“The country is saved”, is how an elderly friend reacted when I called him up after the election results. I can’t call him a left liberal but he is a hardcore political person for whom “country first” has been the leitmotif for life. I have known him for a very long time and can vouch for the honesty of his conviction. He was a worried man. We had had many discussions over the years since the Bharatiya Janata Party formed the government in 2014. As elections neared this time, he told me in one of his friendly but very enlightened chats that if the BJP were to get more than 300 seats, then the country would not be the same again; the Constitution would be changed, Parliamentary democracy would be consigned to the dustbin of history; Parliament and the Constitutional institutions would have no meaning and the country would be proclaimed a Hindu Rashtra. He said this even before BJP called for “Iss baar, 400 paar” and before the Opposition accused the Modi government of having intentions of changing the Constitution if it managed to get 400 seats.

No doubt, within the left liberal group, it was the common refrain that democracy had come under serious threat in the last ten years and would drastically slide further if the BJP were to come back again with a thumping majority. No wonder, a large section of intelligentsia, journalists, professionals working in different walks of life, activists with no affiliation to any party, who had been critical of the Congress in pre-2014 era, and even those who were considered to be rightists or supporters of Hindutva philosophy, gravitated towards the Congress. In their opinion, the rise of right-wing fascist politics was due to the decline of the Congress as a robust political force. And if the country had to be saved then the Congress had to be strengthened. The Congress which was criticised for corrupt practices during its governments, for pursuing anti-people policies and imposing the Emergency, was now hailed by these people as a democratic force despite its several infirmities. Many of them are still critical of its dynastic politics, but in........

© Free Press Journal