A democratic rap on the knuckles

Voters have given the top job back to Modi, but with a warning

Alok Tiwari

As I write this, the results of Lok Sabha elections continue to pour in. To a surprise of a lot of people, the Bharatiya Janata Party is struggling to touch 240 mark. That represents a drop of more than 60 seats from its tally of 303 in the outgoing Lok Sabha. On the other hand, a resurgent Congress is close to 100 mark. Yet, the INDIA grouping it leads is still far from a clear majority. This bodes a period of political uncertainty. It is reflected in the stock market that rose more than 2300 points on Monday on the back of exit polls predicting another BJP landslide but fell over 5000 points on Tuesday as political picture muddied.

It is a result that has disappointed both supporters and detractors of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In the coming days and weeks, the results will be analyzed threadbare. Parties as well as pundits will no doubt parse through local issues, candidate selection, alliances or lack of them. BJP will wonder what went wrong in UP, West Bengal, and Maharashtra. Naveen Patnaik in Odisha will do the same. Cong will think about why it couldn’t do better in Karnataka, MP, and Chhattisgarh. Despite earning widespread ridicule, Nitish Kumar will be pleased with what he got in Bihar. There are endless nuances to this result.

Let us look at the big picture though. To me it looks like the Indian voter has delivered a hard rap on Modi’s knuckles. She is obviously not happy with him. But her anger is not nearly enough to oust him. She believes he is still the best bet to lead the country. So what caused the anger? To me it appears his increasing drift towards autocracy. Just days before the results I was chatting with a childhood friend who is also a senior bureaucrat. He said Indian people want a strong leader but not a dictatorial one. That was a particularly insightful observation.

Modi has been crossing line between display of strength and autocracy off and on but always managed to find some issue that helped him overcome the people’s distaste for dictatorship. Last time it was Pulwama and its aftermath. This time, he had hoped the construction of Ram Mandir would be enough to see him home. As emotive as that particular development was, it was overshadowed by his jailing two opposition chief ministers and freezing the accounts of Congress. It speaks of the maturity of the electorate that they completely set aside the Mandir emotion while voting.

These were just the latest of missteps. His image as an autocratic leader has been building up for some time. This was seen in the response to every major national crisis. To anything not to his taste, his standard response has been a studied and arrogant silence. Be it CAA protests or farmers’ agitation, the utterly shameful happenings in Manipur or agitation in Ladakh, he simply ignored them. That’s not how leaders are supposed to work. They are supposed to respond, communicate, and address the concerns of smallest minorities. Democracy may be the rule of the majority but it is never supposed to be the rule for the majority. Modi and his army of followers (and they are in big numbers) never realized this.

The BJP’s penchant for sabotaging opposition parties also seems to have backfired. The BJP washing machine became a matter of joke. The Prime Minister haranguing about Ajit Pawar’s Rs 70,000 crore irrigation scam one day and entering into alliance with him the next told his voters they were being taken for granted. Modi probably began believing in the myth of his own infallibility. Unfortunately though, it not only cost his party seats in places like Maharashtra and Bengal but also probably dented the career of the talented Devendra Fadnavis, his protégé. It will be a long time before both recover from this self-inflicted setback.

The brazen use of state agencies to subdue not just opposition parties but any voice of dissent has not gone unnoticed. Add to this the continuing control of media, particularly TV, that saw practically every independent journalist being eased out of all channels. The growing disenchantment with so-called mainstream channels and growing popularity of the YouTube channels of the same journalists should have rung the alarm bells. Modi, for all his political savvy, seems to have given in to a failing common among autocrats. He lost touch with ground reality.

So what’s next? Even if the BJP remains substantially shy of clear majority, it is still by far the biggest party. And NDA, assuming it will hold, is already past the majority mark. Safe to say BJP will form the next government which will most likely be led by Modi himself. BJP also has the resources and the will to break some opposition parties to get people to cross over and join BJP. It will not be surprising to see BJP cross the 272-mark after the elections and once again have clear majority.

It will be unfortunate if that happens, not just for the country but also for the BJP itself. It would mean the message from the voter has not been heard and lessons have not been learnt. Despite our propensity to vote on the basis of caste, religion, and freebies, Indians have time and again shown they care for democracy. They can also be remarkably forgiving if someone shows enough remorse. The drubbing Indira Gandhi got in 1977 after the Emergency and the huge mandate she returned with in 1980 are pointers to this.

If instead, a chastened BJP runs a more democratic government, it may have a good chance of recouping its losses. For the opposition, the road is clear, their main plank was danger to democracy and constitution. They have been rewarded with increased presence in the Lok Sabha. They need to guard citizens’ rights and liberties with even greater vigour.

This column appeared in Lokmat Times on June 4, 2024