After the comprehensive defeat of the Congress, a lot of unsolicited advice has been pouring the BJP's way from those who led the ‘intellectual' brigade against the prime minister-designate. Ignore them
Friday, May 16, will go down as one of the most remarkable days in Indian history. It can be reasonably argued that this was the day that India finally threw off the shackles of the Raj. It was a day when in television studios, both sympathisers and detractors of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its prime ministerial candidate, sat with their mouths agape, stunned at the scale of the BJP’s achievement. The party had won a majority in the lok Sabha all by itself and conclusively ended the golden age of coalition politics in India.
However, within hours of the defeat of their ideology, the detractors were at it again. Despite their campaign of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) being completely discredited, they made arguments that were nothing short of trying to shift the goalposts after the game. They claimed that only 40 per cent of the Indian population voted for the National Democratic Alliance and that India needed proportional representation. They argued that the BJP was not ‘representing’ India.
These people are the real anti-democratic forces. Take, for instance, the graceless Mani Shankar Aiyar, who possibly delivered several lakh votes to the BJP with his articulate stupidity, who declared the results as the “dying of the light” for India. Yes, there was a “dying of the light” but for the ideology that Mr Aiyar professes to represent, that of the Congress.
look at the results in States where the Congress is in power and won State polls not so long ago — Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The Congress has been decimated there too. In New Delhi, where the Congress lost power after 15 years this past December, and which is also home of the ideological ‘leaders’ of the party, the Congress did not win or even come second in a single Assembly segment. Think about the scale of the rout for a minute where the Congress has fewer seats than the two largest regional parties combined.
As for the BJP, its 35 per cent vote share in Assam and 17 per cent in West Bengal will feel far more important than its 59 per cent in Gujarat. While in terms of seats, the BJP might have won a bulk in the Hindi heartland, there is no doubt that, as of today, there is only one national party in India on the basis of popular support. The BJP can only grow across India no. It appears that unless the Congress rids itself of a few tumours, it is in terminal decline. Yet the arrogance of its leaders continued unabated. Humility, it seems, is anathema to Congressmen.
The proliferation of, what can only be described as, crybabies on social media sites was unbelievable. These people have now started to offer equally stupid and unsolicited advice to the BJP and its allies about how they should run the country. These are people to whom Mr Narendra Modi is reaching out, but most of whom will not waste a chance to stab the Prime Minister-elect in the back, if they got a chance. These are people who will happily work against India if it meant damaging Mr Modi. These are people who profess to be democrats but believe in the democratic ideals of the former German democratic republic. These are people who sitting in their ivory towers were tone-deaf to India, yet claim to represent, rather claim to own, the ‘concept of India’.
What is equally surprising is the constant refrain that “voters got fooled” by a “marketing campaign”, a theory peddled mainly by the electoral failures of the Aam Aadmi Party. This is immensely strange given the campaign run for Mr Arvind Kejriwal in the media. What is politics, after all, if not giant marketing campaignsIJ Would the ‘New labour’ in the UK or Mr Barack Obama in the US have won without such huge marketing campaignsIJ Unlikely.
But not every marketing campaign is successful. The BJP succeeded because, as Mr Swapan Dasgupta pointed out in this newspaper, it understood the aspirations and hopes of young India. Yet the success of this election victory is not only due to the BJP’s overwhelming presence on Facebook and Twitter, as some might claim. It is the translation of this support into votes and the convincing of people to go out and vote, and the relentless campaign by Mr Modi himself, travelling from end to end of India, despite an army of critics attacking him day in and day out, that has made a difference.
There is little doubt that the BJP’s campaign also broke communal interests. The scale of victory for former Army chief General VK Singh in Ghaziabad, a seat with a large Muslim population, was so huge that it is obvious that Muslims were tired of being treated as a captive vote-bank. The BJP also won Moradabad in western Uttar Pradesh, a seat with 40 per cent Muslim votes. It is easy to argue that there was a so-called reverse polarisation of the Hindu vote but across the country, the BJP attracted a whole new fold of voters into its midst. Don’t believe the cynics, this is an inclusive victory.
True, the BJP will need to reach out to minorities in a way it has never done before, if the desire to rule India for a generation has to come true. The FUD, that has been fed to minorities by the Congress and its allies for decades, needs to be combated. If the constant Western headline description of the BJP as a ‘Hindu nationalist’ party has to change to ‘Indian nationalist’ party, the BJP has to prove that it indeed is the Indian People’s Party.
There is a lot of hope and expectation riding on the BJP and Mr Modi. The Prime Minister-elect has delivered in the past and India has placed her hope on his delivering in the future.