Elections 2024: It's complicated...
...just like this maddening, loveable country of ours
On 5 March, two weeks before the first phase of polling in Elections 2024, television channels went into overdrive over a report that Prime Minister Modi had asked top bureaucrats to come up with a 100-day plan for “path-breaking ideas for reforms, for accelerating growth”.
On 17 April, the inevitability narrative was kept alive with a well-time plant in the media that Modi had told his bureaucrats “when I come back in June” he wanted to review both the 100-day and the five-year plan and it better be ready.
On 2 June, the day after the last votes had been cast, exit fantasy polls had gifted the BJP/NDA with a super-majority and Modi had finished his TV mini-series on meditating in Kanyakumari, the media was again in a tizzy about how the tireless PM had gone straight back to work. He chaired seven meetings that day, we were told, to review the 100-day plan.
In that timeline lies the narrative arc of this election cycle. It is also Modi’s first moment of realisation of the Pyrrhic nature of his “victory – with the BJP at 240 seats falling well short of even a simple majority of 272, his days of running the country by imperial fiat are over.
The word in political circles is that the agenda included the hindutva version of a Uniform Civil Code, the implementation of One Nation One Election, and the implementation of both the Citizenship Amendment Act and of a delimitation exercise so fashioned as to raise the number of Lok Sabha seats to 846, with Uttar Pradesh getting a whopping 143 seats (up from 80), Bihar 79 (up from 40), Madhya Pradesh 52 (up from 29), Rajasthan 50 (up from 25), Maharashtra 76 (up from 48) and Gujarat 43 (up from 26). This would mean that a party holding those six states would effectively rule the country, and the five southern states, with a total of 164 seats (up from the current 130) would be rendered politically irrelevant despite their economic heft. (Add to this One Nation One Election, and imagine the consequences.)
On 5 June, the day the NDA allies met in Delhi to endorse Modi as PM for a third term, came the news that his 100-day agenda would be redone because the allies on whom he depends to form a government wanted various changes made.
This was inevitable. Say what you want about Nitish Kumar’s dizzying U-turns, the one constant in his ideology is that he does not, personally and as leader of the JD(U), endorse Hindu majoritarianism, and neither does Chandrababu Naidu. In fact, as recently as 4 May, in the middle of an election cycle where one of Modi’s, and the BJP’s, central campaign issues was that an INDIA government would take away reservations from others and give it to Muslims, ‘Babu’ went against the grain of his alliance with the BJP and supported 4% reservations for the minority community.
On Twitter, a poster resurrected an old speech in Parliament where the late Pramod Mahajan of the BJP humorously outlined the vagaries of coalition politics. Listen. Then consider this: The BJP is the single largest party in the 18th Lok Sabha, by a distance. The next four largest parties – the INC with 99, the Samajwadi Party with 37, Trinamool Congress with 29 and the DMK with 22 – are all in Opposition. Modi’s shaky throne rests on the shoulders of the Telugu Desam Party, the 6th largest with 16 seats, and the Janata Dal (U) at #7 with 12 seats, who together push the NDA just over the majority mark.
Back in October 2017, I had in a column for BuzzFeed written about how Modi’s unwillingness to listen to others, his arrogant assumption that he knew more than everyone else, was proving to be an Achilles heel.
This is the single biggest outcome of Elections 2024: the electorate took away Modi’s sengol and with it, his assumed divine right to rule, and has forced him to listen.
To listen to his allies on whom survival depends, to listen to the Opposition who can no longer be overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers, to listen to the people who just gave him a stark reminder of what happens when their visceral concerns are ignored.
The neatest, most accurate, summation of this result comes from the always excellent Ravish Kumar who, in a video on the outcome, said (in my freehand translation):
The elections did not give Modi a mandate – it gave the country an Opposition.
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Vivek Kaul once did a masterclass for IndiaSpend on the art of writing with simple elegance on complex economic subjects. “I write for my mother,” he told us. “If she can understand it, so will everyone else.” In his latest piece, where he explains why he hasn’t written in a fairly long while, he says:
The actual writing—that is putting it all down on paper, or on an MS Word file as is the case these days—is the easiest part of writing. The difficult part is figuring out what to write. Or the days at end when random points keep going round and round in my head, until I figure out how to put it all together. Of course, there are other days when one gets an epiphany and everything lands up fully formed, ready to be typed out.
Exactly this. The just-concluded election – both its course and its outcome -- is so complex that its nuances cannot be encompassed in a single piece, or even a dozen. It needs a book (and hopefully, one of the smarter publishing houses has already commissioned one).
As a result, I am now confronting the problem Vivek talks of: too many points going round and round, refusing to be pinned down neatly into a simple narrative. Yesterday I wrote a bespoke piece for Rediff where I looked at the results from one particular angle – the mass repudiation of Brand Modi. The takeaway:
As election campaigns go, this one was as reductive as it gets. Modi said, in paraphrase: 'I am the savior and the Lord'. And the electorate replied, 'No you are not', and gave him an unmissable reminder of his fallibility, his mortality.
In the coming days, I’ll use this forum to look at various aspects of the elections, the outcomes, and what it all means for the country in the coming months and years.
One of the immediate consequences, which I had alluded to in a tweet on the night of 4 June as results were coming in, is this: The allies — not just Naidu and Nitish Kumar, but even Eknath Shinde (7 seats) and Chirag Paswan (5 seats) — want their pound of flesh in return for satisfying Modi’s self-professed ambition to become the first Prime Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to win three consecutive terms. (Modi’s desire to be seen as Nehru’s equal, if not his better, has been one of the most obvious weak spots in his vainglorious personality.)
On the face of it, Modi could negotiate with Naidu and Kumar, meet them halfway and fob off Shinde and Paswan with meaningless baubles in his Cabinet – but the problem is, he needs the latter two and their 12 seats (the same number that Nitish brings to the table), as insurance against either of his major allies flipping at some point sooner or later.
And that sets up Modi’s, and the BJP’s, immediate problem. The buzz last evening was that Naidu, in particular, had demanded everything and the kitchen sink, both at the Centre and for his state. News reports this morning cite sources to the effect that Naidu wants the portfolios of Home (now held by Amit Shah) and Defence (Rajnath Singh, in the outgoing LS), besides special category status for Andhra Pradesh, Central funds for his dream project Amravati which he sees as his legacy, and several Minister of State posts in key ministries.
This is the second time Naidu is coming to the BJP’s rescue. Back in 1999, he had entered into a pre-poll understanding with the then AB Vajpayee-led BJP. The two parties fought in tandem and won 36 of the 42 seats in the then undivided Andhra Pradesh, and it was Naidu with his 29 MPs who helped Vajpayee form the government.
At the time, Vajpayee had offered around eight Cabinet seats, but Naidu opted to stay out and extend what he called “issue-based support”. Now, at age 74, he is a man in a hurry to leave an indelible fingerprint on his home state, and will want everything he can grab from a weakened Modi.
The same is true of Nitish Kumar, except that his bargaining power is somewhat weakened by the fact that two lesser allies can make up for his 12 MPs if he throws a hissy-fit and decides to quit the NDA. He will still ask for, and get, plenty, though.
This is Modi’s immediate internal headache, and the source of his frustration: how to satisfy the allies he so desperately needs, and yet leave enough big slices of cake on the table for his own party.
Then there are the external flashpoints. The middle class, feeling the pinch over the past five years, is clearly deserting the BJP and he needs to win them back.
The farmer community will not be satisfied with anything less than a regularised MSP, beside other benefits. And the BJP has learned, to its cost, that farmer agitations can neither be wished away, nor suppressed through brute force.
The ill-conceived Agniveer scheme cost the BJP big time, not just in Rajasthan and Haryana but even in UP, and will have to be drastically rethought if not scrapped altogether (I’d explained the why of this in a curtain raiser ahead of the seventh phase; Rahul Gandhi’s repeated promise to chuck the scheme in the dustbin resonated with large sections of the electorate).
The youth, struggling with unprecedented unemployment, will erupt sooner than later – and as our own history teaches us, if the youth take to the streets, it is curtains. (Read the history of the student-initiated Sampoorna Kranti movement in Bihar, and how Indira Gandhi’s tone deaf, increasingly violent response set in motion a train of events that altered the political landscape of the country forever).
These are just some of the major fault-lines a Modi with one hand tied behind his back will have to address in one hell of a hurry (fault-lines largely created, by the way, by Modi himself despite having both his hands free).
Draconian diktats won’t work – besides the fact that the people have just shown they won’t stand for it, Modi now faces an energised and numerically powerful Opposition in Parliament.
The first test of that power will come in the very first session of the 18th Lok Sabha, when the Opposition will most likely demand the revocation, or at the least the redrafting, of the new criminal codes (the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Bill, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Bill and the Bharatiya Sakshya Bill of 2023 which seek to replace, respectively the Indian Penal Code, the Criminal Procedure Code and the Indian Evidence Act.
These bills, bulldozed through a Parliament missing a sizeable chunk of disbarred or suspended Opposition members, is due to come into effect on July 1 – but not if the new Opposition benches have anything to say about it. As they will.
It's like the line in that Shah Rukh Khan movie:
Mausam bigadnewala hai, kursi ke peti baandh lijiye
PostScript:
In an interesting sidelight, the RSS has woken up from its Modi/Shah-induced coma and started flexing its muscles again. It has made no secret of its anger at the way Shah sidelined Adityanath, tore up the latter’s list of recommended candidates and imposed his will. (This video was shot, and propagated, at Adityanath’s behest). Modi is on ultimatum that Shah cannot continue to call the shots – and the RSS has nominated Rajnath Singh to sheep-dog Modi and keep him on the straight and narrow.
All of what I wrote above gives me the immediate direction for this newsletter: politics and civil society. The elections were merely the end of the beginning – what happens here on is likely to be crucial to the wellbeing of our country, and I’ll use this platform to document as much of it as I can. (Besides slipping in some side notes on books, and on writing, when time permits).
Prem Sir, you are an excellent writer. This is an amazing piece. I have shared this piece with Vivek Kaul who is a dear friend. He was not aware. Keep writing, Sir. A book by you on cricket is overdue 😁😁. Please consider this as a request from a fan 🙏🙏
Do you have any theory on why Modi completely went off the rails in his speeches in the last weeks of the campaign ? In the last 10 years, his handlers and speech writers had kept him within limits, ensuring at least a plausible deniality for the things that he said. But now he was let completely loose. If it was because BJP was certain to win, they could still have waited till after the elections.
Guess the speaker post is more important to the allies than most of the ministerial berths. In a few weeks, when Shah tries to split TDP and/or JDU, the speaker's call on anti-defection disqualification will be crucial.