The summer of judgement is almost upon us, and it’s with a surprising sense of novelty that we meet it. Now that the Election Commission has given us the expected seven-phase calendar for voting, we are officially in election season. With an electorate inching towards 1 billion on the weighing scale, the 18th Lok Sabha election will easily be the biggest exercise ever in world history to elicit a popular mandate—India’s total population in 1947 was just 34 crore, one-third of the present voting population of 97 crore. At 47.1 crore, women voters are still less than half of that, but with increasingly enthusiastic participation and independent choice-making, not an irrelevant detail at all. A bloc of nearly 20 crore are in the restive age-group of 20-29. Some 1.84 crore will experience the rituals of democracy for the first time.
Does the quality of choice match up? What’s the broad mood? If anyone had asked that question in 2022, it might have been a formality. If anything marks out the Narendra Modi dispensation, it’s that sense it exudes of unshakeable entrenchment in power. This has long been one of its prime sources of political capital, being able to signify a certain inevitability of outcomes. Those in favour luxuriated in that sense, those against resigned to it.
Of late, that static air has been ruffled somewhat. The BJP’s language of certitude is suddenly a little less serene—indeed, its repeated incantation of “400 paar” seems flecked by a hint of unspoken anxiety. Bereft of a lightning rod like Pulwama, it has been collecting little slivers of political turf—just to be sure. After Ram, it thought it sagacious to also toss Nitish Kumar into its quiver for good measure, while plucking a few more loose satraps and legislators wherever possible, ending with a surprise teaming-up with Naveen Patnaik. All actions meant to seal a handful of seats each, stocking up meticulously as if to hedge against any chance of deficient rainfall. That is, careful vigil. Not the gallantly delusional optimism of the 2004 ‘Shining India’ election. That they felt the need for it is the novelty.
The reasons for it are all out there. The pro vote is still an immense coalition of the willing, the fortress walls thick with scheme beneficiaries, votaries of visible development, and those who vote on pure political affiliations. This is further firewalled by institutional capture, which extends to the media landscape, where manufactured consensus rolls out on an industrial scale—dissent, by contrast, is a cottage industry. By all accounts, it looks impregnable. But beyond all that, there are sectors of genuine disaffection. In the armies of jobless youth, in the stressed farm sector, and in civil society where issues like electoral bonds play out on the plane of moral legitimacy. Modi had arrived at a time when UPA-II was collapsing upon itself in moral exhaustion; the promise of salvation, deferred too long for many Indians, has not aged well.
On the other side, the Congress is showing some signs of being revivified, even if at the head of a rickety alliance; and key big states like Bihar, West Bengal and Maharashtra are asking big questions. Tejashwi Yadav’s growth and maturation as a mass leader seems to be inversely proportional to Nitish’s diminution. Bengal, through all grim seven phases, will pit polarising themes like CAA and Sandeshkhali against Mamata Banerjee, still very much a thundercloud with chances of lightning. Maharashtra has too many moving parts. But if the BJP’s self-assurance is a touch soft around the edges, the Opposition has not entirely emerged from its paralysis of diffidence either.
It arrives at the battlefield assailed by a sense of prior resignation, almost like a hope too timid to turn into conviction. Big names are conspicuously absent in Congress candidate lists—the generals are being a little too choosy about picking their battles, when not dodging the draft altogether. Not to speak of shelves full of potential fifth columnists, and those locked in fratricidal fights. All too often, David seems armed with a boomerang rather than a slingshot.
But the more things do not change, the more they may not stay the same. Whether or not the results alter the external structures of power, aspects of the polity’s evolution are plain to see. One, the Congress has for the first time explicitly adopted the language of caste empowerment. This has the capacity to be different from the paternalistic inclusivity of Gandhi, and certainly the empty tokenism it became over time—both of which entailed a gentle reformism that did not threaten the status quo. It is difficult to mark it in terms of tactical utility because its immediate effects are unpredictable.
For one, the OBC castes hardly vote as a single bloc, and are part of a whole spectrum of middle castes that are rival claimants to power and resources in competitive local landscapes. The profusion of small caste-based parties, each vying for tickets, are a reflection of that grassroots reality, where in the short term it creates a zero sum game. A ticket to a Jat comes at the cost of a Gujjar, and so on and so forth. But in the long term, this ferment marks out a live field of ongoing democratic empowerment—what is frequently looked at askance as ‘fragmentation’ by the caste elite is a process that’s deepening the penetration of political power.
So when Rahul Gandhi, on his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, names the layers again and again—Adivasi, Dalit, OBC and, of late, the ‘poor general caste’—he is doing more than just counting off the constituents of the old, all-encompassing umbrella Congress vote. He is reinventing the ‘big tent’ in structurally more radical terms, getting a bit more Ambedkar into a Gandhian frame. This integrates livelihood themes with the idea of numerically commensurate rights for the ‘bahujan’. An authentic and articulate figure like Mallikarjun Kharge at the party’s helm completes the picture.
This is, of course, not a straightforward question of showing up and saying Jai Bhim. The traditional Congress elite and their middle-class support base is not without disquiet about this turn—from an embedded privileged-caste perspective, it strikes them only as tactical folly. There are other paradoxes. The licence-holder of the Karpoori legacy, Nitish Kumar, who had initiated this strategic phase with his caste census last year, is himself on the opposite side now. And Mayawati’s BSP, authentic practitioners of this politics but in semi-eclipse presently, won’t be the only ones ambivalent about the Congress regaining its old vote.
A lot of the fractious seat-sharing talks within the INDIA coalition seemed marked by a new wariness of the Congress. But in the end, whatever the Congress score, it would have evolved internally—a long-overdue correction of its post-Mandal ideological drought. The BJP’s internal processes are, for the moment, adjourned. That’s for a future that will start on June 4.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor Follow her on X @santwana99