Loving to hate Modi & Trump too much

THE return of Donald Trump to the White House is evoking in America these days a similar intensity of emotion that India has experienced over the last decade each time Narendra Modi has won power. The so-called “liberal press” has gone out of its way to paint a dark, doomsday scenario, while the so-called “conservative media” — led by Elon Musk’s X — is clothing the man from Mar-a-Lago in knight-in-shining-armour material.

It is clear that the happy middle in India, just like in America, has largely disappeared under the weight of two polarising personalities.

It is uncanny that India’s emotional mix vis-à-vis Modi has been so similar to that meted out to Trump. Electoral ecstasy versus sullen resentment has been the hallmark of all three elections that Modi has won, in 2014, 2019 and 2024.

Certainly, it is clear that the happy middle in India, just like in America, has largely disappeared under the weight of both polarising personalities, Modi and Trump.

The larger question is, why the media, as well as pollsters in both countries, have been getting it increasingly wrong. Do we love to hate both Modi and Trump so much that we are refusing to really see and hear what the people, whose thoughts and desires and anxieties we claim to articulate, are really saying?

Just like in America — where pollsters had the race down to a dead heat, and respectable newspapers like The New York Times refused to concede that Trump had won, much after he had made his victory speech in Florida — in India, too, many of us have allowed our heart to take over our head, incredibly in both directions. In 2014 and 2019, we couldn’t believe Indians were voting for Modi with both their hands and feet; in 2022, we refused to believe Yogi Adityanath had swept Uttar Pradesh — weren’t the thousands of deaths during Covid-19 proof that God himself had turned against him, we said? In 2024, we were equally shocked that the same Uttar Pradesh had refused to fully deliver itself to the BJP.

In all these cases, we poured ourselves so deeply into the story that we refused to heed the reality on the ground. Worse, once these mandates were in front of us, many of us still refused to squarely accept them. Something remains wrong with Modi and Trump, we insisted — which may or may not have been true. Worse, we refused to apply the same tough yardstick to either Rahul Gandhi or Kamala Harris.

So let’s face the facts today. The fact is, Harris lost because she did not stand for anything — no matter that Trump was a convicted felon, a womaniser or worse, at least he promised to end immigration (bad for India) and bring jobs back to America. As for Rahul, the fact remains that people like me will heartily agree with many of his ideas across a dinner table, but we remain embarrassingly unconvinced about what he’s willing to die for.

Messy democracies like the US and India would rather elect Trump and Modi because they are able to simplify the chaos that are begotten by societies in either decline or in transition. We will overlook the dark patches in the lives of the leaders we elect — the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol as well as the 2002 Gujarat riots in which more than a thousand people were killed — because we are comforted by their present assurances that they will make our difficult lives better today. They speak to us simply. We disbelieve them less than we believe their opponents.

One of the reasons voters said why they voted Trump — some Black districts in the pro-Democrat, southern US state of Georgia shifted almost entirely to him, besides improving his Latino vote by 14 per cent – is because they said that Democrats tend to take their voters for granted.

Sounds familiar? Certainly sounds like Rahul’s Congress, especially those complaining that the EVMs were fixed in Haryana. The voters punished Harris, just like they did Bhupinder Singh Hooda, when he refused to take along recalcitrant leaders in his party, like Kumari Selja, Randeep Surjewala and Birender Singh. Like the BJP which focused on the non-Jat vote in its micro-management of every constituency in Haryana, data shows that Trump has won more non-White votes than any other Republican candidate in the last 40 years.

Worse, the Congress refused to stop crowing when the BJP lost 29 seats in UP and therefore its majority in the 18th Lok Sabha. Modi, on the other hand, understood that there was no such thing as being half-pregnant; as PM, he could do exactly what he had done when he had a full majority. And that the only route to consolidate power — and avenge UP — was to win the state elections coming up. Haryana. Maharashtra. Jharkhand.

Different rules though, it seems, are being applied to Punjab — to a state which had stood up to Modi and forced him to withdraw the three farm laws. So many questions are being asked these days about the immense difficulty in the procurement of paddy these last few weeks — could this not have been averted, considering Punjab, a sensitive border state, significantly depends on agriculture? Could the Centre have been more understanding in the evacuation of paddy from Punjab to other parts of the country? And why is it only this year that the FCI has discovered that Punjab has sold soiled rice to Arunachal Pradesh and Karnataka?

Perhaps, some of this sounds like a conspiracy theory gone viral. Another way to answer these beleaguered questions is that both Modi — and dare I say it, Trump — understand the nature of power. That politics is not a kitty party, or an NGO. That if voters won’t vote for you beyond a certain number — for example, more than 18.3 per cent of the votes won by the BJP in Punjab in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections — then other measures need to be taken. Among them, divide and rule — the oldest rule in the book.

Now that Trump has taken America, it’s time to focus at home. Alongside Maharashtra, let’s start with the four bypolls in Punjab coming up on November 20. Let the games begin.