The day after

As the BJP has pulled off the most spectacular victory possible, outdoing even their most optimistic expectations, we’ll have to put behind us probably the most polarising and divisive elections ever, filled with communally charged hate speeches from all sides.

The one man who deserves complete credit for this victory, which ironically some of the stalwarts in his own party are not willing to give him, is Narendra Modi. None of the other prime ministerial aspirants in the BJP, certainly not L K Advani, nor Sushma Swaraj or Rajnath Singh, would have managed to bring the BJP-led NDA anywhere close to the figure of 338, with the BJP alone set to win over 280 seats.

And who would have thought Uttar Pradesh would give the NDA 73 seats? But the Modi wave was so sweeping in its frenzy that even an unknown party in the NDA such as the Apna Dal won two seats. The only seats left for the others were the two Nehru-Gandhi pocket boroughs of Rae Bareilly and Amethi and five seats for the SP. Mayawati, who had dreamt of becoming the first Dalit prime minister of this country, was left with zero seats for her party.

State after state just bowed to the Modi magic and while the North and the West gave wholehearted and unstinted support to the BJP, even the Northeast cheered it on, with Assam giving the BJP an unprecedented seven seats. Only the two strong women CMs of Tamil Nadu and West Bengal were able to stop the NDA tsunami.

Jaitley’s loss

But while the long and meticulous strategising and planning for this victory paid off, the only bitter bit was Arun Jaitley losing in Amritsar to Amrindar Singh, who was specially asked by Congress President Sonia Gandhi to take on the BJP’s senior leader. One only hopes that the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, the suave, modern and comparatively moderate legal eagle, who has been a key strategist and thinker for the BJP for long years and many elections, does get a berth in the Modi Cabinet. A Cabinet without Jaitley would be that much poorer. He himself has called his defeat “a drop in the ocean” in the face of the BJP’s massive victory and said it’s too early for him to comment on his role in the party. And why the party thought it fit not to give him one of the 7 “safe” seats in Delhi, and sent him to Punjab to ride on the coattails of the Akali Dal, already facing anti incumbency, only the BJP’s top brass can explain. Surely Jaitley was a much better candidate than Meenakshi Lekhi!

Such a massive victory naturally brings smugness and triumphalism to the cadres and lesser leaders. The men at the helm, particularly the top two, such as Modi and Party president Rajnath Singh, don’t have the luxury of basking in either. This staggering victory should bring for both introspection on why the nation has punished the Congress so brutally. The battering of the UPA and the endorsement of the BJP is so wholehearted that it becomes evident that people of this country have huge expectations from the new government they have voted in.

After the deeply divisive campaign, where Muslim leaders and ordinary voters boldly went on record to say they would never forgive Modi for 2002 and would vote strategically for BJP’s defeat, Rajnath Singh did well to warn the BJP leaders and cadres, in his very first press conference, not to use hurtful language and show “humility” in victory. He took pains to point out how this was a record election where people had voted across caste, class, region and religion to unseat the Congress and bring in the BJP-led NDA. Ravi Shankar Prasad’s claim that “young Muslims” had indeed voted for his party is plausible; not only a section of young but also educated Muslims might have decided to give the BJP a chance…. perhaps responding to Singh and Jaitley’s earlier appeals to do so. A crunching of the figures along religious lines will demystify this in the coming days.

However which way different religious groups might have voted, the sooner the hate rhetoric of the election is put aside, and commencement of governance begins, the better.

The equity markets have already celebrated; the common Indian, and all Indians, will now look up to the new Prime Minister and his team to give them some cause for cheer too in the coming days.

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