THE GREAT ESCAPE

It’s a long way from here to an inclusive politics, but we should celebrate the fact that on the fourth of June, 2024, we, the people, avoided the abyss

- Mukul Kesavan

THE morning of the fourth of June found India’s non-bhakt citizens curled in a fetal position. Braced against news of the four-hundred foretold by the exit polls, sapped by a decade of electoral defeats, they had decided not to suffer the drawn-out torment of a televised count. Better to get the bad news all at once when the counting was done.

Then the WhatsApp messages beeped in. “Oye, are you watching?” “Watch, na!” “Arrey, it’s mad.” For me, it was my daughter in Brooklyn. She sent me a screenshot of a docile television channel’s early leads. The pixelated numbers on my phone’s screen were so unlikely that they seemed a cross-connection to an alternate India, a leak across the metaverse. Hooked, I turned the TV on. The rest is history.

The largest effect of Narendra Modi’s comprehensive failure to win a majority for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was psychological. Over a decade, the pan-Indian invincibility of the BJP led by Modi had congealed into a given. Over an extraordinary electoral career, Modi had always won a majority for the BJP in every election he had contested, both provincial and national. This aura of an all-India juggernaut immune to both disasters like demonetisation, and defeats in provincial elections in Bihar and Karnataka, had demoralised the BJP’s opponents in politics and civil society.

It had become hard to read the daily newspaper because the political flux that livens up the news had been stifled by the BJP’s iron grip on politics and political discourse. The 24x7 ‘news channels’ had been unwatchable for years, fronted by death-eater anchors with advanced degrees in performative sycophancy. Absurd though they were, they reigned unchallenged, as the rare island of dissent like NDTV was neutered through acquisition.