If Narendra Modi prostrating at the doorsteps of Parliament House at his election victory in 2014 remained as an enduring image for the people of India, the Prime Minister’s meditation pose in a saffron wrap at the Kedarnath Cave at the close of the 2019 campaign will not be forgotten by most.

Modi’s victory of 2019, with the BJP having an enhanced majority in the Lok Sabha, seeks to redefine the nature of the Indian Republic. What is remarkable is that the same Constitution allowed the Modi regime to make a determined attempt to ‘transform India’ — remember replacing the Planning Commission with NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India), a think-tank.

A well-worked-out political strategy of mobilisation, backed by massive money from leading corporates that also got most of the media to its side, was relentlessly pursued from the national to the grassroots level. There was no matching force. Now the Indian Republic has the appearance of a new avatar.

Rights and dignity

We know from history that even though elections are extremely important for peaceful change of rulers, democracy is more than elections. It is an everyday struggle for freedom, equality and dignity for each citizen, in every sphere, all the time. This election was most frustrating for all those who value the human right to life and dignity for every individual and every group in India. That was not a priority either for the BJP or for the opposition.

Modi and Amit Shah blatantly opted for a Hindutva-driven redefinition of India, first with Yogi Adityanath as Chief Minister in UP in 2017 and then putting up Pragya Thakur, the accused in the Malegaon blast case, from Bhopal. The BJP’s spectacular rise in West Bengal was also achieved by painting Mamata Banerjee as pro-Muslim and polarising the voters, besides opening the doors to the Left cadres victimised by Trinamool.

The NRC campaign in the North-East and the focus on ‘national security’ — using the terrorist attack in Pulwama and air attack on Balakot, and describing Pakistan as ‘the enemy’ — were a part of the same ‘Hindutva-Security’ platform. Add to it the building up of an image of a strong leader who launched ‘surgical strikes’, who talked as equal with world leaders from Donald Trump and Putin to Xi Jinping.

The well-timed interviews splashed throughout the media reinforced Modi’s reputation as a communicator par excellence with no rival in contemporary India. Amit Shah, who was described as ‘the man of the match’ by Modi in 2014, has again lived up to his reputation as a superb strategist using modern organisational skills as well as long-tried local methods using the all-pervasive RSS cadre, recruiting well-funded and strongly motivated workers right down to the booth level.

The RSS’s long-standing work in education through Saraswati Vidya Mandir schools as a better alternative to decadent government schools and expensive private schools and the welfare organisations in tribal areas providing education, health and personal support paid more dividends by the day. Add to that the splits in social groups of OBC that BJP manipulated and taking advantage of the division among anti-BJP forces.

But all this was a mobilisation strategy. They do not amount to realisation of democracy for every citizen. And majority of the citizens — even though 67 per cent voted and the BJP increased its vote share — are struggling for realising their basic rights to livelihood and dignity.

Policy of alienation

Contrary to Modi’s 2014 slogan of ‘ Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas ’, the masses of people who have been almost totally alienated from the polity are the Muslims, Dalits and farmers. The Hindutva agenda and the lynching spree set the main plank of the Modi regime. The Modi regime’s strong-arm policies in Kashmir took common people’s alienation to an unprecedented height and fuelled more violent reaction from the youth.

The PM Kisan Yojana hardly met the basic demands of the farmers who have been agitating. Dalits suffered not only from the cultural wave of Brahmanic revivalism but also economic hardships arising from the regime’s policies.

In the tribal areas, subverting the FRA (Forest Rights Act), mining corporations have got more licences and environmental clearances. The youth, especially the first-time voter, may have been moved by Modi’s appeal to ‘dedicate their vote to the Pulwama martyrs’ but they are the worst victims of unemployment.

The distress of all these sections were sidelined by hiding the figures on unemployment and other negative statistics. The Modi appeal was presented with overwhelming intensity through media and the mobilisers, and it worked.

Regional leaders

There are new forces on India’s political scene who have to be watched despite their varying electoral outcomes. Akhilesh Yadav of SP managed the alliance maturely. DMK’s MK Stalin has emerged as an effective successor to Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu and Jaganmohan Reddy to YSR in AP.

Not as successful, but firmly in leadership, are JD(S)’s Kumaraswamy in Karnataka and RJD’s Tejaswi Pratap in Bihar. The AAP leader, Arvind Kejriwal has things to show in Delhi despite the setbacks. Veterans Naveen Patnaik and Mamata Bannerjee have been badly bruised by the BJP but have held on.

The platform of ‘cooperative federalism’ which is sometimes held up as Modi’s mantra of governing plural India has proved to be sham with high degree of centralisation of the polity and the economy. The revised terms of the Fifteenth Finance Commission are one of the many proofs, besides demonetisation and the GST.

So the regional leaders have to take the responsibility of upholding the federal system as well as the secular and pluralist values of the Constitution and restore autonomy of the institutions.

It is a big question whether Congress under Rahul Gandhi, which pursued a powerful campaign, will reinvent itself as a federal democratic organisation with an alternative paradigm.

Much hope is still pinned upon the people’s movements and creative democratic voices who have to work with common people in defence of the basic human rights.

From the JP Movement onwards there have been many avatars of the Indian Republic and the Constitutional values have bounced back again and again, after many debacles — Emergency, Delhi 1984, Gujarat 2002 — each time with new vigour and new lessons. In fact, Ambedkar had warned and Gandhi had foreseen such turns.

The writer, a former Professor of Political Science at University of Delhi, is currently a Distinguished Professor at Council for Social Development

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