Why did the Indian team lose the cricket world cup final? Because Australia played better on the day. But if you ask the Congress party and its supporters, there were a number of other explanations. They said Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a “panauti”. He brought bad luck. Then there was the fact that the game was played in Amdavad. In their eyes, the Gujaratis are supposed to be bad people who don’t vote the right way. That is why the team lost. So one explanation is superstition and the other is bigotry. Armed with these two explanations, Congress party supporters set social media on fire. They finally had a winning combination. Or so they thought.
It was not to be. In the recent round of assembly polls, the BJP swept three big states. The party got a comfortable majority in Rajasthan. All the talk of Ashok Gehlot retaining power turned out to be just wishful thinking. The BJP has been in power for nearly twenty years in Madhya Pradesh. The Congress would have expected anti-incumbency to do its job. But the BJP won a remarkable victory. It came back to power with almost two-thirds of the seats. The Congress would have been most confident about Chhattisgarh. Back in 2018, it had swept to power with 68 out of the 90 seats. The gap in vote share was 10 per cent! Even if the gap came down a little, the Congress thought it would still be ahead. Again, it was not to be. The BJP won 54 seats out of 90, with a clear lead of 4 per cent in vote share. The state government, clearly, had failed rather badly to meet the expectations of the people.
For the Congress and its fellow travellers, it was time for Plan B. How would they get over the embarrassment of losing three big states? They seized upon the fact that Telangana, the one state they won, is in the south. The narrative was rolled out almost instantly. Earlier this year, the Congress had won in Karnataka, also in the south. The south, they said, is more literate, better educated, and richer on a per capita basis. That is why the south voted for the Congress.
From top opposition politicians to public intellectuals, everyone appeared to follow this line. A DMK MP said in Parliament that the BJP can only win elections in what he called the “gaumutra states” of the north. So much hatred for our fellow citizens? Even Ramachandra Guha fished out a quote from a long-dead Australian diplomat to suggest that India is fundamentally divided between “north” and “south”. As it turns out, that long-dead Australian diplomat was also a big supporter of the racist “White Australia” policy. Is anyone surprised?
Of course, the “north” vs “south” narrative is made up. It falls apart at the slightest touch. First of all, has anyone seen a map of India? In what sense are Gujarat and Maharashtra supposed to be northern states? Don’t forget that these are also two of the richest states in India. Until yesterday, the Congress was in power in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Did these states suddenly shift northwards on December 3 this year? Or did these states get poorer in the last five years under Congress rule? Also, if the north is so backward, what was the Congress doing for nearly sixty years? As many as six members of the Nehru-Gandhi family have represented Uttar Pradesh in Parliament. Now that Rahul Gandhi has to go to Kerala to find a safe seat, they begin to notice all the problems in Uttar Pradesh. Did you know that no Congress government has been re-elected anywhere in the country since 2011? Clearly, these governments failed to meet the expectations of the people. Why blame the people? Why not look within and try to do better?
Then there is the question of what to do with Karnataka. Yes, the BJP lost power in the state this year. But it has ruled Karnataka several times. And it is likely to do so again. In the last four general elections, the BJP has been the largest party in Karnataka. Is Karnataka not southern enough for the Congress and its cheerleaders? Even in the 2023 state elections, the BJP won 16 out of the 28 seats in Bengaluru. In Telangana, the Congress won but did not get a single seat out of the 24 in Hyderabad. What does this do to the narrative of richer, more developed parts of the country voting for the Congress? Here is another curious fact. In the current Lok Sabha, the BJP has more MPs from southern India than any other party. More than the Congress, the DMK, or the YSRCP. There is really only one India and only one national mood. Stop trying to divide us.
But they always knew that. In Telangana, the BJP has already doubled its vote share from 7 per cent to 14 per cent. Some of the more intelligent people in the liberal ecosystem already see the upcoming reality. They have started working on a new narrative of “Karnataka and Telangana” vs “rest of the south”. Writing in the Indian Express, Brown University professor Ashutosh Varshney explains that Hindus in Karnataka and Telangana still resent Muslim rulers of an earlier era. And so, the BJP can go no further in the south, beyond these two states. Wait till these academics find out about the massacre of Hindus by Malabar Muslims in 1921, in present-day Kerala.
Why does it seem like these people have just been looking for a way to divide and rule? A month ago, it was all about dividing people by caste. Now it is by language and region. The issues are being raised so opportunistically and cynically that it seems nobody believes them. Suppose the Congress had won Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan. Would these liberals still have said all those terrible things about Hindi-speaking people? From Jawaharlal Nehru to Rahul Gandhi, the Congress has been the political party of hereditary privilege. Does anyone believe anymore that they are committed to empowering backward sections of society?
But then, the fellow travellers of the Congress party have never had much respect for the intelligence of the common voter. Even more so, now that fewer and fewer people vote for them. On the internet, there is now an army of YouTubers, former journalists turned trolls, who go around trying to prove that common people are stupid. The aim is to catch some BJP supporters off guard and make fun of them. Someone who is unused to speaking on camera. The ecosystem then works hard to make the video viral. But dismissing the voter as “WhatsApp University” does not work.
Yes, there are a few myths circulating on the so-called “WhatsApp University.” But the truths heavily outnumber them. And these narratives get challenged and sorted out. This is much more vigorous than anything that ever happened in closed and corrupt intellectual circles. If anything, the internet made it easier to see how lazy, incompetent, and biased these intellectuals actually were. Everyone knows how myths were created by these people to keep one family in power. Their hypocrisies now have nowhere to hide. Today when a common voter gets a tap water connection, a Mudra loan, or a house under Awas Yojana, it is not a myth. You can ignore the voter at your own peril.
But the Congress and its sympathisers kept building the wall higher between themselves and the common voter. Take the idea that the mainstream media, particularly TV news, has become a lapdog of the BJP. The term “godi media” is now everywhere. It even finds mention in supposedly scholarly reports that claim North Korea is safer for journalists than India. Yes, the latest World Press Freedom Report actually says that. Anyway, the myth of “godi media” should have been shattered on December 3 when the results of the assembly elections came out. As it turns out, the analysts on TV news and their pollsters had been overestimating the Congress, not the BJP!
But the myth will remain. Instead, they are interpreting the election results in creative ways, to show that it was the Congress that actually came out ahead. Apparently, if you pool the votes from the four big states on December 3, the Congress comes out ahead by 10 lakh votes. Nice thinking to include Telangana, where the BJP was not one of the two main players. Okay, so what happens to this logic if we add in the votes from say Uttar Pradesh where the Congress is not one of the main players? Apparently, the Congress may have lost in three states, but it gets credit for retaining its vote share. Okay, but the BJP also retained its vote share in Karnataka earlier this year. Does it mean the BJP “won” there as well? Could it be that elections in India are just getting more bipolar?
Also, if you map the assembly results to Lok Sabha seats, the BJP is actually down from its 2019 tally. They say this knowing well that this mapping never works. The BJP always gets more votes in Lok Sabha elections. It would be okay if some low-level troll made such arguments to lift spirits among the Congress flock. But what do you do when it is someone like Yogendra Yadav? He used to be introduced on TV panels as India’s “numero uno” psephologist. That was in the old days. You know, when there was no “godi media”.
Now if the thought leaders on the liberal side are busy twisting numbers, what is left for the trolls to do? They go lower, fishing in EVM conspiracy theories. In either case, they are just insulting the voter.
Two final thoughts about the opposition alliance, the so-called INDIA bloc. First, for far too long, the Congress has managed to avoid taking responsibility for the actions of its fellow travellers. From the communists to the DMK, to parties like the Indian Union Muslim League. But in the age of the internet, this no longer works. If an ally says something outrageous in, say, Tamil Nadu, there might be a price to pay in, say, Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan. Second, a lot was made about how the BJP had been shaken up by the name INDIA. Maybe or maybe not. You will have to ask the BJP about that. But what we all see today is that the opposition alliance is falling apart. If the Congress had won on December 3, its hand would have been stronger. Now that the Congress lost, its allies want to force its hand. Anyone could have predicted that this tussle was coming. Unfortunately, though, the headlines will now be forced to say that the INDIA bloc is falling apart. And as citizens of India, we do not like the sound of that.
Abhishek Banerjee (@AbhishBanerj on ‘X’) is an author and columnist. Karuna Gopal (@KarunaGopal1 on ‘X’) is president, Foundation for Futuristic Cities. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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