Opinion Tavleen Singh writes: It’s an election, not war

It is largely because PM Modi has taken so aggressive a tone that the coming election has begun to sound more like a civil war.

October 8, 2023 08:53 PM IST First published on: Oct 8, 2023 at 07:45 AM IST

Are we facing a general election next year or a civil war? I ask the question seriously, silly though it may sound. It is because I find myself alarmed by the tenor of campaigning by our two main national parties. They seem to believe they are in this fight to destroy their opponents, not just defeat them electorally. This is true of the campaign on social media and in real life. On social media last week there was a juvenile and ugly poster war.

First, came a Congress Party poster that called the Prime Minister ‘Jumla Boy’ which roughly translated means that he makes fake promises. In the picture he is shown with his head rested against the back of the head of his loyal comrade Amit Shah. The Home Minister was the first person to use the term electoral ‘jumla’ to dismiss charges that Narendra Modi had not fulfilled his promise in 2014 to put Rs 15 lakh in the bank accounts of every Indian if black money in Swiss accounts was brought back. The BJP’s response to this poster was to upload a poster depicting Rahul Gandhi with ten heads as ‘Ravan’. This led to senior Congress Party officials accusing the BJP of trying to ‘murder’ their leader. Both posters were nasty and in bad taste.

Meanwhile, in real life, we saw the Prime Minister charge the Congress Party with treason while campaigning in Bhopal. He said, “Their leaders speak the language of our enemies. They have faith in what terrorists say. They have no faith in what my country’s military (leaders) say.” While all this was going on, the man who is seen as Modi’s main opponent was in the Golden Temple in Amritsar doing ‘seva’ and musing about his father’s feelings on that “dark night” after his grandmother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated. What I found interesting was something else Rahul said as he reminisced about the assassination of his grandmother, in the temple in which her assassins convened to plan her murder. He said that he had seen a “small ray of hope” the day after the assassination and knew that it was this that would “change India into what it is today”.

It is hard to know exactly what he meant. But, with respect I would like to remind him that it was the murder of thousands of Sikhs by Congress workers seeking to avenge the murder of Indira Gandhi that enabled the change we see today. The Congress Party’s superpower till then had been that it was seen as truly secular compared with the BJP. It had spent decades in power and its ‘socialism’ had failed to provide ordinary Indians with such basic things as clean water and electricity. But it was forgiven these failures because of its secular credentials.

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After that awful first week of November 1984, when the bodies of dead Sikhs lay in the streets of Delhi, it became hard to believe in Congress secularism. It was this that led to the relentless rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Narendra Modi. It is because of losing its superpower that Congress will find it hard to defeat Modi in next year’s Lok Sabha election especially now that it has compounded its mistake by adopting a policy of soft Hindutva. Almost not a day goes by when we do not see Congress leaders praying in some temple or other. Do they really believe that soft Hindutva will defeat hard Hindutva?

A question that I puzzled over before sitting down to write this piece is why Rahul Gandhi is doing ‘seva’ in the Golden Temple when he should be campaigning for his party. It will not be easy for Congress to take on Modi’s electoral juggernaut, but it might help if his main challenger was seen at election rallies instead of in temples, vegetable markets and railway stations. Gimmicks have a place in politics but only if there is a solid political platform and a political message alongside them. What exactly is the Congress Party taking to the electorate this time other than promising freebies that will debilitate the economy permanently? From speeches made by the Gandhi siblings we have learned that they despise businessmen so where are they going to find the money to give women monthly pocket money and jobless youths dole?

Modi’s message this time is openly narcissistic. He takes personal credit for everything that his government has done and personal credit for improving India’s image in the world. He gives personal guarantees for future schemes. He also makes it clear in every speech he gives that he sees opposition leaders as traitors and terrorists. He leads his party’s cheerleaders in talking about the I.N.D.I.A. group as an Indi-Alliance and as ‘ghamandiya’ (arrogant) leaders.

It is largely because he has taken so aggressive a tone that the coming election has begun to sound more like a civil war. This is not good, but nobody can deny that Modi’s message is totally clear when compared with the message that his opponents are trying to send. When they meet next time to decide which seats who should contest, they would do well to spend some time on clarifying why people should vote for them, instead of a popular and populist prime minister who has managed to deliver on welfare schemes with more efficiency and elan than the Congress Party ever did.