Shiv Visvanathan: What the thumping mandate for Modi means
The first thing one
notices about the Lok Sabha election, in which the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) has secured a phenomenal victory, is that elections
are no longer a game of chance. Majoritarian politics has robbed elections of a
sense of contestation. The Election Commission as an institution has been
emasculated. The plurality of politics that kept India alive has been lost to
the univocality of choice, all focused around one man, Prime Minister Narendra
Modi.
It is almost as if India held a presidential election, while pretending
to be overtly parliamentary. One man’s presence justified the power of
propaganda, but also vitiated the plural sense of India. The whole election was
held on one question: do we vote ‘yes’’ or ‘no’ for Mr. Modi? This created a
reductive politics where a simplistic idea of the nation state and its security
destroyed the sheer diversity of issues that locality and region raised.
Mr. Modi’s victory is
a result of three triangular forces. The first is the creation of a
majoritarian society. The second is the ‘Hinduisation’ of this society. The
third is that this majority is committed to middle-class aspirations. A vote for Mr. Modi is
a message that needs to be interpreted. It is a vote that says he speaks to the
aspirations of the common man; he speaks the language of mobility, expectation;
he represents the middle-class dream of success. On the other hand, the Congress,
which was mouthing the language of socialism and secularism, has literally
become a voice in the wilderness... read more:
