Ravish Kumar: Why the Modi Voter Has Fallen Silent
The BJP’s 2019
election drive has shaken off every association with the 2014 poll campaign. To
put it baldly, 2019 is all about an excision of the memory of 2014. Seeing the
party’s campaign posters, one gets an unerring feeling that the very mention of
the last Lok Sabha campaign has it running scared.
The BJP has stuck new
posters over those of five years ago – new issues are being marketed and
the forced taglines are glaringly obvious. The analogy that comes to mind is of
a schoolboy who fails his exams and comes home saying that many students have
failed, because their answer sheets had not been properly evaluated. Similarly,
in Modi’s case, his residual political success comes from the fact that
opposition politicians and their parties too have nothing to show except
failure.
There is one more
thing – at home the schoolboy might dress up his failure by saying that other
students have also failed, but in the neighbourhood he tells everyone that he
has cleared his exams. Of course, he is careful not to show his report card to
anybody. This is the story of more than 50% of the students in the Indian
education system – and this is the story of Narendra Modi as well.
It is astonishing that
the BJPs campaign posters have no mention whatsoever of the slogans of 2014;
one wonders where they have vanished. Moreover, in the previous Lok Sabha
election, people took it upon themselves to promote the party’s campaign, make
the slogans their own. This time around, if not for playing politics over the
army or the anti-satellite weapon programme led by the Defence Research and
Development Organisation and the Indian Space Research Organisation, Modi would
not have had a single issue to put up on his election poster.
As the man who has
ostensibly hounded terrorism out, he stares out from the posters with a stern
gaze. In Hajipur, on the way to the Digha Bridge, one comes across a poster
lauding him for the successful anti-satellite missile test. The image that
springs to mind is of a student who comes home and shows his mother not his
bare exercise book but the full notebook of a classmate.
In 2014, Modi sold the
people a dream. In 2019, he is hawking his failure... read more:
