The pseudo-secular forces spread across the country saw the 2017 Gujarat assembly election as a laboratory for building a social coalition of anti-Hindutva forces, which could become a mirror for national politics. The election campaign and the political discourse revealed their unwillingness to reconcile with the emergence of Hindutva as an influential ideology and Narendra Modi as a national leader. They harbour hopes of a BJP defeat and a sense of euphoria about its implications for national politics. They applied immense psychological pressure on the voters of Gujarat and offered the delusion that they could be the inspiration for a formidable transformation of the polity.
The justification for their spirited efforts to create an anti-BJP climate in Gujarat is simple: It is the home state of both Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. The intensive campaign by the prime minister himself was held up to argue how important the state was for him. This is only partially true.
In the last UP assembly election, the same people said Modi had a lot riding on the election results since Varanasi was the prime minister’s constituency and that he and Shah did intensive campaigning. The fact is during elections, Modi and Shah work hard for the party as party workers without being uppity about the positions they hold.
Though the anti-Hindutva and anti-Modi forces have remained more or less the same for the past one-and-a-half decade, their posturing has changed. In the quest for an opportunity to delegitimise Modi, they treat every election as a referendum on both Modi and Hindutva.
It gives the pseudo-secularists an exaggerated notion of their own importance in national politics and makes them presume that the BJP will be defeated in Gujarat. Though they have no stake in Gujarat, they have been busy generating narratives on issues ranging from the economy to social philosophy.
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The reasons are more than obvious. They hope an anti-BJP outcome in Gujarat would be a golden opportunity to reignite the anti-Modi sentiment. Their collusion with forces outside India who are opposed to any nationalist consolidation in the country is not unknown. The Western media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Guardian share the counter-narrative of the Indian pseudo-secularists that the 2014 mandate inaugurated religious majoritarianism in New Delhi. Pseudo-secular intellectuals spontaneously become natural allies of a leader or party that poses a challenge to Hindutva and Modi. Hence, their sympathy for the Congress and the glorification of Hardik Patel, Jignesh Mevani and Alpesh Thakor. That the pseudo-seculars could endorse the politics of a reactionary patchwork of castes reveal the toxicity of their anti-Modi sentiment.
The Congress and the pseudo-seculars have willfully worked on their doctrine of a balkanised Hindu community and monolithic minorities to establish a counter-hegemony. The BJP has exposed their unethical design. It is a truism that in the age of global consciousness no election can be absolutely localised. Voters go beyond local aspirations and immediate reasons while deciding their choices. Factors and forces outside their territory impact people in varying proportions. This happened in Gujarat too. They intuitively understood the hidden agenda of the pseudo-seculars who rebelled against the Modi government by re-electing it.
Modi and Hindutva have been blamed for all small and big isolated incidents. This had attracted international attention as well as criticism of the government. Gujarati voters rightly apprehend that the pseudo-seculars want to use an anti-BJP mandate to destabilise the Modi government and attack Hindutva as a discredited ideology of majoritarianism.
Another folly of the pseudo-seculars is their obsession of judging voters and predicting outcomes through conventional tools and wisdom. Voters have changed. Their voting pattern is not guided by a single factor and nationalist aspirations outweigh narrow considerations. The anger visible in the mobilisations of the three caste leaders was neither a sign of rejection of the BJP nor disillusionment with Modi. It was a message for the ruling party to cure its ills, which are side-effects of being in power for more than two decades. Modi and his team neutralised the restive sections with their humility and silent regret.
The impact of the Gujarat election on the Congress reveals a shift in the ideological fulcrum of Indian politics: The old model of secularism, which was based on minority worship has shifted to the Hindu tradition of secularism that abhors the categories of minority and majority. The pseudo-secularist discourse in Gujarat did not mention the Sachar Committee report and Rahul Gandhi presented himself as a devout Hindu. This is partly due to the success of the RSS in consolidating Hindus and changing the ideological contours of Indian politics. Time alone can tell if Rahul’s temple visits and the mention of his sacred thread is just electoral Hindutva or a genuine shift in Congress thinking in the post-Sonia era.
While the BJP-RSS is consistent in its definition of secularism, the Congress has been playing with multiple ideas of secularism. Exit polls show the voters of Gujarat have opted for a stable polity. However, there also seems to be a message for the BJP that economic development needs to be egalitarian and benefit rural areas, farmers and marginalised people. The message for pseudo-seculars is that anti-Modism can’t be a substitute for an alternative vision.
