There are firecrackers bursting all over India. And it's not for Diwali. It's in celebration of the drubbing Modi's BJP received in Bihar. The hijacking of the Idea of India has been stopped in mid-heist. We are saved. Thank you, Nitish.
For what has happened in Bihar is not just an election but the Rediscovery of India in the nick of time, on the very eve of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's 125th birth anniversary celebrations. When the forces of malevolence won the Lok Sabha elections last year, too many Indians voted for Modi thinking they would thus end corruption in governance and accelerate the processes of growth. It was called Modi's "development agenda".
But as the year progressed and moved towards the end of 2015, the hidden agenda came all too sharply into focus. Modi's finger that trembles all the time on his Twitter account held firmly back as the real representatives of his thought processes - the Mahesh Sharmas and the Sanjiv Balyans, veteran colleagues in the
Sangh Pracharak brigade and ministers to boot - proclaimed aloud with no restraint the steps they were taking to convert our liberal India into an authoritarian Hindu
Rashtra, based on a narrow construct of our nationhood and designed not to take us forward through the 21st century but all the way back to the 12th.
There thus followed, in planned succession, the outrageous statements within the sacred precincts of Parliament of Acharya Giriraj Kishore and Yogi Adityanath, backed up by the likes of Sadhvi Jyoti and other BJP MPs; "love
jihad"; "
Ghar Wapasi"; church attacks; partisan appointments to key positions, based purely (or, rather, impurely) on ideological orientation, in the Indian Council of Historical Research and the Film and Television Institute, among others; subversion of the autonomy of our Universities and other centres of higher learning with the ulterior motive of bending them to yield their academic independence to Hindutva perspectives; recasting syllabi and text books to distort history and the minds of young children; threats to Muslims to "go to Pakistan"; a rising tide of intolerance and violence and black paint circumambulating around beef and cow slaughter; the return in protest of awards by literally hundreds of intellectuals, writers, scientists, artists, and film-makers, all airily dismissed by the Finance Minister as "manufactured dissent"; divisive election rhetoric; the baiting of silver screen icon Shah Rukh Khan; the ridiculous talk, from none other than Amit Shah, of fireworks in Pakistan if the "mistake" were made of defeating the BJP; worst of all, murder and mayhem from Saharanpur to Dadri - none of this condemned or punished and, therefore, implicitly endorsed from on high.
The composite India that our freedom fighters fought for (and whose ranks contained no RSS members or Hindu
Mahasabha-ites) was, and was seen to be, under attack as never before. The Prime Minister's pregnant silences spoke louder than all his empty bombast. All this was noted in Bihar.
To hide their true agenda, the BJP at first proceeded cautiously. Hamstrung by a strong Constitution, embedded with Gandhian and Nehruvian values, they lulled fears of a Hitlerian take-over by a meretricious demonstration of their alleged commitment to Parliamentary democracy. So the newly-elected Prime Minister, in the full glare of a huge bank of TV cameras, knelt to kiss the steps of Parliament House as he first entered it. But within the first couple of sessions, he got bored, even frustrated with dilatory parliamentary procedure. So, where Nehru had proclaimed his commitment to Parliamentary democracy not by kissing well-trodden stones but by conscientiously attending Parliament, Modi, brought up on rare and brief sessions of the Gujarat assembly, started ignoring the House and especially the Rajya Sabha where his troops were badly outgunned.
His contempt for Parliament was unleashed upon the nation when, in the aftermath of the 2014 Winter session, "Ordinance Raj" was unleashed upon the country, beginning with his much-discredited Land Acquisition Ordinance. Democracy started sliding towards the doldrums, however many stone flaggings the Prime Minister may have kissed. He had to be taught that this was not the way of democracy. The Opposition decided that enough was enough and showed him that if Parliament was to function, Parliamentary democracy meant respect for the Opposition. But Modi's inherently autocratic ways made it impossible for him to even sway, let alone bend. This did not go unnoticed in Bihar.
While there has been no attempt by Modi's lot to reach out to the Opposition in the months that have elapsed since the Monsoon session, the hammering they have received in Bihar might have taught them, as the well-known British jurist, the late Sir Ivor Jennings, once wrote: "Every election throws up not only a government but also an Opposition." During the fortnight that remains before Parliament reconvenes, we will see whether Modi's cohorts have learned Parliamentary humility or whether they will go on with their self-destructively arrogant ways.
Bihar has also shown the country that "
jumla" politics has had its day, that attempts at finding "
samajik samikaran" through untrue innuendo does not work. Most importantly, it has shown that trying to create a salience between "Pakistan" and "Muslim" to scissor a communal divide also does not work, for Indians are too wedded to millennia of religious tolerance, indeed, the celebration of our diversity of faiths, for the exclusivist Hindutva line to work. For a brief passing moment in mid-2014, the electorate was taken in by Modi's style and his disguising his Hindutva agenda with tall talk about "development". Now, after 16 months of Modi raj, they read the Sangh Parivaar's communal signals loud and clear, and see the face of Modi's "development" in dal selling at Rs 200 a kilo. As one cartoonist has accurately put it, "
Har Har Modi" is now "
Arhar Modi"!
Agriculture, on which 60% of our people primarily depend for their livelihood, is down two years in a row to just 1.1% in Modi's first year and now steeply hurtling towards negativity in his second; that manufacturing is now at 5%, where in the UPA's heyday it was booming at over 14 %; that exports are wallowing at minus 21%, below where they were at this time last year (which was already well below where it had been the previous - UPA II - year); that imports are stagnating, pulling down all-round economic activity; that no advantage is being taken of the fortuitous fall in global oil prices; that the rupee is at its lowest ever; that NPAs are swelling even as bank credit off-take lingers; that the only things rising are prices and unemployment.
While Nitish has shown that State spending and State schemes are the key to economic and social welfare that encompasses the poor, the BJP's promises are hollow because they are looking to Big Business to bail them out. Bihar saw that Modi knows nothing about development and everything about dividing people and society. Therefore, Bihar sent him packing to the pavilion.
Will the BJP draw the right lessons? It can't. For its Hindtuva was an invention of the 1920s. They are not going to celebrate the upcoming centenary of the creation of the RSS by abandoning everything Savarkar and Golwalkar stood for. They understand Hindutva, they understand little else. Therefore the Bihar wind will continue blowing through the land until we sound the Last Post in 2019. In next year's state elections, the BJP will be nowhere in the picture in at least two States: Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. But they will be in Assam. So, a declining Tarun Gogoi has already announced his strategy of replicating Nitish's "Bihar" model by uniting the secular forces in the state to counter a resurgent BJP. Hence, however many ministers Modi might reshuffle, and even if they send Amit Shah to a well-earned rest, the BJP cannot sustain its 2014 sweep so long as the BJP remains the BJP. The seeds of its self-destruction are embedded in its ideological DNA.
(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.