Election Results
Constitution, Nationalism and Ethnic structure are not matters for parties to chew on.
By Manohar Manoj
After the election results, a post went viral very quickly on our social media in which it was said that all the parties were happy with the eighteenth Lok Sabha election results. BJP was happy that it emerged as the biggest winning party. Congress was happy that its seats got doubled.
Samajwadi Party was happy that it had made an excellent election performance in UP. Telugu Desham Party is happy that it is going to form the government in Andhra Pradesh and become a part of the government formed at the Centre. Trinamool Congress was happy that it stopped BJP from growing in Bengal. Janata Dal-United is happy that it will become a part of the Central Government.Regarding EVMs which always have been the target of political parties, it was said in this post that it is relieved that this time no party is cursing them or holding a press conference regarding it. In this viral post about Kejriwal, it has been said that he will no longer be able to call his sugar level uncontrolled.The voters i.e. the public are also happy that they have got the opportunity to make new investments in the stock market which has fallen drastically due to the election results.This means that this is a rare election result which has made everyone happy.As usual, we educated people take a dig at the messages on social media or not taking them too seriously, but the above viral message actually described the political dynamics of Indian society very truthfully. This result showed that there is dissatisfaction against the ruling party in different pockets of the country but it is not nationwide but it is relative to the regional and local level socio-economic issues and the dynamic social equations prevailing there. Similarly, these results also showed that there is a tendency of voters to support the opposition parties too, but it is not so strong that it takes the form of an equal wave in the entire country.The support received by the opposition is also a result of anti-incumbency towards the state and the ruling party. Overall, through the
results of this Central Lok Sabha election, a new phase of political federalism was seen emerging in the country. That is, the seeds of political federalism which were sown in the democratic political ecology of India after 1989, have now become visible again after remaining invisible for ten years after 2014.If we look at these election results from the perspective of electoral issues, then many myths are broken through the results of the eighteenth Lok Sabha elections. However, identity politics has always been prevalent in Indian democracy. But this time the politics of religion has fallen flat. The public rejected the wave of Hindutva spread by the BJP in the entire country and especially in Uttar Pradesh through the inauguration of the incomplete Ram temple.Uttar Pradesh has given vent to the emotional issue of religion through the issues of unemployment and inflation. BJP not only lost the elections in Ayodhya but Prime Minister Modi got a very ordinary victory in the Varanasi seat. BJP suffered a crushing defeat in most of the seats in Eastern UP around Varanasi and in the nearby Shahabad region of Bihar.Many clear messages have come through this election result such as the use of religion in identity politics will not last long. And it will also have the same fate as caste politics in the past. Ultimately, political parties will have to address the basic socio-economic administrative issues of the people in the long run. These issues are permanent, the rest of sentimentalism and identitarian issues have now become an object of expiry for Indian voters.It has to be said that in the course of time, the supremacy of money power and muscle power in Indian democracy has been transformed into smallness.Similarly, the tradition of populism and treasury throwing which was spreading rapidly in all the political parties has also got a big blow in this Lok Sabha elections. For example, in Andhra Pradesh, the government of YSR Congress was distributing billions of rupees to the people through about half a dozen schemes of direct cash payments and of free ration. But despite this, the people there completely rejected it and decided to support Chandrababu Naidu’s slogan of modern industrialized Andhra this time. If the public had truly supported freebies, then the people of Karnataka would have been lured by the five guarantees of Rs 50,000 crore given by the ruling Congress government in the state and would have again won more seats in the Lok Sabha elections. In competition with the politics of freebies, the way Congress talked about giving one lakh rupees per year in the accounts of poor women and talked about giving 10 kg grains instead of Modi’s 5 kg, it did not get nationwide support for it. On the other hand, BJP, which was giving the slogan of winning 400 seats by talking about continuing the policy of distributing 5 kg free food grains per person for the next five years since the Covid period, was also rejected by the public. It must be said that in this Lok Sabha election, the Congress Party strongly countered all the political narratives of the ruling party and received good support from the public on the issues of unemployment, inflation and repression of opposition parties by the political vendetta policies adopted by Modi government earlier.That is, overall, this election result has given a big lesson to the political parties of India on behalf of the public against all those disorders of Indian democracy i.e. money, muscle, identity, populism and hate speeches which were prevalent in the country. It is a different matter that it depends on the political parties of India as to how much they understand it.Through these election results, a new message has also been given to the people of India. These messages are about India’s constitutionality, nationality and ethnicity. The manner in which the opposition raised these issues strongly in the elections and the ruling party also gave its full explanation on the same.But the message received through the election results was that India’s constitutionalism, nationalism and ethnicity are not party’s issues which any political party can try to mislead the public by distorting in its own way. India’s Constitution, nationality and ethnic roots are not the property of any particular party which they can use to try and absorb public sentiments unnecessarily.These three things are the permanent assets of any nation which are like the DNA of its entire structure, which once determined remains forever intact by becoming a part of the entire structure of that nation and its underlying concept. It is the audacity of the parties to make them an election issue, which ultimately makes them an object of embarrassment. This message has been reflected very clearly through this election result.Writer is a senior journalist, author and reform activist