Bharat and its elections: The wonder that is India

The 2024 Lok Sabha elections are a milestone in the political evolution of the country. It has taken India 75 years to overtake its primary colonial ruler, the United Kingdom, as the world’s fifth largest economy. This is the first national election held in India since it has become the world’s most populous nation, and it comes at a juncture where India has just started taking its place as a global power, a distinction it lost before rampant colonisation started in 1700.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seen as divisive, right-wing, and at times dictatorial by the West. India’s ‘secular’ fabric is portrayed as under threat under his leadership. Much of the country’s Hindu identity is ascribed to him, the BJP, RSS, VHP, and the milieu of Hindu parties and groups that have supported his rise. The much-weakened Congress and its various allies, the INDI Alliance, blame him for sacrificing India’s secularity and its “traditional protection” of minorities. They warn that a resounding Modi victory will only lead to a change in the constitution, the erosion of India’s democracy, and a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, where Muslims will not have equal rights. They see Modi and his allies as ‘master manipulators’ , the symptoms of the disease of Hindutva that has gripped India. No one really knows if it’s the West that echoes the congress’s line or its congress that continues to echo the philosophies of the West.

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I have lived the last 24 years of my life overseas, away from India. I was born in 1980 in suburban Bombay, a few days after Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother, Indira, won her resounding victory. I grew up in a predominantly Sikh colony when she was killed in 1984. I still remember the despondency of losing her and the chaos that followed—riots and destruction of the Sikh community at her assassination. I remember his father’s famous speech a few days later, where he said, “When a great tree falls, the earth shakes," justifying the massacre. I have lived through each step of the Congress trying to implement its divide and rule agenda, the imperial imprint left behind by the British, while Hindus tried to grasp their own identity and come to terms with who they were in their own country and democracy, where they were the majority.

I have seen Bombay become Mumbai, Balasaheb Thackeray and his rise, and the slow evolution of a people from a Union of States to one country, one nation, and one identity. The destruction of the Babri Masjid and its brutal aftermath. When I left India in 2002, Narendra Damodardas Modi had just arrived on the national scene.

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Modi is not the aberration of India’s tryst with its destiny; he is its result. By blaming the evolution of India’s Hindu identity on Modi, the opposition, Western scholars, and media once again take the dignity away from every Indian citizen. The Indian Hindu voter is stupid, gullible, bulliable, pliant, does not know his mind, and finally, if nothing sticks, can be easily tricked by faulty voting machines. He needs protection from the wiser rulers who know better. This was basically the British perspective when they ruled India, and this is what the Congress wants you to continue believing.

The Congress and Rahul Gandhi call India a Union of States. They are partially right. At independence, India had over 600 kingdoms and presidencies that needed to be united. It was Indira Gandhi who abolished the privy purse and got rid of the monarchs. It was Indira Gandhi who brought in Harivansh Rai Bachchan to promote Hindi as the Rashtra Bhasha, when there were several other older languages that could have taken the credit.

All this forging of a nation and national identity has had its desired effect. India is a nation now. The people have a national identity, which they are proud of. They also have a religious and cultural identity that they have started accepting. It has taken 75 years from independence, after two centuries of humiliation, for Bharat to build its first temple that matters. It also took Bharat the same time to inaugurate the first temple in the Persian Gulf since the advent of Islam. The self-respect that the country has achieved is reflected in the respect other rulers and countries ascribe to it.

Hindutva has evolved into Sanatana Dharma, and the evolution has brought Prime Minister Modi to power. Modi was not the man who invented or popularised Hindutva; that happened hundreds of years ago, when a boy saint in Alandi gave life to a darshana to unite people against foreign invaders. Dnyneshwara’s Bhavarth Deepika, Hinduism’s first book in a vernacular language (old Marathi), is credited to have been completed the same year as the sack of Devgiri, the capital of the Yadavas, by Aladin Khilji, 1296. It is there that you will find the framework of Hindutva where he calls for unity in the face of foreign aggression. It is his commentary on the Bhagvad Gita in Marathi where he calls on the reader to defend dharma.

The reason why the Prime Minister of India, still campaigns with a hectic schedule, despite being credited with easily winning a third mandate, is because he respects the Indian voter. He understands that the Indian voter is thinking, volatile, wants to be courted and convinced, and while many may be uneducated, the Indian voter understands the value of his or her freedom. This is the reason why, despite poverty, ignorance, natural calamities, wars, terrorism, and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, Bharat’s democracy has survived and prospered.

While one debates Modi, one must, for a minute, think about the dharma of the opposition in a democracy. Rahul Gandhi and his colleagues have time and again brought up caste, the north-south divide, and raised questions about the identity of the Union of States of India (that is, Bharat). The strength of a democracy is not its rulers; it is its opposition. By allying himself with corrupt dynasts with no united plan or programme for the future of the country, Gandhi has failed in his dharma as the leader of the opposition.

The Congress Party was established in 1885 as a conduit between the Indian masses and their colonial British rulers. Eventually, it was convenient to have them around. When Britain wanted ‘Brexit in 1947’, it had a local agent who not only maintained its influence in the newly independent colony but also took responsibility for the horrors that followed, including partition.

The modern congress uses the Abhaya hasta as its symbol, which is the symbol of fearlessness, where the deity (here the congress) protects the devotee (the citizen). It could not have adopted a more Hindu symbol, which graces almost every Hindu deity. Our gods constantly protect us, and the hand is the hand of benevolence, blessing, and protection. The Congress’ repeated defeats do not just signify that it is unable to be benevolent and protective towards the voters. The Indian voter has reached a maturity where he or she does not believe that their rulers are on a pedestal or godly. The Congress has been unable to make peace with this evolution of India, where the national state has one identity first, that of being Indian. It does not put its rulers on a pedestal anymore and is proud of its identity as a nation. Hindus, after 75 years, are comfortable with their identity and confident that despite the government they will elect, it will protect every Indian citizen regardless of their religion, caste, gender, or political orientation. The abhaya hasta is now in the hands of every Indian citizen, not the Congress party.

Maybe the opposition and the West are looking at this picture all wrong. It is not Modi’s India. It is India’s Modi. The Prime Minister, in his third mandate, will be an expression of a young, united nation that is just getting comfortable with its unity, identity, history, and religion. It isn’t perfect; it is in constant evolution.

On June 4, Bharat will have spoken, and the case will be closed.

The author is an Indo-Italian entrepreneur and writer, has worked closely and continues to advise various governments in Europe, Middle East and Africa. He is the founder of the Dialogue on Democracy. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.