The 'pro-incumbency' factor

The election results are anything but a failure of the Opposition

What a terrific election this has been. The first in 50 years that returned a government with two consecutive majorities. This is what the word mandate means. It means endorsement and acceptance and ratification from the voter of the agenda you lay out and the achievements you boast of. 

The last person to achieve two consecutive majorities was Indira Gandhi and this was five decades ago. It shows how totally dominant Narendra Modi has been in the contemporary politics of India. He was careful to say through the campaign that he was witnessing “pro-incumbency” and that he would again win a majority. He has done that. 

This result gives him the mandate to pursue his ideas of transforming India. We can quibble over whether or not some of these ideas — say in economics and national security in particular — have produced the results they were meant to, or might be the right thing to do. 

However, all of it stands endorsed and approved by our people, and overwhelmingly. We should expect that such things will be more forcefully implemented.

The Opposition will be attacked for being incompetent and unable to put up a fight. But it is not easy to see what else they could have done differently and what they could have done more.

Uttar Pradesh became the critical state early on, and it was here that we saw the Opposition swallow its pride and align against the ruling party. It would have been difficult to get two parties as the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party to align. They settled the question of who would be the bigger partner and divided the 80 seats.

The difficulties at the level of the worker and the candidate can only be imagined. For the Dalit of northern India, oppression comes not from the Brahmin or the Baniya but the Other Backward Classes that they deal with in their daily lives. 

For them, to get together and fight an election shows that they realised the strength of the coming storm and did what they could. If they have lost to a phenomenon they are not to be blamed.

In West Bengal, a tough and fresh Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was held to an honourable draw by Mamata Banerjee. Honourable, that is, for the BJP. Banerjee did the best she could. Bengal is the cauldron where the majoritarian ideology and the BJP have their birth: Syama Prasad Mookerjee and all that. That land has not seen the sort of politics that the BJP is capable of introducing and the churn in society that comes with it. 

There will be bigger and better results for the BJP in Bengal. What the party has achieved in its strongholds is astonishing. It happens rarely in first-past-the-post systems like ours and the one in the United Kingdom that the winning party wins 50 per cent of the vote. Especially rarely in multi-party democracies like ours where it is not normal for one force to overwhelm all others. A 50 per cent voteshare at the local level is irresistible. Meaning it cannot be resisted.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

That is what the BJP has delivered in critical states including, apparently and quite amazingly, Uttar Pradesh. Even if it doesn’t quite touch that number, it doesn’t matter because it has improved on a base of over 40 per cent. Incredible.

Rahul Gandhi will be held accountable for the loss of the Congress and that is as it should be. However, it is unclear if he is to blame. All the things that he was previously faulted for — taking it easy, not being aggressive enough, going off on holidays, not warming up to the Opposition — he addressed all of those things. We could say that he didn’t deliver and that is a fact. But he tried what he could. 

For now, we must admire the craft and the abilities of Modi, easily the most talented politician of our generation. 

The BJP has held two constituencies for a long time (it had about a quarter of the national vote under Atal Bihari Vajpayee). The first is the communities that align themselves with the party locally. And so the Patels in Gujarat, the Lingayats in Karnataka and so on. These are communities that stay no matter who leads the party. 

The second constituency is that of Hindutva and those who have gravitated towards the BJP because of its anti-minority and especially anti-Muslim posture. It is likely that, for whatever reasons, which we need not go into here, they have been satisfied with the 2014-19 era. 

To these, Modi appears to have added a third constituency: Those of us who have accepted his thesis of an old India, dynastic, corrupt and weak, making way for a new one that is meritocratic, clean, efficient and above all strong. 

Such numbers as this election has thrown up need to be understood at a deep level. It will be fascinating to see how the shattered opposition — the Battle of Karnal comes to mind (the combined Mughal armies were laid low by Nadir Shah) — recovers from a wound as seemingly fatal as this.