Modi made a commitment to India in his victory speech that he would do nothing for himself- shades of Plato's "Philosopher King" in the context of vision, wisdom and asceticism and said that he would look ahead and take everybody along including rivals.
2022-India completes 75 years of Independence.
This is the first time a non-Congress government that has completed a full term is returning to power for a second consecutive term with a better majority in the Lok Sabha.
Verdict 2019 was not really about BJP or the government or even about governance. It was about Modi and his leadership. He has ensured that a parliamentary contest became presidential in nature without changing the Constitution. Modi seems impregnable politically. It has become increasingly clear that Prime Minister Modi runs a parliamentary system in a presidential style. The present parliamentary system has been tried and tested for nearly 70 years. Our parliamentary system is a perversity only the British could have devised: to vote for a legislature in order to form the executive. It has created a unique breed of legislators, supremely unqualified to legislate.
The main opposition party, Congress has failed to be eligible to be even recognised as Official opposition party. It has only 51 seats as against the required 55. It attempted to personalize its attacks on the prime minister, but that narrative simply failed. The party then tried to project a positive vision about a daily minimum wage for the bottom 20% of the population, but that proposal went nowhere with the voting public - a fact that reflected the utter lack of credibility of the leadership.
A word on the elections themselves, which stretched over a mammoth six-week period to give approximately 900 million eligible voters the chance to vote: To put that in context, it's as if the entire populations of the United States, the European Union, Russia and Japan all turned up to vote.
This time the polling exercise will cost an unprecedented Rs 50,000 crore, a 40% jump from 2014 polls. With more than 8,000 contestants fighting for around 545 seats, there's tough competition to win over voters.
The number of sittings of Parliament has declined precipitously, and when it meets, disruptions are frequent. Even Budgets are passed without debate amidst din and disruptions. As a result, Parliament has effectively ceased to be a forum to demand and receive accountability from the government. 2019 is a binary choice in more ways than one. India had to choose between Modi and Anarchy. There cannot be two opinions that the general election was Modi-centric. People voted on his name and image overwhelmingly. Nirmala Sitharaman, union defence minister, told an election rally a month ago, "The people have to vote for Modiji, not the candidate. When you choose the lotus, it is your direct vote to elect Modi. Thus the candidate is irrelevant. Modi had a record to defend; his detractors had none. The choice for some was "only Modi"; for others, it was "anyone but Modi". The 'anyone but-Modi brigade's reason was survival. If Modi gets a second term their political futures are at risk.
The BJP was a party with a collective leadership. Not anymore. This time around one could say our elections have become presidential. Modi is a person who inherently polarises, and 2019 is not the only reason for saying so. Add an Amit Shah as his party's president, and we have an uncompromising kind of leadership and style of functioning that makes the choice binary. As is often said BJP is one man army and two men party.
Modi is at once both bold and timid
Bold that he ordered surgical strikes against terror. Bold that he could get back the captured Indian pilot from Pakisthan unharmed within two days!
Bold to the point of being reckless to take a disastrous decision like Demonetisation which upset his own party's core base of traders and small businessmen. Such dramatic and stunning actions conceived and conducted essentially in and by the PM's office, appear to be a hallmark of Modi's leadership style.
He has been timid in his approach to issues on reforms particularly on Black money and corruption- though he himself appears clean, his followers have made fortunes. His Kashmir policy is as timid and is no different from the previous governments' policies. Only lately Z security has been withdrawn to separatists with no action on article 370.
Realising his lofty vision of "sabka saath, sabka vikas" is handicapped at the delivery end. Fat cats that thrived on corrupt bureaucrat-businessmen-politician nexus continue to thrive, affecting overall efficiency. Modi's domination of Indian politics, and of Indians' imagination, is complete; no alternative seems possible, every challenger has been defeated. But bad economics has a habit of catching up.
The personality cult manufactured around Modi as the sole figurehead stands in stark contrast to the aspirations and demands of over a billion Indians. But all personality cults, even if they are secular-as the Stalin and Mao regimes showed-are ultimately dangerous, and even more so for democracies. And when we are talking about India, the largest democracy in the world the outcomes of a personality cult and the destruction of institutions can only be catastrophic.
In the present times, on the contrary, significant sections of the masses and the elite are revelling under the thrall of the Modi personality cult, and almost the entire mainstream media, has completely surrendered to the whims of the one-man regime. With BJP hovering around the 300 Plus mark on its own India is set to return to an era of one party dominance with BJP occupying the position once held by Congress. That will have its own spinoff effect on the country's politics, governance, social dynamics and constitutional functioning in the months to come. Ultimately, nothing can symbolise the Modi regime better than the daily photographs in which Narendra Modi is shown alone, whether it is inaugurating development projects, public monuments, riding public transport or visiting places.
In a country of 1.3 billion, with its teeming multitudes, and thronging crowds, doing things all alone is the ultimate marker of greatness. After all, what is greatness if it has to be shared among many others? The greatest contradiction that India faces now is precisely this: the exploding democratic aspirations of the poor and the oppressed on the one hand, and the increasing expectation of the fulfilment of these aspirations from Modi, on the other. The elections in 2019 have the potential to change India as we know it forever. As a people we want nothing more than peace, harmony, security and an economy that benefits everyone in a society that is inclusive, we have to think of not just the next five years but the next five decades and beyond. It is the duty of this generation to save the generations to come. A mistake now could prove costly for a long time.
