On Saturday, India’s six-week election ended with polls projecting a landslide victory for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). BJP leaders, inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, repeatedly made clear that their aim was to win 400 seats in the 543-seat Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. But the vote didn’t go so well for them.
On Tuesday, official results showed that the BJP managed to win 240 seats, losing 63 seats from the 2019 elections and causing the party to fall short of the majority it has maintained over the past 10 years. With his allies, he will still be able to form the next government, but Indian voters clearly did not give him the absolute mandate he wanted.
Instead, the people of India have given meaning back to democracy. They reaffirmed that democracy is opposed to the complete dominance of one idea and one voice. They demonstrated that, in a multi-religious and multicultural India, they do not accept the isolation of followers of a religion and the mobilization of the majority against them. They have given secular India hope that even under a new BJP government, there is potential for political change.
The electoral campaign that brought us here was extraordinary. Modi ran the election because of himself and his quest for absolute power. He was the face of the campaign, telling voters in every constituency he visited that they were voting for him and that all candidates were just his representatives.
Modi has also made his imperial ambitions clear. He called himself a Hindu emperor, trying to persuade the public that he was actually taking revenge for the atrocities of the Mughals, the Muslim dynasty that ruled India from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and that, for the first time, the government of Hindus was being established in India under him. He maintained that a Hindu nation was about to happen and for that he needed to be in power.
At the same time, Modi also indulged in anti-Muslim rhetoric. His speeches were full of abuse and hatred towards the Muslim community. He made a desperate and dangerous attempt to scare his voters by telling them that the opposition party, the Indian National Congress, would snatch their properties and other resources and hand them over to Muslims. He portrayed the opposition as an anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim political force.
But running the election campaign solely on a Hindu nationalist and anti-Muslim platform backfired. Modi asked his voters for an anti-Muslim mandate and failed to get it. This is an indication that there is a limit to the rise of hate politics in India. It’s also an indication that it’s a mistake to ignore people’s daily needs in favor of polarizing rhetoric.
Every young Hindu I spoke to told me that by lulling them into the belief of a Hindu nation, this government has destroyed their present. There is no work or economic prospects for them. The economic crisis is palpable across rural India. Young people saw that Modi was hiding his incompetence by indulging in the rhetoric of Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim hatred, so many of them decided to campaign against him.
The BJP also suffered an important symbolic defeat in the Ayodhya constituency, where in January Modi consecrated a new temple dedicated to Ram, one of the most revered Hindu gods. The city of Ayodhya played a central role in the rise of Hindu nationalist politics and the BJP with the demolition of the 16th-century Babri Mosque in 1992 and the subsequent effort to build the Hindu temple in its place. The inauguration of the shrine was a key moment in the BJP’s election campaign. However, the people of Ayodhya voted against the ruling party.
Modi also won his own seat in Varanasi, another holy city that he claims to have transformed, by just over 150,000 votes, a much smaller margin than in the 2019 elections, when he won by almost 480,000 votes.
People voted against the BJP also out of fear that the party could use its absolute majority to change the constitution. Dalits and the disadvantaged mobilized against this perspective, worried about the possibility that all the rights they had won through the Constitution would be taken away from them.
The opposition – finally united after years of rivalry under the banner of the INDIA Alliance – also did a good job of rallying voters to defend India’s constitutional democracy. Although he actually lost the elections, he improved his position in the Lok Sabha, and did so in the face of a myriad of challenges.
Before the elections, the opposition was far behind the BJP in raising funds. The situation only worsened when money was forcibly withdrawn from the account of the largest opposition party, Congress, by government agencies and its bank accounts were sealed.
Opposition leaders have also been victims of harassment by authorities, with some facing raids and lawsuits filed against them. The chief ministers of Jharkhand and Delhi, members of two opposition parties, were arrested just months before the elections began
The opposition also had to face a hostile media environment. Over the last 10 years, the mainstream media outlets have turned into propaganda platforms for the BJP. During the election campaign, the main media outlets demonstrated a clear bias against the opposition.
Along with all this, for the first time in the history of India, the Election Commission also openly worked in favor of the BJP. It remained silent on repeated violations of the electoral code of conduct by Modi and his party and turned a blind eye to complaints of voter suppression and manipulation of voter lists.
The message that Indian voters have sent to the BJP and the rest of the political elite is clear. They want the return of decency, civility and mutual respect. They reject the BJP’s abusive political language, which humiliates and insults specific communities and demonizes them. They recognize the threat to the constitutional idea of India in the form of the Modi-led BJP.
Indian voters gave a mandate to safeguard secularism in India, protect the rights of minorities and respect a pluralistic society. It is a mandate in favor of the values of equality, freedom, justice and fraternity. It should be hoped that India’s constitutional institutions understand its significance and are able to muster sufficient courage to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities.
This term is also an opportunity for the BJP to free itself from Modi’s arrogant clutches and start functioning like a normal political party. At this moment, everyone in the BJP has become just henchmen or servants of the party leader. Political observers have noted that all the powerful leaders of the BJP have been sidelined or marginalized by Modi who, along with Amit Shah, captured the party.
These election results gave an opportunity to India as it was known. India, which has been badly wounded by the politics of Hindu nationalism over the last 10 years, can now heal its wounds.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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