Snap Out of it India, the King is Dead!

by Suranya Aiyar

June 5, 2024

Narendra Modi

It is quite bizarre to wake up in India on the Fifth of June 2024 to headlines declaring the return of Narendra Modi to power when the results of the General Election yesterday saw him snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). There is no party that has won the majority of seats in this election. In this sense, the election has been lost by all parties, but the only party to be truly defeated is the BJP.

It is the BJP that has lost a Parliamentary majority in this election. Moreover, in this 2024 Parliament of No-Winners, it is the BJP that has suffered the greatest loss of all parties, coming in at 62 seats below the number it won previously.

Not only has the BJP lost over 20 percent of its seats, its rivals of the INDIA Alliance have all made massive seat-gains this election. The Congress Party has nearly doubled its seats in Parliament, even though it fought on fewer seats than the last election. The Samajwadi Party has gained over five times its last seat tally.

These two are, respectively, the second and third largest parties returning to Parliament after this election. Moreover, almost all their gains are from seats that were held by the BJP, and the same goes for the fourth largest party, the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), which has also increased its seat share by nearly one-third.

The TMC’s performance is all the more extraordinary considering the inevitable weight of anti-incumbency that it carried in this election, having been in power in West Bengal, and under the same leadership, since 2016.

The Samajwadi Party’s performance is also extraordinary considering the almost universal opinion among the people of Uttar Pradesh that they suffered a severe breakdown of law-and-order amounting nearly to mafia-rule when this party was last in power in their State. Regardless of whether the Samajwadi Party’s reputation in this regard was fair or whether, as I personally believe, that Akhilesh Yadav is determined to break with his party’s Robin Hood-esque past; the fact is that people in Uttar Pradesh retained the negative image of his party on this front, right up to the day of voting.

The performance of the Congress Party is also extraordinary because Rahul Gandhi was the face of its national campaign and the people in general continue to be sceptical, albeit to a much lesser degree than previously, of Rahul Gandhi’s personal abilities as a leader – whether of the party or of the country.

The shift of the vote from the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to the INDIA Alliance in Uttar Pradesh is another exceptional result in this election, for it has occured despite unresolved caste-, communal- and social equity-based objections that BSP voters have against the Alliance member-parties.

The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that the mandate given to the TMC and northern INDIA Alliance parties, is above all and by far, a repudiation and rejection of the BJP.

Needless to say, this repudiation attaches wholly and solely to Narendra Modi. For what is the BJP today? It is a party that has been decimated, not by the people, but by Narendra Modi. 

Narendra Modi is the BJP, and the BJP is Narendra Modi.

A dictatorial leader from the start, Modi threw off the yoke of repression and censorship under which the BJP had been functioning since his first term as Prime Minister, to openly operate it by this year as a one-man party. 

He disrobed winning BJP state leaders, as we saw in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, replacing them with his nominees. He denied tickets to established popular and multiple election-winning leaders. Days before the General Election, he replaced them with unknowns, whose only standing was that they were chosen by Narendra Modi. He then announced the BJP’s election campaign as his solo-project under the slogan of “Modi ki Guarantee” (Modi’s Guarantee). 

And what comprised Modi’s guarantee? It became clear early on in the campaign that it comprised of nothing more than a guarantee of himself personally, that is, of Modi.

Extraordinary: “Vote for me, so that you will get…..me!”. A whole series of essays is merited on the moral and psychological implications of such a choice of platform – by Modi as performer, and the people of India as audience. What an utterly degraded and degrading spectacle.     

But to get back to the res, this vote must be understood as a vote against the BJP urf Narendra Modi. If Parliamentary politics allows for the BJP to retain power in a coalition, despite being the only defeated party returning to Parliament, then it should atleast respect the will of the people by sacking Narendra Modi, and his chief executive and campaign strategist, Amit Shah.

And let us not forget the third Lord of this Unholy Trinity, Ajit Doval.

Modi, Shah and Doval’s divisive and murderous stratagems in Kashmir and Punjab are directly responsible for having provoked the election of some terrorists and religious fanatics over pro-India moderates and integrationists there. These extremists and madmen are growing roots once more in our polity on the fertile soil of division and paranoia laid by the BJP, while the BJP is itself wiped out in both these places.

To what end is the BJP exacting the heavy price of hatred and discontent from our people in these places when it is not even able win a single seat there, and in the case of Kashmir, not even able to run for one, in return?

Before Modi, the BJP was able to steer a course between the worst effects and the merely bad effects of its misguided ideas about India when things got out of hand. But under Modi, there is no such possibility for the BJP. 

As we saw in Manipur, Modi does not have the capacity to even see the problem, that is, the danger of engaging in incendiary politics and repressive state measures, let alone engage with it.     

Is the BJP even aware of the scale of the damage that Modi has done to it? Even Ladakh has been lost – and to an Independent of Muslim background. This is, again, extraordinary. People in mainland India may not know this, but there is a clear separation that always skims the edges of division and polarisation between Buddhists and Muslims in the Ladakh region. Again we see here people voting in this election against the BJP despite abiding objections against whomever they have sent, with open eyes, to Parliament.

For those concerned about the “integration” of our northerly regions, the Buddhists of Leh will say they are “with India”. This is said in much the same spirit as the Bhutanese (well, some and not all, but who in India understands that, certainly not our Sanghi Foreign Ministry) say that they are “with India”. As in, with India, and not with China…..and not like Tibet.

This is the existential position of the Buddhists of Leh; and the BJP is foolish enough to think that it is alright to alienate them. Let us be clear, without Ladakhis on our side, we cannot defend our border there with China – not even as weakly as hitherto under Modi.  

But Narendra Modi’s failures in Kashmir, Punjab, Haryana and Ladakh are nothing as compared with his defeat in Uttar Pradesh. The loss there is manifold. For one, the BJP has been reduced to a minority of seats in the Lok Sabha from this state, as compared with its rivals. Then, it has seen this loss despite having a highly popular incumbent state government in Uttar Pradesh. And furthermore, it was a loss that Modi managed single-handedly to bring upon the BJP when it was set to win all eighty seats in Uttar Pradesh, until weeks before the election.

The INDIA Alliance leaders will not want to acknowledge this, but it is a fact that the Alliance as well as the voter came together in a phalanx against Modi from the moment that he sent Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s sitting Chief Minister, to jail. This is notwithstanding the fanatical voters of Delhi who have brought Modi back in their state, insulated by their insularity from the anti-Modi wave in their neighbourhood from Punjab, to Uttar Pradesh, to Haryana. Nothing but blind worship of Modi, and reckless support for Hindutvavad are behind the Delhi vote.

But to return to Modi’s loss in Uttar Pradesh, the INDIA Alliance caught the nation's imagination with its rally in Delhi on March 31st to protest the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal. It was in that moment that we, ordinary citizens of North India, saw that the threat to our democracy from the BJP was not merely an Opposition slogan. It was then that we saw the sincerity of the Alliance leaders in coming together against that threat. I suspect that the INDIA Alliance rally before this in Maharashtra, had the same effect on people there.

All that Modi has gained from not allowing the Aam Aadmi Party to campaign in Delhi, is seven seats here – it cost him 29 seats in Uttar Pradesh, including Ayodhya (Faizabad). It might just cost the BJP Delhi – the gaddi, that is, compared with which the seats are as nothing.

It earned Rahul Gandhi – the main target of the entire BJP party machinery for one decade – a thumping 4 lakh plus majority from Rae Bareli compared with the Prime Minister’s 1.5 lakh majority in Varanasi. It resulted in the trouncing of Smriti Irani in Amethi – a second loss of the BJP to the Gandhi family. The loss of face for the BJP in Amethi and Rae Bareli to the Gandhis is devastating for a party that gets much of the wind in its sails from that intangible thing called “prestige”.

Modi's antics have also resulted in the BSP-vote, that is understood to be quite fairly communal – enough for the BJP to hope that it would cut the secular vote – to move en masse, despite grave reservations on grounds of caste and past hostilities, to the Samajvadi Party and, to a lesser extent, to the Congress.

Ayodhya, the theatre of Hindutvavadi politics, and the stage of its climactic hurrah on January 22, 2024 has been lost! This one loss alone is the end of Modi, and of 99 years of Sanghi politics. The end. It is a testament to the demoralisation of the Indian people under a decade of Modi that they have woken up this morning, and not seen that.

Under Modi, the BJP have had a ten-year experiment in the implementation of the most extreme version of Hindutvavadi politics – both as India's national and international policy. The limits and failures of Hindutvavad are now laid bare. The BJP is going to have to think of a new politics, and a new course.

This cannot happen under Modi. If the hour produces the man, then we have seen, in all its revolting detail, the man that is Narendra Modi. When surprised by the change of mood in the public after the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal, and left with nothing but his wits to rely on, Narendra Modi, two-time Prime Minister of a sub-continent, who ruled by decree from his executive office; who could have made any claims about his record – as it was all self-written anyway, and the public were willing to be fed more dreams from his hands - despite all this, the man could only summon up hate-filled rhetoric, personal abuse and desperate misrepresentations of his opponents. 

Under pressure, Modi races to zero. 

He is not capable of introspection. Perhaps because his entire training has been to eliminate that very faculty, as has been the tradition of the Sangh Parivar and its ideological forebears in grooming assassins, moral and temporal, from the start.

I am of an age where I have seen the BJP repeatedly bring defeat onto itself with its over-confidence and inability to stay connected with the people. The latter is rather ironic, considering that the BJP presents itself as the more authentic, Hindi-speaking, non-elite Party of the Hindu people. Yet, it is the Hindi-belt Hindus that keep delivering them these humiliating losses, even when the BJP believes they are riding 1000-year crests of victory! 

Yes, that was what Modi was claiming a mere seven weeks ago. Do you remember now, my morally shattered and battered fellow citizens? When are you going to snap out of the spell of the wicked wizard?

Why is it that the default position of the BJP leadership is arrogance? Why is this party that runs in the name of Ram, so prone to the precise failings of Ravan? 

I say that it is because the so-called ideology of the Sangh Parivar is no more than empty bluster and falsehood. In the absence of truth or morality, the only thing that is real about a Sanghi is his arrogance, and this alone props up the ideas he spins for our nation.

The BJP will not agree with this analysis, ofcourse, but even they cannot deny that arrogance has been their abiding weakness, and the cause of their self-triggered implosion every time they have come to power.  

So, to repeat, this is a time for critical introspection in the BJP – something that Modi will never tolerate in others, and that he cannot do for himself. The BJP needs to understand that it can either survive as a party, or keep Modi.

As for potential coalition partners: if not today, then very shortly they will realise which is the right side of history. Especially for those nearing the ends of their lives spent working hard for this nation, this is not a time to fritter away their legacy for very brief and shallow gains.

So, the question is, why is Modi still in Delhi? Why is he still in politics? This is the end of his career. His speech yesterday was like the corpse of Humayun being walked out for the Emperor’s daily public audience from the balconies of the Purana Quila - a ruse to prevent a rebellion while Akbar rode back to Delhi.

Wake up India. The King is dead!