Shikha Mukerjee | The message of voters is: Enough is enough!

The mandate delivered by the popular sovereign leaves no room for deniability. The voters have called Narendra Modi’s gigantic bluff, delivered on the floor of the Lok Sabha that the BJP would win 370 out of the total 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. The National Democratic Alliance is far short of the “400 paar” mark that Mr Modi guaranteed he would get.

Voters have said loud and clear that they don’t entirely believe in Mr Modi’s guarantees, whatever these may have been. That they believed even less in his weird “guarantee of guarantees” is quite obvious.

Voters across the country have delivered a verdict that, especially in the heartland state of Uttar Pradesh and in Maharashtra, have given the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance with the Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the DMK, the Trinamul Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party led by Sharad Pawar, the Shiv Sena led by Uddhav Thackeray on the one hand and the other partners in other states trashes the BJP’s conviction of being the best ever, even better than the Congress led by Jawaharlal Nehru.

The mandate destroys the myth of the invincibility of Narendra Modi and the BJP that he leads. The mandate does two things simultaneously. It tells the political class what it does not approve; it also tells the political class what it wants the government to do. So, on the one hand, it is a rejection of the unprincipled politics of engineering defections, splitting parties to seize power in states where the BJP had not succeeded in winning the popular mandate. It is equally an emphatic rejection of its dangerous divisive politics based on religious identities. It can also be taken as a rejection of the homogenising Hindutva that Mr Modi tried to bully the rest of the country into believing as the only valid way of practicing Hinduism.

On the other hand, the verdict signals serious disapproval of the policies pursued by the Modi government and its governance that took people for granted, imposing hardship without apology in the name of “vikas”, that is, development. It challenges the “vision” of the new “Viksit Bharat” that Mr Modi described at length in a newspaper article on June 3 and his entirely unbelievable promise or guarantee that India would be an economic superpower, a land overflowing with milk and honey as it were, by the time India was ready to celebrate 100 years of being Independence.

Equally, the verdict does not deliver a victory for the INDIA bloc, but it does stop the Modi-Amit Shah-BJP juggernaut in its tracks. Mr Modi is no longer the man of the moment, who holds India in his tight grasp; that baton has passed on.

As a new narrative on the “UP ke Ladke” (Sons of Uttar Pradesh), namely Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav, is crafted, the fact of the matter is that the combination of the Congress and powerful regional and smaller parties crafted an alternative that obviously captured the imagination of voters in crucial states, starting with Uttar Pradesh, moving on to Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Bihar, Karnataka, Rajasthan and even succeeded in shaking awake voters in Mr Modi’s bastion of Gujarat. The verdict in Maharashtra, where the BJP split the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party to burgle the majority held by the Maha Vikas Aghadi, is a decisive indictment against the skullduggery of the BJP masterminded by Mr Modi and Mr Shah. This is also the passing of the mantle to younger leaders -- Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, M.K. Stalin, Tejashwi Yadav -- the despised “shehzade” of political parties where leadership is passed down within the family.

The mandate is, above all else, a celebration of the diversity of India, rather a verdict against the overweening ambition of the BJP, which believed that it alone was qualified to represent every region, sub-region and corner of the world’s most populated country. The regional parties are powerful stakeholders in the idea of India that is not hegemonistic as the BJP so clearly is. The manoeuvrings of the BJP to jostle its way into Kerala and Tamil Nadu and declare that West Bengal would give it the best results in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections is a part of its hegemonistic vision, that is all too evident in the idea of “One Nation-One Party” and its follow-up “One Nation-One Election”.

The 2024 Lok Sabha election confirms that regional parties have come of age. They are no longer the feared, almost despised, “parochial” parties of the 1960s that popped up to “fragment” the nation, as political pundits propounded, fearing the imminent dismemberment of India. It was Mr Modi’s mistake to believe in an idea that was obsolete, though he should have known better given his claim of fast forwarding India’s economic progress in his 10 years of being on top.

India, as the 2024 verdict indicates, cannot be represented  by any one political party and certainly not by a leader whose ways are similar to the archetypal authoritarian demagogue. It is also a verdict that shows strong opposition to the idea of this demagogue telling the electorate that once his claim to power is confirmed, as Mr Modi did in West Bengal, he would overturn the popular mandate to the Mamata Banerjee government. Mr Modi and his partymen, in flagrant violation of democratic principles, repeatedly threatened Opposition-held state governments during the campaign that they would be busted. He said it in West Bengal; he repeated it in other states, warning voters and the regional parties in power that the BJP would seize power, by hook or by crook.

The bottom line is that Mr Modi does not have the mandate, because the BJP has not won a majority of the seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha. By falling short, the BJP now has to depend on its allies to retain power. What the BJP does and how Mr Modi responds to this crisis of confidence will play out over the next few days. It is entirely likely that a period of hard bargaining within the NDA will follow as allies extract the maximum price for their support.

It would be a mistake for the BJP to hustle at this point; it not only needs to sound penitent for taking the voter for granted and abusing the power it held between 2014 and 2024, it also needs to act penitent. The INDIA bloc, at this point, is the declared alternative. To assume any other responsibility would betray the mandate.The one thing the INDIA bloc leaders should not forget is the responsibility of holding Mr Modi to account for his acts of omission and commission over the past 10 years.