New Delhi: There are two messages thundering across India today: First, the people are fed up with entitled dynasts who think politics is a weekend picnic and would much rather set their watches to London, New York and Dubai instead of Lucknow, Bhopal and Rohtak.
The best example of this is Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia, who flew to his son’s graduation at Yale University, close to New York, as soon as his constituency in Madhya Pradesh, Guna, voted in the last phase on 19 May. As of Thursday afternoon, Scindia was trailing from Guna by over 1 lakh votes, with the BJP’s Krishna Pal Singh leading.
The BJP’s Smriti Irani, who is ahead of Rahul Gandhi by 16,000 votes in Amethi, has leveraged the so-called “Modi wave” to underscore that even family bastions cannot be taken for granted. If Amethi teaches Gandhi and his sister, Priyanka, a lesson, it will be that the days of noblesse oblige are over.
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Priyanka is certainly a gutsy girl, and old-timers couldn’t stop recalling how she demolished her uncle Arun Nehru’s winning campaign in Rae Bareli in 1999. But in 2019, Amethi and the rest of UP showed her that she cannot catapult herself into politics just because she — or her brother — felt like it.
The second message is about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose incredible drive and ambition is now a byword in politics. In this election, he has shown in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, for example, that a changing and rapidly urbanising India needs a message beyond a coalition of castes. He offered to provide it.
In UP, Modi cut through tired old arguments offered by the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, both of whom never had anything to say to people beyond a dependence on castes. The difference between the BJP and the gathbandhan, both of whom founded their political strategies on caste, was that Modi also promised people the future.
Modi brought some of those promises to life through government schemes like Ujjwala and Swachh Bharat. He showed that he would put his money where his mouth is.
‘A good listener’
In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee also paid dearly for her several last-minute gaffes —arresting the young and irrepressible BJP worker Priyanka Sharma, who made a cartoon of her, and refusing to allow Amit Shah’s helicopter to land in Jadavpur for a BJP roadshow.
Between Modi’s arrogance and Banerjee’s political conceit, the young especially seem to have bought into the former’s messaging.
Modi’s confidants point out a lesser-known fact, that the PM is also a very good listener. On the eve of the 2017 poll in Uttar Pradesh, for example, Modi is believed to have tasked his aides with finding the winning formula for the election.
The message came back that BSP leader Mayawati’s Dalit vote had to be broken, while the Yadavs and Muslims had to be marginalised. Along with the egalitarian message that demonetisation brought, this was the formula the BJP adopted to win heavily across the state.
If Modi has decimated the opposition two years after his party’s sweep in Uttar Pradesh, it is because the opposition let him divide and rule them. Modi seems to have read his history well. From Babur to the East India Company, from the various battles at Panipat to Srirangapatna — Tipu Sultan’s capital near Mysuru, which has also been won by the BJP — the victor was able to carry off his spoils because the opposition wasn’t united.
Winner takes all? This wasn’t meant to be a presidential campaign, but Modi changed the rules of the game. In 2014, he won 282 seats by banking on the BJP’s “achhe din” slogan.
In 2019, Modi is the party and the party is him. The laziness of the BJP’s slogan “Phir ek baar Modi sarkar” showed the party’s confidence in having the PM as their only face. The party’s nearly 300 seats have vindicated this faith.
Also read: Modi has turned me into a Devdas. Was I day dreaming for the past 5 years: Shobhaa De