The Resistance has Just Begun

The 2024 election turned out to be a battle between vested interests and unorganised masses

- Harish Khare

SEVEN decades ago, the eminent American political scientist, Professor Seymour Martin Lipset, published a seminal research paper, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’ in the authoritative American Political Science Review in 1959. His thesis was that advanced levels of literacy, industrialisation and urbanisation were required for democracy to succeed. It became an influential argument in those contentious days of the Cold War, and provided the Western policy elite a rationalisation for Washington’s support and patronage for military regimes in various continents.

Indian voters had neither heard of nor cared for Lipset. They definitely proved the Harvard professor repeatedly wrong, but most emphatically in 1977. Nonetheless, the voters reserved their most resounding refutation for the Lipset thesis till 2024 as for the first time, democracy as an ideology triumphed over fancy notions of strong-leader-led-autocracy.

The last 10 years have seen a very determined ideological assault on the idea of democracy, anchored in constitutional legitimacy. A tiny elite—a dozen favoured business houses, a band of technocratic bureaucrats, and a corrupt and corrupting media mafia—had enlisted the upper castes and upper classes in a Project Limited Democracy to install an anti-people policy regime. The 2024 vote came down to whether the masses wanted to lend their imprimatur to an all-powerful, unaccountable, and omnipresent State, which provides a shield to the power-hungry elite to carry on its greedy business.

This elite was prescient enough to realise that it would need a mukhota, someone like Narendra Modi, an effective and energetic demagogue, a man of relative humble origin who would remain in awe of people of wealth, a man of immense self-belief, who could be easily manipulated to stand up for crony capitalism dressed up as