Dubai: When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a clear majority in India’s 2014 general elections — winning 282 seats and emerging as the first non-Congress party since independence to win an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of parliament) — it was widely believed to be a vote for change.
This was all the more poignant given the slew of corruption scandals and graft cases that came to light during the second five-year term of the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance government, headed by the Congress party.
The hitherto gripping tale of a Hindu nationalist party charging ahead with an almost missionary zeal to establish a unipolar political discourse in a multipolar society has started to lose the plot.
In more ways than one, the BJP’s thumping win in 2014 — reducing India’s Grand Old Party, Congress, to just a 44-member outfit on the floor of the Lok Sabha — was a watershed moment in national politics. In less than two years’ time, when BJP repeated its stellar show by winning more than 300 seats in the Uttar Pradesh assembly election — along with wresting power from the Congress in several other states across the country — the “Congress-mukt Bharat” (a Congress-free India) clarion call from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah seemed to have a fair bit of substance in it in terms of political ambition, the pomposity notwithstanding.
Then followed demonetisation, rolling out of the goods and services tax (GST), a skin-of-the-teeth victory in its stronghold of Gujarat, pipped-at-the-post disappointment in Karnataka, uneasy questions over a fighter plane deal, and finally, the biggest electoral debacle for the BJP since coming to power at the Centre in 2014 — losing the three crucial Hindi-heartland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh last month.
The hitherto gripping tale of a Hindu nationalist party charging ahead with an almost missionary zeal to establish a unipolar political discourse in a multipolar society has surprisingly started to lose the plot. And this dilution of a muscular political brand equity has quite ironically made way for the phoenix-like rise of a benign-at-best, uncertain-at-worst political persona of one Rahul Gandhi. The Congress president, the fifth scion of the Nehru-Gandhi clan to bear the mantle of India’s GOP, has not only given his own political career a fresh lease of life, but has even made his party rank and file believe that the Congress has a future beyond the intensive-care-unit existence it had largely confined itself to since the summer of 2014.
With yet another general election scheduled barely four months into the new year, the fight couldn’t probably have got any closer than this. And who would have thought that there would be such a twist in the tale barely four years into a landslide victory. Politics makes strange bedfellows. Politics can also be a great leveller. A Modi-vs-Rahul presidential-style slugfest in 2019 is a make-or-break — whichever way one looks at it.
Fasten your seat belts for a roller-coaster ride this summer with the world’s largest democracy!
