If Narendra Modi wins for the third time, equalling Jawaharlal Nehru’s record, he will be realising a long-cherished personal dream. In historical terms, it could also mean the end of Nehruvian India in one specific sense: the withering of the Congress as a national party. That is why 2024 is a crossroads election.
Last Sunday at Mumbai’s Shivaji Park, when Rahul Gandhi ended his second yatra, all opposition leaders on stage said, not without a touch of nostalgia, that a third term for Modi would be the end of India as we know it. Yet, the problem is that in the matter of seat allocation, regional parties cannot be too generous with the Congress because it would hurt their existence. This dilemma is a direct result of the weakening of the mother party, which is what the Congress was for a good while.
The BJP’s stated objective of a Congress-free India is a potent one, not just because they would like to free modern Indian history that lionises the roles of the Nehrus and the Gandhis—that is, free it from anglicised dynasts and their equally colonised cohorts. The BJP, naturally, would like to rewrite history with a more indigenised ink. Out of that ink flows new names, new people and an alternative history. For history is not always what happened, it is what is written. As Gabriel García Márquez said, it is not what happened, it is how you remember it. The dramatis personae of a Congress-free India are led by Modi.
A Congress-free India is not just a Nehru-free India. It is an opposition-less India. If the Congress performs poorly in the coming elections, the political vacuum it would create is not easily filled by any of the regional parties. Friends and enemies are born of needs and transactions. With a very powerful BJP at the Centre and the absence of a functional Congress, regional parties must work at new equations of reconciliation with the dominant national power. Many regional parties may find their identity attenuated or altered. In effect, with a few maverick, unpredictable exceptions like Arvind Kejriwal or Mamata Banerjee in the North and Dravidian-identity politicians like M K Stalin in the South, there is a strong possibility the political vacuum created by a possible decimation of the Congress would lead naturally to an electoral autocracy. This would be legal, but not just.
To my mind, this is the larger game-plan of the BJP. If opinion polls are any indication, the chances are that Modi will win the election; the BJP is projected to secure more than 300 seats. Certainly, they are likely to win enough to justify changes to the Indian Constitution. In a recent interview, Congress leader P Chidambaram talked about ‘major amendments’ in the event of a third Modi term.
In the face of that probable outcome, the opposition in general should be formulating a strategy on how to subsist the next five years. Although their pronouncements make it clear they are aware of the situation, they do not appear to have a fallback plan in the event of a Congress annihilation. Even for Karnataka, the only rich state where the party is in power, things might change if the BJP wins. Admittedly, this is a dystopian future. But it exists somewhere in the wings as a new act. If it has the least chance of emerging on the centre-stage, the regional parties must take it seriously and draw up plans besides just hoping for the best.
The BJP’s strategy of othering minorities like Muslims—without which they cannot optimise the Hindutva game-plan—is not likely to abate a third Modi term. The sustained consolidation of Hindu core votes demands it. It is as if the 4 percent ‘Hindu growth rate’—a term economist Raj Krishna coined in 1978 to explain our reluctant economy—can be improved only if the Mughal phase of Indian history with all its excesses and lapses can be embodied in the present generation of Muslims. Despite the alienation, the community, possibly hoping against hope, has not consolidated its vote in favour of the Congress.
If the BJP wins, the rupture with the old, easy-going India would be final. There would be prosperity, but it would come with a certain mutation in the genomic code that was at the heart of the Indian social and political reality.
It is not as if the Congress is going out of its way to win the alienated Muslim votes either. At Sunday’s INDIA rally in Mumbai, the only Muslim leader with some measure of visibility on stage was Farooq Abdullah, hardly a man with a pan-national or even pan-Kashmir image.
Modi, in his pran pratishta speech at Ayodhya, said people would remember the ceremony as the auspicious beginning of the next 1,000 years of a new India. The dread one feels is at the foreclosed nature of the future. It is somewhat like entering a tunnel—an interminably long, well-lit tunnel, but a tunnel nevertheless.
The Congress’s one hope is that Rahul Gandhi’s seemingly endless walks effect a conversion of the Muslim, Dalit, and other minority votes in his party’s favour. If that happens, the party will have a fresh lease. This is an uncertain possibility.
The BJP dispensation has made great use of State apparatuses to work its way towards building a new State. It has been a subversion of nearly consummate artistry. The elections begin on April 19. The result would decide whether we make a complete rupture with the past, or stay in a hopefully improved continuation. A country and its people are about to be redefined.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer.
His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)