• Pushparaj Deshpande

Even though the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has emerged as the single largest party in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, India is euphoric for every reason except the BJP’s pyrrhic victory. The INDIA bloc has successfully halted the BJP juggernaut despite being stymied at every step – with two chief ministers being jailed, the principal opposition party’s accounts being frozen, the state machinery and the mainstream media colluding with the BJP, vast disparity in party funds and so on.

If there were a genuine level-playing field, INDIA could have crossed the magic figure of 272. For achieving the impossible, INDIA Chairperson Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi and every single leader of the Alliance have won the nation’s heartfelt gratitude.

Secondly, this unprecedented result feels like a people’s victory. Many Indians are celebrating the results as a personal win because they joined this historic battle for India’s soul. And thirdly, now that progressives have witnessed the power of their courage and collaborative effort, they will inevitably step up the ante henceforth. Like in 1942 – when despite the Quit India movement being crushed, the nation sensed it was the penultimate struggle – progressives can feel the final victory is within grasp. The results allow for not just a potential reset in India’s political culture, but also hope.

Capitalising on BJP’s fault-lines

Clearly, the BJP is neither the behemoth nor the monolith it presents itself as. There are deep-seated structural problems within the BJP, which are easily exploitable. On one hand, in circumscribing the Sangh parivar, the Modi-fied BJP has weakened its foundational strength. While there isn’t any ideological dissonance between them, there are serious differences about power sharing and influence. On the other hand, to undercut alternative power centres, the BJP, under Narendra Modi, expended considerable effort to defeat candidates with divided loyalties. Many of them won and will likely foment internal rebellions for the next five years.

Moreover, even if the BJP stitches together a coalition government, its allies will not just share an uneasy relationship with the Prime Minister because of the treatment meted out to them in the past, but they will also extract expensive concessions. Apart from facing opposition from various quarters, the BJP will also face the defiance of religious bodies who have shifted their allegiances because the Ayodhya Trust undermines their authority and powers. Consequently, if Modi returns as Prime Minister, he would face strident opposition and not have absolute control. Tactically, the INDIA parties are duty bound to capitalise on these fault-lines and muddy the BJP’s waters. But they will need to play aggressively on the front foot, as Rahul Gandhi has been doing for the last few years. Overcoming a vicious propaganda campaign, he has exposed the BJP’s ideological agenda and the adverse effects of their socio-economic policies. For example, his concerted attacks on crony capitalism were vindicated by the electoral bonds scam and by the fact that today, India’s top 20 companies monopolise 75% of corporate profits (up from less than 50% in 2012). That is why they’re unsustainably dependent on the Prime Minister for plum projects and to ramrod the sale of India’s public assets which could have instead been leveraged for economic statecraft globally. This has severely harmed the national interest and will take a lot of concerted effort to redress. As Martin Luther King Jr. said: “those who love peace must learn to organise as effectively as those who love war”.

Even if progressives have a morally superior message that resonates with people, more programmatic and evangelical effort needs to be exerted to comprehensively reshape mass consciousness. This necessitates the re-imagination of politics as not something purely electoral. To draw a historical analogy from India’s freedom struggle, we’ve managed to break-through from the moderate and extremist phase. What we await is a leader like Mahatma Gandhi who can recreate the Congress movement as one that constructively channelises all of India’s progressive forces into thought and action. Each network, organisation and individual needs to be empowered to kick-start, or scale up, something that tangibly furthers our shared cause. But this requires nerve centres to loosely coordinate everything (consensually not domineeringly). Eschewing any kind of bureaucratic inertia, progressive parties must therefore urgently empower internal systems to do so.

Constructively channelising all progressives

The last few years have shown us that there is a vast reservoir of progressive filmmakers, authors, poets, academics, diaspora communities, religio-cultural/youth/community/civil society organisations, businesspersons, YouTubers and movements that are tenaciously working to further India’s Constitution. There are many more who will now find the courage to openly join this national endeavour. They are eagerly waiting and wanting to collaborate, and not just sporadically connect, with INDIA. Some of them are undoubtedly self-serving but, like in Bhagwan Shiv’s baraat (wedding procession), we need all sorts in this normative battle.

Protests around parliament or assemblies, open letters and petitions, social media campaigns, press conferences and lectures may temporarily enthral. But to convert hearts and minds, we need to silently build relationships with progressives of all ages, empower them from the panchayats to Parliament, and unleash their energies through their respective sectors. This guerrilla politics will invariably destabilise any authoritarian regime. Given his ideological clarity, appetite for the disruptive and efforts to take everyone along, Rahul Gandhi is clearly the undisputed leader of this future national movement.

A strategic five-year plan cannot just defeat the BJP electorally, but substantially reverse them ideologically. That is the real battle. Winning elections is just the first step. We also need to inoculate the state, suck-out the hate that’s poisoning the polity, and create constitutionally-wedded systems that programmatically replace (and not just expose) regressive organisations at the grassroots. The ground is undoubtedly fertile for such a comprehensive recalibration. Consider this – despite trying to hijack Hinduism, BJP lost Faizabad, the constituency where the Ram temple is; Shravasti, where the Chairperson of the temple construction committee contested from and others like Sitapur, Chitrakoot, Mayapur, Shirdi, Tirupati and Ramanathapuram. Clearly many prominent Hindu temple trusts did not blindly support the BJP, which is a fault-line waiting to be exploited. Despite pitting Hindus against Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, India hasn’t given the BJP a clear majority, teaching a lesson to almost all those who led communally-charged campaigns. In fact, even Modi’s victory margin in Varanasi fell by over three lakh votes. And despite claiming “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas”, Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs have begun gravitating towards INDIA. No matter what the BJP spins this mandate as, Modi and Amit Shah have lost the moral right to lead.

The power of hope

Clearly the tide has turned. Countless patriots, cutting across all castes and communities, have put their lives on the line to safeguard India’s ‘Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb’ and belief in ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ (the world is one family). Now that Indians have realised their collective strength and found hope, there is no going back. If we begin working strategically today, INDIA can easily deliver another body blow – in the assembly elections due in Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand later this year. That would kick-start a domino effect, which will further trip the BJP. This is still an uphill task, and the BJP will be more malicious thus cornered, but India’s crossed the Rubicon. This battle will take much more from all of us, but nothing that has meaning is easy. As former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said, “That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we might…give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world”.

The author is Samruddha Bharat Foundation’s Director and author of ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra: Reclaiming India’s Soul’. Courtesy: The Wire