If the first few days of the 18th Lok Sabha are any indication, India’s self confessed, “non-biological” Prime Minister Narendra Modi still believes he has “divine” sanction to exercise absolute power. Modi is refusing to accept the mandate of the 2024 general election. This year, the Bharatiya Janata Party lost 63 seats and scored only 240. The party also lost its flagship town of Ayodhya and fell short of the majority mark; Modi almost lost Varanasi. Voters have cut Modi to size. But the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance seems to believe that 240 is the new 400.
“Abki baar 400 paar” was the BJP’s campaign slogan, and despite the results, it seems to believe it has achieved that target. Modi and his ministers are still blithely swanning around, flaunting an arrogance of power. The reality is, Modi is entirely reliant on allies to cling to his chair.
The 240-is-the-new-400 mentality is revealed in the fact that there has been no shake-up in the Modi cabinet even though as many as 13 sitting ministers of the NDA government were defeated in 2024, including the high-profile Smriti Irani and Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
In this government, railway minister Ashwani Vaishnaw holds two other major portfolios. On 17 June, when the Kanchenjunga Express collided with a goods train and 10 were killed in West Bengal, Vaishnaw was appointed election in-charge for Maharashtra. How’s this for the arrogance of power?
A parliamentary standing committee has found that there have been as many as 244 major rail disasters under Modi’s watch from 2017-2022. Does India not deserve, at the very least, a dedicated railway minister? When the lives of millions of passengers are at stake, it is the arrogance of power to evade all accountability. No heads ever roll in the Modi dispensation. The PM keeps flagging off Vande Bharat trains, but when a train accident claims lives and disasters strike, he is nowhere to be seen, shrugging off all responsibility.
Raking up Emergency
The NDA government has so far not reached out to the Opposition in any meaningful manner, even though the election results have significantly boosted the latter’s numbers. This is exemplified in Modi’s stubborn insistence to keep Om Birla as the Lok Sabha Speaker and push through his election. Modi also paid glowing tributes to Birla. The truth is, Birla, in the previous Lok Sabha, functioned in the most brazenly partisan manner, suspending as many as 115 Opposition MPs in a single session. Back as Speaker, Birla, in a shocking move, read out a resolution against the imposition of the 1975 Emergency. Such resolutions are usually moved by political parties, not by the Speaker who is mandated by the Constitution to preside as a neutral umpire between parties in the House.
Parliament is the home of the Opposition and the platform where it is supposed to hold the government accountable. Unless the Opposition is allowed space in the House, dissent and disagreement will spill onto the streets as happened with the 2020-2021 farmers protests. At the start of the new session, the INDIA bloc brought copies of the Constitution to Parliament to remind the Modi government of the values it needs to abide by, particularly because the BJP does not have a majority.
In response, the “non-biological” PM has raked up the Emergency and even forced all constitutional functionaries — from the Speaker to Rajya Sabha Chairman to even the President — to include references to the event in their recent public speeches.
Also Read: 2024 election is throwing up many reality checks. There’s Modi fatigue
A photocopy version of 1975
If the “divine” PM is so obsessed with the Emergency, then why has he been trying to implement an undeclared one for the last decade? Why is he busy trying to extend the Emergency if he is so opposed to it?
Why is he exercising a stranglehold on the media, refusing to give up executive control of agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED)? Why is he refusing to give the Opposition equal space and visibility in Parliament, to reform the police and make it an autonomous body according to the 2006 Supreme Court judgment? What are the reasons for delaying judicial appointments in attempts to influence the judiciary and refusing to honour the federal principle of cooperating with state governments?
Recently, Australian High Commission diplomats were stopped from meeting Bengal ministers. Modi met Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina and according to some reports, the 1996 Bangladesh-Farakka Treaty or water sharing between India and Bangladesh is being renewed. Yet, Modi did not see fit to include Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee at the meeting, when this water sharing crucially affects the inhabitants of the state.
These moves are nothing but a photocopy version of the 1975 Emergency. The PM is trying to implement the very thing he says he opposes and carrying forward an autocratic Emergency mindset.
Days after the election results, Delhi Lieutenant-Governor gave sanction for terrorism charges to be brought against renowned writer Arundhati Roy. Sebastien Farcis, a French journalist reporting from India, was forced to leave the country after the home ministry refused to renew his work permit, just as another veteran French reporter Vanessa Dougnac had been forced to leave some months earlier.
Also Read: Modi is convinced he’s sent by God. Citizens more worried about inflation and employment
Reflecting the same mindset
The Modi dispensation’s response to the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) reveals the same 240-is-the-new-400 mindset. The government has given no apology or mea culpa for plunging lakhs of medical students into despair and anguish. There has been no acceptance of the government’s own inefficiency. The sudden removal of the National Testing Agency chief looked like a knee-jerk move. Instead of holding education minister Dharmendra Pradhan accountable, lo and behold, he has been put in charge of the Haryana elections.
How is the NDA government going to prevent such examination disasters in the future? What systematic steps are being taken to create a permanent solution? The answer is abolishing the NEET entirely and returning to the old decentralised system of state-specific medical examinations.
On a personal note: My son is a doctor. In 2013, he took the first NEET-UG examination but also had to go through the old system of state-specific medical entrance tests, since in that year both exam systems ran concurrently. I recall the old examinations were cumbersome, entailed travel and took up a great deal of time, but in the end, they were transparent, fair, and trustworthy.
Modi’s over-centralising tendencies keep leading the government into a swamp of inefficiency. Medical entrance examinations have been needlessly centralised, only to create endless trauma and hardship for harried exhausted students pushing themselves to the brink.
Verdict 2024 is a rejection of Modi’s style of one-leader-one-party rule. The voter has chosen the multi-party constitutional democracy. Trapped in a fantasy, the PM is incapable of providing daily governance. India craves day-to-day administration, not acts of god.
The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP, All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)
Do some soul searching, provided you have soul, before asking such loaded questions.
So you are basically lamenting that opposition is still unable to make Modi bend.
This is how defeat smells.
You and the entire opposition need to accept that despite such strong support from various quarters you did not reach even the numbers that BJP alone has.
Politics of Sectarianism is going to doom all.
Please reflect on this . Stop anti Hindu activities. Otherwise for coming 20 years you will not get to form the government.
Modi and his team also need to reflect that they came very close to losing the game and pushing with their Hindutva agenda will henceforth be dangerous, both for them and the country.
This Sagarika and her idiot of super grade husband thinks that they will write whatever crap they want and people will trust them.
She is asking why Modi is ruling as if he has got 400?
I am asking her why her step father( Rahul Gandhi) is behaving like he has got majority? Yesterday he abused Hindu religion. And there is no fatwa , no threat. That’s the tolerance of Hindu religion. He can try abusing Islam and then see. Just try once.
Manmohan Singh ruled when Congress got 140. NDA has clear majority. Is there a confusion in this?
Why are you people brazen and emboldened so much as if you got 230 as a single party?
I hope sagarika will have the guts to speak out against the action taken by her own party men in Cooch behar (where a muslim woman supporter of BJP was disrobed, draggged by her hair and physically assaulted), or against sheik shajahan, or against someone called as JCB.
I think she is lucky that BJP is not ruling like INC and that Modi is not Indira. If that were the case, Mamta would have lost power in 2021. Neither she nor any one of her ilk will ever acknowledge that.
I am in no way fan of Modi’s BJP, and they did quiet a lot of mistakes in they way handled multiple issues over the years. But this article is clearly biased and twisting numbers and issues assuming readers are just going to form opinion based on their wordplay.
1) 244 major rail disasters between 2017 -22?? conveniently ignoring that the trend of railway accidents consistently came down from 450 per year in 2001 to 150 per year in 2010 to below 50 per year by 2020.
2) Not reached out to opposition even though the election results boosted their numbers??? Is the expectation to bow down just because the numbers got higher even when the majority remains at BJP side?
3) Dissent spilling on streets like Farmer protests? Opposition can in no way claim credit for this. If they want the credit, they should own up to having kept farmers misinformed about laws and supporting them in keeping them always depended on govt subsidies, also hurting tax paying middle class in the process
4) strangle hold on policing agencies? When was the last time any govt let police do their jobs?
5) there were 65 exam paper leaks in 19 states in the past 7 years. Instead of addressing larger issue of repeated leaks, focusing on one central operated exam leak is just trying to rally up issue and is not solution oriented criticism. Never the less, it brings more focus on the repeat leaks, I am all for making as much noise on this.
Says the MP from a party called TMC that has pushed bengal so deep into the abyss that women are routinely harassed, beaten in public in talibani style and the sitting MLA says “this is muslim rashtra”.
Mamata banerjee wants judiciary to be free of political bias. In the same breath, i would like to add that journalism should be free of political and ideological biases.