Opposition parties must keep INDIA intact

Julio Ribeiro

NARENDRA Modi has won his third term as the Prime Minister. It was not the cakewalk that the exit polls had predicted. The BJP managed just 240 seats, well below the half-way mark of 272. It will have to accommodate its partners in the NDA in order to govern. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP), the Janata Dal (United) and others together picked up 50-odd seats; this will pose a problem for Modi in allocating Cabinet portfolios.

Modi will have to rethink his strategy of governance, particularly how he treats political opponents and the minorities.

The NDA, which includes the parties that had a pre-poll understanding with the BJP, secured more than a hundred seats less than the 400-mark that Modi had set. He is still the most capable political leader in the country, but his authority has diminished. He will have to rethink his strategy of governance, particularly how he treats political opponents and the minorities.

Modi used the ‘Hindu majority versus Muslim minority’ card to gain electoral victory. It worked in 2014 and 2019. But with this modified mandate, he will have to change his approach. Clearly, it is not a winner anymore. He needs to discipline the fringe elements in the Sangh Parivar who had free rein in the first 10 years of his reign and had tasted blood. Taming them will take some doing. It is not easy to rebottle the genie once it is released.

Modi will have to concentrate on jobs and unemployment. This should be his first and foremost concern in his third term. His meditation at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial must have filled him with thoughts of things to do and also, I hope, things he should not do. All that will need to be revised in the light of the harsh message that Indian voters have delivered. He will have to start with the basics — education and health.

Here, he should draw lessons from his opponent, Arvind Kejriwal, and the Aam Aadmi Party. That party has made major strides in both fields. Unless the productivity of our labour force is raised by many notches, we will not be able to match our neighbour to our east, which has stolen a march of 50 years or more on us. For productivity to improve, the levels of education and health of the lowest economic brackets have to be lifted by their bootstraps.

Modi also needs to moderate his dislike for those he calls ‘urban Naxals’. Most of them come from affluent families but have developed an outsized concern for the poor and the dispossessed. Last week, I wrote about Alpa Shah and her book on the 16 Bhima Koregaon accused. Two or three of the ‘BK 16’ were deeply concerned for the tribals. Eight were Dalits fighting for the empowerment of their community. None had shown any violent streak. None had pushed their followers into activities that could be classified as violent. Yet, they had been incarcerated for years under the draconian UAPA. Modi should give the green signal for the release on bail of those still in jail. That would signal a change of heart that is urgently needed.

With the BJP failing to secure a majority on its own, stability is not assured. Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP and Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) do not share the BJP’s Hindutva ideology. What is needed now is course correction on the lines spelt out by me earlier. That course correction is necessary to retrieve Modi’s fast-fading reputation as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ leader with the qualities that befit a statesman.

The INDIA bloc had come together to oust Modi from power. Its members were aware that when he ruled from his vantage position as the elected leader, he was likely to crush them one by one, like he had disposed of the old leaders in his own party and kept upcoming leaders guessing. Modi is a natural-born leader with a sharp instinct for survival. He is not going to allow this ‘defeat’ to demoralise him.

Modi had declared that INDIA would dissolve into thin air after its defeat in the polls. Taking a cue from his own wisdom, these leaders should think positively. They have fought a valiant battle and should not consider this electoral loss as a defeat. They have disproved Modi’s and Shah’s prediction of a runaway victory for the NDA as a gross miscalculation. It could even be interpreted as a slap on the face of the two leaders. The BJP enjoys only 37 per cent backing of the Indian people. The NDA collectively is slightly better at 41 per cent. The majority of the Indian electorate is not with Modi and his ideology.

Keeping this in mind, INDIA constituents need to stick together for survival. Sharad Pawar, once Maharashtra’s strongman, predicted that smaller parties in INDIA would merge with the Congress. I doubt if that would happen. An up-and-coming leader like Kejriwal has his sights on the PM’s chair. There is no chance of his party merging with the Congress, which AAP has already reduced to irrelevance in the national capital territory. Incidentally, AAP’s own performance in these elections was quite miserable.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) was the recipient of much flak, mostly uncalled for but some well-deserved. Its hesitation to rein in the PM, particularly for vituperative remarks bordering on the scandalous, was the real cause of the epithets hurled at the commission. The loss of credibility of the ECI is the biggest negative outcome of this year’s Lok Sabha polls. That could have been avoided in the ‘Mother of Democracy’.

The exit polls were unanimous in proclaiming the BJP as runaway winner of the Lok Sabha polls. I had calculated that the BJP would win but not with such a wide margin. The less affluent sections of the country’s population were solidly behind Modi. The domestic help, security guards and others of the same economic bracket, hailing from UP, Uttarakhand and Bihar, were solidly pro-Modi.

The BJP had lost traction among those who had benefited the most from its economic policies. I am not referring here to the captains of industry and the businessmen at the top of the corporate ladder, but to their high-salaried employees.

Even the monthly dole of 5 kg of rice or wheat for each ‘below poverty line’ ration-card holder seemed to have swayed them. The direct transfer of subsidy to individual bank accounts, the pension payments to widows and welfare grants to women for education or their marriage expenses — all these played on the minds of the less fortunate, without whose votes victory was out of the question.

The salaried and, more than them, the intellectual class, which would normally have supported a right-wing dispensation, had begun questioning the government’s approach to human rights and freedom of speech. Some of the political moves against its adversaries also came up for scrutiny. The BJP lost the votes of these people, but the loss was compensated by the freshly minted votes of the poor.

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