*Written by Yogendra Yadav

This extraordinary election was an extraordinary personal journey for me. It has been a journey of loss and recovery of faith, a faith in democratic politics, a faith in the abstraction called The People.

In the last four decades of poll-watching, never before had I approached a national election with as much trepidation as in 2024. A few days after the announcement of elections a friend remarked: “Aap aaj kal mayoos se dikhte hain (you look despondent nowadays)”. He was right. While I wrote about how it was possible to bring the BJP below the 272 mark and planned with my Bharat Jodo Abhiyan colleagues to realise this possibility, I was not sure if it would happen. Media screens and middle class chatter was full of the pran pratishtha ceremony in Ayodhya. “400 paar” was being discussed as a prophecy with loyal channels drumming up figures up to 411. On the other side, the Opposition did not have a clear and shared narrative or a common programme, let alone a consensus leader to generate hope around an alternative.

I began asking myself: Is this the end of the India we grew up in? Have words like democracy, secularism, socialism lost all meaning? Putin’s Russia began to look like a mirror to India’s future. Jokes about the Election Commission of Pakistan started sounding too close to home. There were operational questions too: Would this election mark the end of parliamentary oppositional politics? Is the politics of the street and underground resistance the only path open to those who wish to reclaim the republic? There were no easy answers. I spent many weeks in depression.

Something changed thereafter. I cannot put a date to it. Nor do I fully understand what brought this about. But as we started approaching the elections, something opened up, there was a distinct change in the air quality.

The election was transiting in phases. I was........

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