Who is winning Uttar Pradesh? For the last three months, this question has captivated our media, our political class and news audiences across the country. Well, now we know. To be fair, almost everyone already knew that the BJP was always ahead, whether they chose to believe it or not. This was generally accompanied, therefore, by a second, more intriguing question. If the BJP is winning, what will be the margin? Is it ‘enough’ for the BJP to win with a bare majority of 200 seats, a comfortable majority of 250 seats, or do they need a landslide of 280 seats? Or is it that anything below 300 seats is some kind of defeat for the BJP, PM Modi and Yogi Adityanath?
Let us see. We have a first past the post voting system and a parliamentary form of democracy. Whoever wins a majority of seats forms the government. It really is that simple. So where is this question of ‘enough’ coming from?
But you cannot dismiss this question as ramblings of a defeated opposition and frustrated civil society. You could sense that BJP circles were also wondering about it. And BJP supporters on social media were heavily invested in it. But why? The answer is just as simple. Because the party and its supporters have let their critics run free inside their heads.
This has real consequences. For almost a year, there was the so-called farmers’ movement that blocked all routes to the national capital, demanding that the government take back three new agricultural reform laws. They went on a rampage, destroyed mobile phone towers, beat up the police. They coordinated openly with separatist elements. They even held their own kangaroo courts and carried out gruesome public executions. The more they were treated with kid gloves, the worse they behaved. Ultimately, the government rolled back the farm laws.
But what do the election results say? In the first phase of Uttar Pradesh polls, the BJP won 46 out of 58 seats. In this phase, the BJP’s vote share was a jaw dropping 50%. This was in western Uttar Pradesh, where farmer anger was supposed to be the highest. Even in Punjab, the Congress, which adopted an aggressive posture against the farm laws, was wiped out.
This leads to a chilling realisation. There never was any anger against the farm laws. Not even in western Uttar Pradesh. If there was real anger in Punjab, it was vastly exaggerated. Remember that half of all Indians depend on agriculture for a living. Remember that farmers in all other parts of India were silent. Remember that farmer organisations, including the Bharatiya Kisan Union itself, had been campaigning for these exact reforms for decades now. Remember that the opposition Congress had promised these reforms in their manifesto for 2019 elections. Remember that every economist had supported these reforms at one time or another. It all makes sense now.
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But we have allowed a vocal minority, backed by vested interests, to prevail over the will of the people. This is dangerous for democracy. Who says the opposition and civil society have not figured out a way to stop the BJP? As long as they can keep the BJP from implementing its agenda, they are still winning.
How do they manage this? They play on the insecurities of the ruling party. They sow a sense of inadequacy in the ruling party regarding its electoral performance. Is 200 seats in Uttar Pradesh enough? Or do they need 300, perhaps even 400? They are able to plant canards in the media about Jat and Brahmin anger, and make the BJP take these seriously. As long as the ruling party is fighting these phantoms, the opposition is still winning.
We have to note how unusual this is. In the 2004 general elections, Sonia Gandhi’s Congress won 145 seats and the BJP got 138 seats. This gap of seven Lok Sabha seats was trumpeted as a historic mandate for the Congress and all its imaginary qualities such as liberalism and secularism. And even a victory for something described pompously as “idea of India.” For the next 10 years, or at least until the lakh crore scams tumbled out, the UPA was able to pursue its agenda ruthlessly, without ever having to look over its shoulder.
But when the BJP returned to power in 2014, the civil society changed its assessment of what it means to win an election. Even the first past the post voting system was questioned. In PM Modi’s first term, they asked if the BJP has a right to run India with just 31% of the vote. Never mind that 31% was the highest vote share for a ruling party since 1991. After 2019, they began asking if the BJP has a right to run India with just 38% of the vote. This is a trap. It is designed to keep the ruling party distracted, endlessly hankering for the moment when the critics finally admit that the BJP government is legitimate.
Naturally, the BJP detractors realise their psychological advantage. They keep raising the bar higher and higher. After the BJP’s win in Uttar Pradesh, at least one well-known liberal portal argued that the party had fallen short of Yogi Adityanath’s target of 80% of the vote. And thus, the BJP had actually failed. This is ridiculous, and the liberals know it too. But they argue like this because they know they can get away with it. It is the only leverage they have over a party that continues to enjoy support of the people. Why wouldn’t they use it?
The problem is that it is not just the BJP here which is getting a raw deal, but also the people of India. Some three decades ago, we decided to put an end to the Nehruvian system and bring in economic reforms. And it made almost everything about India much better. But those reforms did not touch the agriculture sector. As a result, the Indian farmer remained in chains, caught in everything from a debt trap to a dependency trap. The agricultural reform laws would have opened a window, even a door towards bigger reforms. But we have lost that opportunity, for now.
The same goes for several matters related to labour reforms, industrial policy, land acquisition and so on, where the opposition’s street veto applies. It also extends to education, where the slightest attempt to correct for 60 years of bias of communist historians is seen as something terrible.
A similar situation exists on the issue of freedom of speech. All governments in India have interfered with freedom of expression and always will. This is a result of laws passed by successive Congress regimes. The Emergency is really just one example among many. More often than not, liberals will issue a proforma denunciation of the Emergency. They will then use that as a way to claim moral superiority, as well as some form of objectivity. In 1980, when Indira Gandhi returned to power, one of her first decisions was to pass the National Security Act, under which anyone could be kept in jail for a year without trial. In other words, her authoritarian instincts remained as sharp as ever.
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For liberals, the trick is to take one or two isolated incidents and blow them up into an international talking point against the Modi government. You talk endlessly about that one alleged comic who spent a night in jail. You get your friends at Freedom House or some think tank in Sweden to talk about it too. That way you create an environment where nobody notices how many BJP workers have been murdered in West Bengal. You create an environment where only the voices of Modi’s critics are heard. You also manage to keep the government on the defensive, unable to wield its own agenda.
This system of liberal privilege has always existed, but it has become more starkly visible of late. In Canada, Justin Trudeau’s liberal government declared a national emergency because it could not handle a two-week protest. The New York Times tried to call it an attack on civil liberties, but apologised and changed its headline when the Canadian ambassador to the UN objected. Because nothing says civil liberty like a government official dictating a headline to a newspaper. Like the farmer protests in India, the trucker protests in Canada had no mass support. But the fact is that Canada’s liberal government was able to wrap up these protests in two weeks, limit damage to the Canadian economy and difficulties for common citizens. Because the Canadian government had no class of internationally connected class of critics nipping at their heels. In contrast, India suffered for a whole year. And ultimately, the people lost.
Nearly eight years since it rode to power, the government cannot keep walking into rhetorical traps set by its implacable foes. Even if the BJP had won 400 seats in Uttar Pradesh, they would have come up with some other test of legitimacy that the BJP would have to meet. This latest round of elections has shown that people are firmly behind the ruling party. They want the Modi government to implement its decisions. The margin of victory in Uttar Pradesh may be huge, but it does not matter. What matters is that the opposition should not keep winning nationally by a margin of negative 251 seats. That is the difference between the 52 seats won by the Congress and the 303 seats won by the BJP.
In August 2019, we remember how the government acted suddenly and decisively. They yanked Article 370 from the Constitution and tossed it into the trash heap of history. In one moment, the cobwebs in the minds of generations were swept away. The opposition was reduced to a whimper. That is the kind of decision-making that a young restless India wants and they have voted for it.
Abhishek Banerjee is an author and columnist. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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