A Turning Point

We have all been justly euphoric since 4 June 2024 as results started pouring in, especially since the non-biological being himself was trailing behind the Congress candidate Ajay Rai for quite some time. If the claim made in a video of a hardcore BJP worker Ujjwal Kumar from Banaras is to be believed, they – the unsung workers – had to arrange for ‘extra votes’ to ensure that ‘he’ wins. Regardless of whether his claim is correct, we kept up our euphoria even as the ECI website stopped updating counting figures and reports kept coming in from different constituencies in UP and some other places that INDIA alliance candidates were being forcibly declared lost after having won.

We have all been justly euphoric, even though we know that there is a lot we do not know still about what happened behind the scenes: (1) why the aggregate voting figure were not made public by the Election Commission of India (ECI) till 11 days after the first phase and 4 days after the second? How did about I crore 7 lakh votes increase and the percentage of votes polled jump about 5.7 percent during this period? Though the ECI denied this, there are very legitimate questions that remain, which were aired during the process itself and the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) has reportedly made state-wise calculations of these excess votes. The Quint has also reported that the ECI discarded 5, 54, 598 votes across 362 Lok Sabha seats. (2) Why did the ECI file an affidavit in court saying there was no legal requirement regarding the making of Form 17 C and aggregate voting figures public – and then mysteriously suddenly make them public? Why had this ECI departed from the previous, more transparent practices even during the 2019 elections as is clear from journalist Poonam Agarwal’s tweet reproduced in the first link above? (3) Why were the figures for the last phase not released till 6 June, well after the results were declared? (4) Most importantly, there is a discrepancy between votes polled and votes counted in more than 140 parliamentary constituencies.

Poonam Agarwal, who had followed the issue of such discrepancies during the 2019 elections has also stated that when the issue was raised last time, rather than explain it, the data was simply removed from the ECI’s website. Supreme Court lawyer Mehmood Pracha and former IAS officer MG Devasahayam who have taken up the crusade against EVMs have much more to say on the improprieties in the process, given the opaque nature of the machines. After the first phase itself, The Indian Express had reported that figures provided by the returning officers to the CPI(M) in Tripura revealed that many seats polled over 100 percent – in one case, 105 percent votes! Pracha likens all these discrepancies to the cash that sometimes might fall out of the bag by bank robbers attempting to escape.

We were all justly euphoric even though some of us certainly suspect that this is a stolen election.

After the Euphoria

Now that the moment of celebration has passed, the drama of government formation, distribution of ministries and the pathetic figure cut by Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar – all have been providing tax free entertainment. Some of us probably signed a letter demanding that Naidu and Nitish that they throw their lot with the forces of democracy. People like me who signed it, did so in order to build up pressure on those two persons. In retrospect, however, I am convinced that Naidu and Nitish Kumar, especially the latter, would have acted as Modi’s Trojan Horse, destabilizing the INDIA alliance government had it materialized, and conspired to bring down .

The parties in the INDIA alliance still hope to win over Naidu and Kumar, which to my mind, is a prospect fraught with danger. We will do well to remember that this election was not really fought by the parties who came together as late as in June 2023, largely under popular pressure and when Modi-Shah turned the heat on them. Even after the formation of the INDIA coalition, they fought the five state assembly elections, separately and often against each other. It was only after defeat in the state assembly elections and when 141 opposition MPs were suspended en masse from the parliament that some kind of urgency became visible. In any case, there are insurmountable difficulties with the alliance as far as West Bengal, Kerala, Delhi and Punjab are concerned, given that in Kerala both the ruling and Opposition alliances are part of the INDIA, and in West Bengal, Delhi and Punjab the ruling AITC and AAP are faced by other INDIA partners as Opposition forces apart from the BJP. We do not know if the parties can rise to the occasion in the larger interest of restoration of democracy. Since these parties are all prisoners of their respective histories, this becomes a difficult question to deal with – unless at least some of them are able to hand over leadership to those who are less constrained by older animosities.

Nonparty and Civil Society Activism

The ground for this electoral defeat of Modi (this being a stolen victory) was created by many different movements of the last five years, especially the anti-CAA movement, the farmers’ struggle, the anti Agniveer protests, which gave voice to a simmering anger that was building up against the regime. In electoral terms they, in different ways, did what the parties had been unable to – break the pall of fear and pave the way for the dissipation of the so-called ‘Modi magic’. The ground for these elections was prepared by non-party movements like the ‘No Vote to BJP’ campaign in West Bengal or the Bahutva Karnataka and Eddelu Karnataka campaigns wherein hundreds of people, unaffiliated to any party, worked tirelessly for the defeat of the Modi regime. The Manipur events too shocked a large number of people though it is not clear how much electoral impact it might have had in other parts of India. Indeed, even the campaigns and interventions to ensure electoral accountability and transparency were undertaken by civil society organizations.

The ground for these elections was also prepared by the large segment of Youtube channels that came up over the past few years as stalwarts of the Hindi media in particular were forced out of the channels they had worked in earlier. But this is not just about stalwarts like Ajit Anjum, Punya Prasoon Vajpayee or later Ravish Kumar but also the ones like National Dastak and Bolta Hindustan and a whole range of others that were anchored by completely new faces. The ground was also prepared by the Neha Singh Rathores and Dhruv Rathees (in different ways of course) who actually totally took the challenge to the mass level.

Perhaps INDIA coalition’s biggest strength was that while the Modi government was trying to crush parties like AAP or paralyze the Congress by freezing its accounts, there were thousands of unnamed warriors who took the task upon themselves. Of course, Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra and Nyay Yatra too played a significant role in galvanizing sections of the till then despondent people from different walks of life. Indeed, Rahul Gandhi behaved less like a politician and more like a deeply concerned citizen himself, connecting with people in the Yatras and also from different sections in their places of work – in the fields, in the Subzi Mandi or at some railway station. if there is one politician who had reinvented himself, it was him.

Finally, the story of this election will be incomplete without the way in which the Dalits and Most Backward Castes realized the threat to the Constitution posed by the BJP and what it could mean for them, though this part of the story is not entirely independent of the way the parties conducted themselves. Large masses of Dalits have voted for INDIA, translating into poor performance by parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi of Prakash Ambedkar. Responding to this situation, Harish Wankhede makes an interesting argument for a new vision – of working towards a national alliance of Dalit parties and organizations with the idea of working towards a ‘federal Dalit front’ where he sees a crucial role for intellectuals and civil society activists.

Looking Ahead

It will be suicidal to assume that the caste-class social support that INDIA received is here to stay. The caste-class alliances have to be strengthened mediated through parties or otherwise by undertaking joint activity. It will also be suicidal to assume that what we have just seen is the beginning of some irreversible decline of the forces that stand behind this regime. Enter, therefore, Mohan Bhagwat. The speech that is being discussed and debated everywhere stands out because it is an early indicator of a power struggle within to regain control of the BJP that the RSS has lost. The RSS leaders are shrewd enough to realize that without that the end of the Modi regime might mean the end of RSS in power as well. Bhagwat’s speech should not be read literally – it is not about democracy and consensus building that he wants to con us into believing. Thus when Bhagwat says that the Opposition (vipaksh) should not be seen as opposition (virodhi) but as the pratipaksh that merely brings forward other aspects of the matters at hand, and that they should be treated as complements of government, he is neither being a great liberal nor the mythical ‘tolerant Hindu’. Rather, he is merely taking aim at the usurpers who have hijacked the house that RSS built. It is about regaining its own lost control in the interests of preserving its power in the long run. The rhetoric of taking the opposition along is precisely that – rhetoric meant to confuse the opponent. It is actually part of the Sangh’s understanding of ‘Hindu tradition’ as samanvay (assimilation, if one may put it thus), which domesticates opponents or appropriates after destroying them, a la Gandhi – but that is another discussion.

A big challenge on our side will be to recognize the fragility of our own coalition – party and nonparty – and move towards overcoming it. We need to build on and consolidate the gains of this electoral struggle along with the parties who are willing to do so. Any halfway serious party should make the attempt to reach out to the sections that participated in the struggle but if they don’t, the responsibility might lie on the nonparty sectors to do so by keeping the pressure up on the parties.

It is here perhaps, that parties like the CPI(ML) Liberation, who are part of INDIA and have displayed great sagacity and readiness to relate to different parties, even those with whom they have had sharp conflicts in the past (in Bihar, for example), can play an important role. It is one party that is uniquely placed to play a catalyst’s role in firming up the relations between the party and nonparty sector.