Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra arrive at the party headquarters in New Delhi, India, June 4, 2024. (REUTERS Photo)
When dramatic expectations are set through media management, a setback looks like defeat. When parties and leaders are believed to be invincible, retaining power with constraints looks devastating. This is the BJP’s predicament. After enjoying two consecutive terms with an unfettered majority, the BJP can now return to a third term with crutches. The outcome presents it with three complicated features.
First, its strength in the Lok Sabha will be reduced compared to the past five years — unless it opens moneybags and adds to its seat tally. Two, in contrast, its vote share will remain robust. With a nearly 38 per cent vote share, it would be an ostrich-like response to celebrate the outcome as the defeat of the BJP. Third, in order to form the government and remain in power for five years, the party will have to strike many compromises — internally and among its so-called allies — something its leadership is utterly incapable of. This scenario will bring more intrigue, repression and revenge into our politics. While cutting the dominant party to size, the outcome may have posed a challenge before the country’s bruised institutions and blinkered politicians.
As this writer has said repeatedly, Narendra Modi is the main driver of the BJP’s successes since 2014 and by implication, the under achievements too need to be laid squarely at his door. Of course, the BJP has built a gigantic electoral machine, but the energy of that machine comes from Modi. If the BJP’s successful expansion in south India (not so much in terms of seats but vote shares) and east India is to Modi’s credit, the setbacks elsewhere indicate the limitation of his appeal. It is necessary that “Brand Modi” is appropriately deciphered. Comprehending the meaning of Modi — the brand, the representation of something beyond Modi the person — can help us unravel three things: Even in its near-defeat, what the BJP has achieved so far, how and what this means for the India of tomorrow and yonder.
First, we must recognise that the BJP has fundamentally changed the terms of political discourse. It has also managed to ensure that economic hardship will be condoned in lieu of distant dreams and most importantly, that multiple fault lines, including economic ones, will be overwhelmed by a narrative of religio-cultural assertion. These elements were present in its 2014 victory but became more explicit in subsequent victories and have brought the BJP and its now-less-needed mother organisation, the RSS, to an important milestone in the achievement of their century-long objective of making Hindutva the lingua franca of culture and politics in India.
Once we realise this core aspect of the BJP’s contribution to politics, the explanations of the current electoral outcome can be fitted into the larger and historical shifts since the 1990s. Probably more than in any of the BJP’s previous campaigns, this election saw harsh dog-whistles and direct appeals to an aggressive religious identity. The Opposition made efforts to move the focus of the campaign to issues of distribution and social justice. That seems to have yielded limited results. The BJP responded to the Opposition campaign with shriller minority-phobia. That is where the relevance of Brand Modi needs attention. It articulated a package: A response to the social need to have a larger-than-life figure as saviour, a strong personality to ward off global challenges, a devout Hindu figure to satisfy the century old aspiration to Hinduise the power structure of society, a demagoguery to excite voters against the “other” and also a discourse directed at abstract ideas of becoming an economic powerhouse.
In a sense, the Modi regime brought to the centre stage the twin factors of Hindutva and the personality cult. All other political moves and policy initiatives were subsumed by these two. The BJP has been cut to size in this election. This also means that elections have put a brake on both these factors. But Modi is unlikely to give up on the personality cult and both he and the BJP are unlikely to give up on Hindutva. This poses an interesting moment of tension. We shall now witness the co-existence of a leader convinced of his divine role and a politics of more routine transactions and concessions. We shall also witness the co-existence of a political project of Hindutva that has tasted popular approval and what I have recently described as Hindutva fatigue. Evidently, a possible third term for the BJP signifies a deeper possibility for the future. It would be tough but tempting for the BJP to continue its assault on institutions and the project of undermining the Constitution.
At the same time, the Opposition will need to understand this outcome with caution. Silent disappointment about economic hardships may have put the BJP on the back foot, but the Opposition would be wrong to declare that the voters have rejected BJP: Neither its arrogance and destruction of institutions nor its politics of cultural assertion have been explicitly rejected.
For the Opposition, this outcome poses a difficult challenge. The outward political expressions of hegemony may have been pushed back but the hegemony itself is not undone and the Opposition does not have the ideological wherewithal to counter it. With a truncated strength of the BJP, the politics of isolating it may gain momentum but the critical question is whether the non-BJP parties — in Opposition or in power — have the energy and will to attack the BJP on a front where it is far too strong.
Ten years of the Modi regime have shown that irrespective of how the government handles the economy and the livelihood crises, irrespective of how the government walks roughshod over voices of dissent, a substantial segment of the citizenry continues to endorse the regime’s foundational agenda. That agenda is not merely about the personality cult nor about trampling formal democratic norms. These are instruments of the core agenda of changing the character of the Indian mindset, homogenising it and bringing in a frightening religious and cultural transformation that India has not witnessed in many centuries. A setback in terms of reduced strength may not deter the BJP and may not win large segments away from that exclusionary agenda.
The outcome only opens up the possibility of staging a counter. Following its defeat, the BJP will resume its core politics from the next day. Will the non-BJP parties realise that this is not a victory for them but only an opportunity to define their politics sooner than later?
The writer, based at Pune, taught political science
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