“Unka Sankalp, Vipareet Bharat”
“Sab ka Naash, Sab ka Vinaash”
By Aravind Bhatikar
THE Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo was unambiguously defeated in the last Lok Sabha elections. In Maharashtra, the BJP candidates won only in three out of the 17 Lok Sabha constituencies where Narendra Modi had addressed election rallies. The message from most parts of India was loud and clear: shelf-life of the Modi brand is over. The defeat of the Modi-Shah duo and their party – it was Modi, Modi, Modi everywhere and “BJP” was nowhere to be seen or heard – should be understood in proper perspective.
The INDIA bloc was not only fighting against a cash-rich ruling political party but also against the mainstream media which was nothing short of bonded labor of the ruling party; government regulatory agencies should have had operational independence but which were ostensibly hijacked by the ruling party; an Election Commission which had openly thrown its weight behind the Modi-Shah duo; and a legal system which has become a prisoner of its own procedures and ambiguities.
Just to ensure that the NBNM (Non Biological Narendra Modi) does not ignore the loud and clear message given by the Lok Sabha Elections, the by-elections in 13 Assembly Constituencies in seven states held recently re-emphasized the eclipse of the Modi brand. The Modi-Shah party won only in two out of 13 constituencies. INDIA block won in 10. Worse still for Modi was the blow inflicted on Modi by the Congress when the latter won the Badrinath seat in Uttarakhand. Modi’s desperate attempts to hijack religion to bolster his politics was first rejected by voters in Ayodhya (Faizabad) and then in Badrinath.
The electoral debacles came in the midst of a survey in UP by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) which showed that 36% of the respondents preferred Rahul Gandhi as the next prime minister of India to Modi whom only 32% favored. The CSDS is an autonomous institution fully financed by the government of India.
Another bad news for the Modi-Shah duo came from a totally unexpected direction – the Lok Sabha TV. Rahul Gandhi’s speech as a Leader of Opposition was reportedly viewed by about 10 lakh viewers as against Modi’s speech which had only about 80 thousand viewers. The widely tom-tommed claim of Modi managers that he has 10 crore followers on X (formerly Twitter) is also widely challenged as one of the many fake claims of the “godi” media.
There is no good news from anywhere. Modi is desperate. So is Shah. Their spin-doctors have now hit upon a new idea to divert India’s attention from the present Modi disaster to an event in history which they think has not been flogged enough – the Emergency clamped on the nation by Indira Gandhi in 1975. A blunder committed by Indira Gandhi 50 years back is now sought to be recycled and carpet-bombed on a nation to obliterate the multiple failures of the Modi-Shah duo during the last 10 years. The government has notified on the official gazette that June 25 will henceforth be observed as “Samvidhan Hatya Diwas”– this can be roughly translated in English as the “Constitution Assassination Day.”
The desperate attempts to revive memories of Indira Gandhi’s blunder and derive political mileage from this ploy, ignores the fact that 83% of India’s population today was born after 1975, and that no attempts to brainwash voters born after 1980 will succeed in hiding Modi’s failures, since what is happening today has a direct impact on their lives.
Incidentally, if the Constitution was assassinated in 1975, how come Modi-Shah and other members of Parliament, and all judges from the lowest to the highest court swear by the Constitution and take an oath to uphold the sovereignty and integrity of India? India became a sovereign nation when the Constitution was adopted. How long and how far can the Modi-Shah duo go in misleading the nation?
