnataka receding in the mirror now?
The BJP has a superb organisation that no party matches, and massive money and muscle power on account of its control over every organ of the state. Photo: X/BJP4India.
Much of the analysis points in that direction, though it is noted that the Congress held on to its assembly poll percentage of 2018 when it had wrested these three states from the BJP. In the recent era, that is unusual for the party when it is face-to-face with the BJP.
And in Rajasthan, it nearly made it. Had the bid succeeded, it would have broken the state’s tradition of not letting an incumbent return.
As the losing side, the Congress’s relatively high vote shares in the three north Indian states point to a new development: namely, the party’s state leaders could hold their ground although they competed not against the BJP’s state leaders, as may be expected in state elections, but against Modi, whose purported invincibility – and popularity – is so much the staple of media commentaries even out of season.
The upshot then is that with some actionable introspection on the part of the Congress, the party can possibly hold its own against Modi in these particular states even in the parliamentary election, which is barely five months away.
This impression is bolstered by the fact that in Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh, the BJP had already won practically all the seats in the last Lok Sabha poll. To reach the cent per cent mark in these states, the saffron party need only win three more seats while holding on to its 2019 tally of 62.
How realistic is this when the Congress has shown it is cohesive enough to retain around 40% of the vote share in state elections in spite of the absence of ‘jointness’, to use a military term, in its ranks or in relation to allies or potential allies?
There is a caveat here – that holding 40% of the vote in an assembly election does not guarantee winning the same vote share in the same state in a parliament poll, unless the body of supporters has turned unshakeable. That proposition remains to be tested.
In addition, there appears to be a whole new phenomenon on the horizon that all parties – not just the Congress – need to contend with or pay attention to.
This is that in the three states where the Congress lost recently – and in UP, which is electorally the country’s most significant state, as it sends up the highest number of MPs to parliament – Modi’s leadership of the government and his total control of the BJP party apparatus appears to have wrought a cultural putsch, or something akin to a cultural revolution.
At any rate, in these regions, it has succeeded in creating a cultural rift that can be accelerated and catalysed into something resembling a revolution if Modi returns for a third five-year term.
The rampant misuse of the levers of state power at all levels – from the panchayat office that the saffron party holds to the PM’s office – and social media propaganda on an unimaginable and uninterrupted scale to promote and further the perception of an idyllic past when there existed only Hindu society in India, now seems to find sympathetic acceptance among increasing numbers of people.
Creating grounds for an embrace of Hindu-supremacist ideas are the essence of such a scheme. In this massive exercise, the emphasising of rituals in everyday life, and the re-adoption in daily practices of irrational beliefs and superstitions which appeared to be on the way out, are being undertaken as part of a plan.
In the experience of the present writer, this is all too evident in rural parts of the Hindi-speaking states. In this belt, the struggles of everyday life are harsh on account of deeper and more extensive poverty, and the penetration of modern ideas and culture – such as gender equality, rationality and democratic conduct – way slower than in many other parts of the country.
This has made them prime catchment areas for the RSS and related bodies, including the BJP, whose stock-in-trade is some contrived notion of past greatness, single-religion nationalism and the bearing of overt signatures of allegiance to a particular belief system.
Given the massive push in this broad direction, the finding in the CSDS-Lokniti surveys in respect of MP, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan that substantial numbers of those surveyed (percentages vary in the different states) had made up their minds to vote for the BJP regardless of what the issues were and who would lead the campaign, though they agreed that unemployment and high prices were serious problems they faced, can occasion no surprise.
Indeed, this can be said to be a pointer to the production of a carefully crafted cultural rift being well under way.
Alongside the emphasis on rituals, irrational beliefs and superstition in the name of tradition and culture, through massive high-dosage propaganda exist the legitimising of caste-based entitlements and also of a certain type of political ideas, as well as gossip, aimed at destroying the heritage of some leaders of the freedom movement and the first important leaders of post-independence India, in particular Nehru – and his legacy and ideas.
Through personal interactions over time, the present writer has also observed in rural areas the continuing and organised political assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, although the most senior leaders of the current establishment take care not to be associated with such activity, while known rabble-rouser BJP MPs are perhaps permitted to make no secret of their admiration for Gandhi’s assassins.
This particular aspect is of course directly related to the propagation of anti-Muslim (and anti-Christian) sentiment amongst the widest section of the populace in a variety of ways – through songs, jokes and other cultural mediums, and a range of coercive tactics that are widely reported in the media, such as calls for love jihad, lynching in the case of alleged cow slaughter, running of bulldozers in Muslim areas, attacks on churches, and even calls for genocide by so-called holy men.
These are doubtless deemed important ways of voter mobilisation, especially among people who are simultaneously being brought under the spell of the concatenation of ideas that make up the belief in a pure Hindu society and Hindu state. The overt communalisation of politics is made a subset of the larger universe of the drive toward advancing the notion of Hindu society, culture and state.
Sabyasachi Das, the young economics teacher who earlier this year was obliged to resign his position from Ashoka University on account of the impact of his academic paper that dealt with vote manipulation possibilities in closely contested constituencies in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, does point to the suppression of the Muslim voter, although he notes that he looked at data only from eleven constituencies and was for that reason not reaching firm conclusions.
In such an atmosphere of revived devotion to pre-modern ideas especially built up in the Modi era, the (Hindu) voter is far from impressed when a BJP opponent stands up and criticises the PM’s call to bang thalis (metal eating plates) to ward off the coronavirus, or when he claims ancient Hindus had mastered plastic surgery and cites as proof Lord Ganesha’s elephant trunk.
This is the magic being wrought through the cultural putsch.
For that matter, criticism of Modi for demonetisation, which ruined micro and small industries that are avenues of bulk employment, or faulty GST implementation, appear to cut no ice among significant sections of voters.
This is because Modi is seen by them as the central figure whose presence on the scene has made the ‘new present’ – or in his own words, the “New India” – possible even if the lives of the poor have suffered immeasurably, more than under any of Modi’s predecessors.
In fact, it is this facet of Modi that appears to make him “popular”, turning that term on its head. In ordinary usage, the expression connotes appeal deriving from the innate personal traits of a public figure – politician, sports icon, or film or rock star.
When the newly constructed Ram temple is inaugurated in Ayodhya in January, just months before the national election, the reverberations of the event are expected to be felt far and wide, and not just in rural or ‘rurban’ India.
In our great cities too, millions of people from rural or semi-rural areas of the Hindi belt live in hard conditions to make a living. In their new ‘homes’ they may be exposed to metropolitan culture in a variety of ways, but they are also exposed to gargantuan levels of ‘New India’ propaganda which plays in the background twenty-four hours of the day.
The mainstream media plays up the effect even further, providing ‘legitimacy’ to what they happen to see on WhatsApp.
It is in such a setting of election politics that the Congress party and its partners of the INDIA alliance are required to forge their tactics and their strategies. The task is likely to be far from easy, although the difficulties are by no means insurmountable.
Photo: Special arrangement.
But the primary requirement is that the INDIA parties recognise that they are each an organic part of an alliance to which they formally subscribe. Security does lie in numbers, in mutual solidarity.
If this is not grasped, and the day is lost when the results come in after the parliamentary poll, each member of the alliance will be made to hang separately. This may be taken to be “Modi’s guarantee”.
On the other hand, if genuine solidarity can be forged, even if this means some sacrificing for common good here and there by dominant parties in a region, the BJP can be pushed back in state after state in every part of north India, including the Hindi belt. A cursory view of the data for assembly and parliamentary elections for the recent period would point that way.
Voting numbers in thrall of Modi’s ‘New India’ have grown steadily in recent years, but they are outdone in collective strength by a wide coalition of interests – farmers, farm workers, formal and informal sector workers and the wider intelligentsia. But there is a proviso. The appeal to these powerful sections must be made by the alliance parties acting in tandem and in coordination.
The INDIA grouping’s best chance may lie in reaching for the doable. This may boil down to reducing the BJP’s – Modi’s – numbers in Gujarat, Assam, UP, MP, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, which have a total of around 180 parliament seats. This does not look like an impossible ask if the Congress and the INDIA group leaders are united in their vision. That is key.
Before the recent assembly election, when the various INDIA conclaves were held, each alliance party and the Congress in particular (being the largest party, and about to go into a one-to-one battle with the BJP), was guilty of not underlining that their electoral association, which was in effect a political and ideological front against ‘New India’, had to be for national elections as well as state polls.
In fact, a senior Congress leader in Madhya Pradesh, who aimed at high office, took pains to exclude the assembly polls from the equation.
The Congress leadership was guilty of not obliging state leaders in all states where elections were being fought to see the larger picture, to take the extra step to reach an understanding with all sections of society and all parties that were not in the BJP’s clasp – essentially, of abusing the latitude given to them and not falling in line on fundamental matters.
The playing of the religion card by CM-aspirant Kamal Nath (although this was not communal since it was not aimed against any religion group) and thinking he had aced the game, was not worthy even of an amateur. Such a leader can hardly inspire confidence for planning moves for the Lok Sabha poll.
In Rajasthan, incumbent CM Ashok Gehlot remained selfishly all-knowing. He rejected sensible advice to deny nominations to many unpopular sitting MLAs only for the reason that they had sided with him in factional warfare earlier. Again, the central leadership let this pass instead of cracking down.
The Congress top leaders could also have ensured that Gehlot struck an understanding with the CPI(M) and the Bharat Adivasi Party. This may have just helped the Congress go over the line, as psephologists have suggested.
The Chhattisgarh CM, Bhupesh Baghel, overlooked Adivasi aspirations and flirted with the religion game. Regrettably, the Congress leadership, fearing the unknown, failed to act as effective monitor.
While the leadership question is straightforward in the non-Congress parties of the INDIA alliance, the elected Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge, seems to be in need of abler political all-round backroom support.
Through the Bharat Jodo Yatra, former party president Rahul Gandhi has played his part by preparing the ground for the Congress’ possible electoral revival. In an avatar as guide and consultant, he may be invaluable in formulating strategic communications strategies within his party and with alliance partners.
With Modi at the helm on the other side, the wall between state and national issues has collapsed. INDIA might benefit by continuing to project state issues in Lok Sabha polls, and steer clear of attacking individual leaders. A battle has been lost, a cultural blitzkrieg is on, but a war is more than one engagement.
Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator based in New Delhi.
