The Lok Sabha election has produced what was easily the worst conceivable outcome by giving an outright majority to the Bharatiya Janata Party under a man who is widely believed to have been complicit in mass killings of Indian citizens belonging to one faith, and who even 12 years on has not been fully exonerated by the country’s legal system despite its compro-mised, semi-functional nature, and vulnerability to diabolical manipulation.
Make no mistake. Despite a limited (31 per cent) national vote, Narendra Modi’s victory is the result of a Rightward shift in society, and the triumph of Hindutva combined with neoliberal capitalism.
It’s an ugly scar on the face of Indian democracy, and the combined outcome of many long-festering social pathologies, including Islamophobic religious-communal prejudice, belligerent nationalism, rising influence of corporate power, growing social intolerance, gullibility of people to paranoid propaganda, and intense craving among the middle class elite for authoritarian rule.
Contrary to claims, Modi’s “presiden-tialised” election campaign, in which billions of business dollars and the corporate media played as crucial a part as “56-inch-chest” aggression, had nothing to do with “development” or “governance”. It was India’s most communalised campaign ever.
Modi symbolises, personifies and radiates “alpha-male”, militarised Hindutva—even when he doesn’t openly indulge in hate-speech. This time, his canvassing was actually lubricated by blood: from an early stage in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, and later to Kokrajhar in Assam.
Modi wickedly deployed toxic rhetoric about driving out Bangladeshi “infiltrators” (read, Muslims) while welcoming “refugees” (read, Hindus), and about the “Pink Revolution” (beef exports). He brazenly used religious symbols. Six lakh Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh men ran his military-style campaign and cynically used slogans like “love jehad” and “bahu bachao, beti bachao” (protect Hindu women from Muslim predators) to polarise opinion communally.
The polarisation helped the BJP exploit widespread discontent, often disgust, with the Congress, rooted in high prices, corruption, economic elitism (especially growth that pampers Big Business, but creates no jobs), and the Gandhi family’s hubris. It the laid the ground for venally shrewd caste calculations and the micro-level “booth management” strategy per-fected by Modi’s henchman Amit Shah in Gujarat, in which 20-25 RSS men “cover” each polling station and lead the voters there.
Communal-caste-class polarisation paid off handsomely. The BJP performed spectacularly well in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra and Karnataka, won “saturation-level” seat-scores in its “home States” (Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh), and secured unprecedentedly high vote-shares in West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and even Kerala.
The BJP’s 73 out-of-80 seats victory in UP is the highest score by any party there since the 1984 election, which had delivered 83-of-85 seats to the Congress. The sheer size of the BJP’s UP vote (42.3 per cent), and the nose-diving of the Congress’s vote (from 18.3 to 7.5 per cent) meant that its main opponents would be decimated in a three-cornered contest.
The Bahujan Samaj Party couldn’t win a single seat despite bagging a 19.6-per cent vote, and increasing its vote-share in 46 consti-tuencies. The Samajwadi Party too shrank from 23 to five seats despite winning For More:
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