Extraordinary And Plenipotentiary Diplomatist July 19 Edition . | Page 10

COVER STORY
MODI 2.0
Nobody expected Congress to win the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, but neither did the
nation expect BJP and Modi to surpass their own tally of 2014 too!
BY SUNIL DANG*
T
he elections are a done deal now. We have a clear
winner in Modi and his party BJP. Whether or not the
country or the opposition, to be precise, anticipated
anything of the sort that fi nally emerged on the horizon is of
no consequence now; Success has many fathers but failure is
an orphan. The opposition indeed looks like an orphan today.
But dare I say, that Modi and his machinery helmed by the
magician at work Amit Shah, the thousands of Karyakartas
(Cadre), the crafty social engineering, aided, abetted &
propagated like a blitzkrieg by various forms of media, all this
helped the saff ron forces to paint the entire landscape from
Jammu to Darjeeling and Kutch to Mangalore in its colours.
Rest as they say is history.
If one were to critically analyse some of the standout
reasons for Modi’s win in a highly polarized election of the
century, one could then deduce what went behind the scenes.
The most notable reason behind such a decisive mandate
has been the ability of BJP and its charismatic leader Modi to
appropriate muscular nationalism to its sleeves. If Pulwama
was the trigger, Balakot was the perfect elixir doctor had
ordered. I have never been this surprised. Not that we did
not anticipate a Modi win but the scale and enormity of the
mandate has certainly pushed our intellectual and analytical
prowess to the tiniest corners of irrelevance. Contrary to the
conventional wisdom that he would fall somewhat short of
the numbers to cobble up a simple majority, he outdid the
2014 outcome and that to me is the ultimate tribute to his
versatility and fatal attractiveness to the Indian electorate.
There is the only plausible explanation that holds good
here as to what has caused this swing of 6 percent to 7
percent in favour of the BJP and this is that the fi rst-time
voters have voted for him overwhelmingly. They typically
tend to side with the BJP, but what they have done this time
is just matching it up with some of the data that some of us
analysts had seen and some of the anecdotal evidence in
our conversations on the road with fi rst-time voters. Politics
including looking at things like caste, incumbency, the kind
of stuff that we have been used to looking at for the last 25
years is dumped into irrelevance for the time being.
When we also examined certain aspects of such an
awestruck audience for Modi, it became clear that most of
the people all over across the Hindi Heartland, Bundelkhand,
Karnataka, West Bengal, Odisha felt that Modi was an
extremely hard working Prime minister. He works 18 to 20
hours a day. Mehnati hai (hardworking) that is the kind of
phases that you hear for him; Imandaar hai (He is honest)
which basically is saying that no matter what charges are
levelled against him, he is perceived as honest partly because
10 • Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Diplomatist • Vol 7 • Issue 7 • July 2019, Noida