India renews its passport to democracy

India’s tryst with destiny was not meant to be a singular event but a process, composed of & by vox populi. Election 2024 inaugurates a new movement in that unfolding symphony
India renews its passport to democracy
Express Illustration | Sourav Roy
Updated on
5 min read

On par with Jawaharlal Nehru. That bridge has been crossed for Narendra Modi, but as part of a political bargain whose cost cannot be entirely calculated at present. The river underneath flowed in strange ways. Rather than an enhancement of stature, it is the shadow that lengthened—of a doubt about his continuance that was unthinkable just the other day. The figure itself stood diminished in victory, when set against the will of the people. Which is not inappropriate in a democracy.

The safe passage to the other side of the bridge has brought one of modern India’s biggest leaders face to face with a somewhat alien landscape. These were not the results the BJP and its totemic captain had expected when the script was conceived and rolled. The Lok Sabha election of 2024 contains such a collection of novel factors that it is certain to go down as a landmark in the evolution of Indian politics. More than that, it is an event whose meaning will perhaps still be revealing itself years from now.

The first set of factors—unforeseen to those whose vision was fixated at the macro level, but a rational deduction for keener eyes—relates to the ruling BJP and the titanic figure who has become near-synonymous with its epoch of unmatched power. PM Modi now comes into his third term with a vastly reduced quantum of public consent, and it is not a familiar place for him. He has always wielded power from a locus of unquestioned mass approval. Coalitions have been unpleasant exigencies, never a natural way of politics.

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Now, with the BJP reduced to a seat share that’s well below the majority mark, Modi and his strategist-in-chief, Union home minister Amit Shah, will be coaxed into more accommodative stances than they have been used to. That too with hard-core transactional leaders like Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar, who have both managed to extract a rich larder for the winter of their political lives.

How the Modi-Shah duo adjust their politics will be crucial to how the BJP looks forward to the future. The party, once a tight and cohesive political formation with a distinct identity and a leaning towards organisational primacy, is a vastly bigger entity now but also one with a receding resemblance to its old being. Turncoats from other parties fill its leadership ranks, and the strain this has been causing vis-a-vis the old cadre has been becoming quite perceptible of late.

There is also the related question of a string of senior leaders caught in various degrees of distance and estrangement from the centre: Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Vasundhara Raje most visibly, but perhaps a few more important ones. The relationship with the RSS will also be up for some refinement. And all this will have to be conducted with less latitude for exuding or wielding absolute power.

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The real renaissance has happened on the other side of the political fence. The Congress, for long sunk in a swamp of political decay and an idea famine, had been regularly threatening to go into the past tense. The only debatable point about the phrase ‘Grand Old Party’ seemed to relate to the first word there, as defeat after demoralising defeat seemed to come like lines in a long epitaph. And Rahul Gandhi, the fifth-generation leader from a family associated with the party for a century, had been damned by popular consensus as singularly incapable of turning things around despite being a man of good intentions.

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Indeed, as races go, he started with a negative headstart of miles. He covered some of those through a hard trek across India. But it was not just movement in space. It is Rahul’s daring ideological makeover—rather, an organic evolution into borderline radicalism—that has upended Indian politics. This happened through an infusion of urgent themes related to subaltern India—which is to say, most of India.

To see that it was timely, high time actually, one only needed to look at where India was figuring on world inequality indices. In a sense, Rahul Gandhi’s appearance with a long-term manifesto of egalitarianism in both class and caste terms—which he calls his “life’s mission”—turned him into an instrument for a historical necessity.

He may have landed short of an actual entry into the government’s decision-making apparatus for now, but the decisions that flow from there cannot now be entirely immune to the themes he has brought to the table.

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To say it simply, Rahul Gandhi can now justly claim that he has to be taken seriously as a leader. To come from so far behind, with a rickety and pauperised party with fickle leaders, and get so close to felling a giant who was said to be unbeatable is proof enough: Pappu can dance. The proof also lies in how India came this close to having its first Dalit prime minister in Mallikarjun Kharge, whose near-leonine presence at the top of the party hierarchy is not be discounted as a factor that enabled voting patterns to shift.

There were of course many other actors and events in this epochal election. The BJP’s ingress into newer territories in the east and south inaugurates fresh chapters. In sheer quantitative terms, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav comes first—having carved away more than half of India’s biggest political state, Uttar Pradesh. The Dalits of UP voting for the SP’s bicycle perhaps merit special attention. Add non-Yadav OBCs and even the privileged castes, and you see that the Congress did not merely benefit in the company of regional parties, it also brought a new possibility of cohesion. Bengal’s electorate, on the other hand, stayed like a solid monolith behind Mamata Banerjee.

Each of these, and many other micro-narratives, will call for individual interpretation. But the grand narrative this time belonged not to parties. For the real scriptwriters will stay anonymous: the millions and millions of voters who crossed many lines to inscribe a new future for themselves. “The past is a foreign country,” goes a famous old line. If the future looks alien to some, it is only the force of habit they have cultivated. That may now have to be shed. Consensus has been a scarce commodity of late, but on this a fresh start can be made: democracy has won.

(Follow her on X @santwana99)

Santwana Bhattacharya

Editor

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