It’s perfectly legitimate for a political party and its leaders to take credit for an electoral victory especially if it is won against odds including anti-incumbency, but it is against basic democratic norms and political decency to label political opponents in the darkest possible hues. That is why the response of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the BJP’s victory in the Haryana elections and the increased vote share in Jammu and Kashmir fails the test of grace that the winner is expected to demonstrate. It is almost akin to the Congress directing its ire to the electronic voting machines when it loses an election.
The Prime Minister told his party cadre who gathered to celebrate the party’s victory that the Congress and its allies were “indulging in an international conspiracy to damage the country’s democracy, economy and social fabric” and that the patriots of Haryana taught them a lesson so as “not to allow such anti-India” politics”. Curiously, Modi would even charge the Congress and its alliance partners for attacking the honour of institutions such as the Election Commission, the Army, police, judiciary. And he would call those who petitioned the Supreme Court for better transparency in the use of electronic voting machines urban Naxals.
The Prime Minister is very well within his right to credit the victory to the ‘development politics’ of his party or to the ‘anti-development politics’ of his opponents; political parties can take on their adversaries on ideological level. However, it is not for the Prime Minister of the country to present himself in the garb of a nationalist who is fighting the anti-national forces in elections.
It is not for him to call his fellow citizens and partakers of national politics as urban Naxals and anti-nationals. It cannot be that all those who question the decisions and actions of the state and its arms as haters.
The BJP has been talking of a ‘Congress Mukt Bharat’ since 2014 and the call got shriller after the near decimation of the Congress at the hustings and its winning historic low seats in the Lok Sabha elections. It prompted the saffron party to envisage an India where the Opposition does not exist. The slogan got unprecedented traction in the saffron parivar with several elders echoing it, frightening the people of the return of the Emergency days when the leader of the ruling party equated the prime minister with the country. Like the Congress then, it did not occur to the managers and spin doctors of the present ruling party that India is a democracy, with warts and all, and that opinions that go against those of the ruling party are an essential part of the very idea. The people taught the BJP that tough lesson in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
The Prime Minister and the BJP must realise that the people refused to give them a simple majority in the elections; it is incumbent upon them to work with the other parties which need not necessarily share all their ideas. That is the mandate of democracy. Being restive at the prospects of giving democratic space to the Opposition is not the best signal a Prime Minister can give out.
