Modi seems invincible in his ninth year as PM

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s supporters are celebrating his ninth year in power, the opposing parties are desperate to grab political space. Will Modi be able to match Jawaharlal Nehru’s third consecutive general election triumph in 2024? Will the Opposition be able to thwart his efforts?

The election campaign is going to pick up towards the end of the year, but the Opposition seems to be in disarray. The Congress, of which people once had high expectations, is fraying at the edges. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has failed spectacularly in pulling the party together and winning elections for years now. The Grand Old Party is a shadow of its former self today with more and more high-profile desertions. The Congress being in such tatters is the main impediment to Opposition unity.

In the last election, the Congress faced off against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 191 seats. In 2019, it received approximately 119.5 million votes, accounting for around 20% of the total voter turnout. No regional party can match this on its own.

Over the last two years, the Congress has performed poorly in assembly elections held in Bihar, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Goa, Manipur, Punjab, and Uttarakhand. It did not win a single assembly seat in Bengal, and it won only two in UP. In Bihar, the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Lalu and Tejashwi Yadav believe that they lost the election only because, driven by an old political friendship, they gave the Congress 70 seats. This is why Tejashwi did not opt for any collaboration with the Congress in the Legislative Council elections.

Some strategists feel that if efforts are focused on relevant issues going forward, Modi’s charisma will begin to fade. Perhaps this is why, on Gandhi Jayanti, Rahul Gandhi will begin his Bharat Jodo Yatra.

To underscore this point, analysts frequently mention the successful agitation carried out by Jayaprakash Narayan in the 1970s and Vishwanath Pratap Singh in the 1980s. What was the environment in the country when Jayaprakash Narayan began his agitation in 1974? We had been independent for 27 years at that time. There were many people around who had fought for or sympathised with the freedom movement. They believed that true freedom had still not been won and were willing to fight for it all over again.

With Independence came an increase in urbanisation and several new issues. A sizable proportion of the youth believed we had been duped. At the time, youth all over the world were agitating for freedoms in one way or the other. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were considered heroes in India at the time.

You may recall that Naxalism, which evolved from Naxalbari, was rapidly spreading in many states. Mao Zedong was also a hero in the eyes of these youth. Rebellious expressions were visible in literature and cinema; Amitabh Bachchan, the angry young man in films, seemed to speak for millions.

In such a situation, when Jayaprakash Narayan called for a “total revolution,” there was already widespread support for it. But thanks to the political ineptness of the leaders of that time such as Morarji Desai and Charan Singh, these sentiments were dissipated. Indira Gandhi came back to power. However, she was assassinated on October 31, 1984.

Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, riding a wave of sympathy generated by her murder, stormed to power with an unprecedented majority of 414 Members of Parliament. Three years later, he became involved in the Bofors controversy. As a result, Vishwanath Pratap Singh emerged as a hero in 1988 and went on to become PM the following year. People began comparing him to Mahatma Gandhi in terms of integrity, but he couldn’t keep his hodge-podge government running for even two years.

This was a second blow to the dreams of India’s youth.

Those planning to stop Modi in his tracks seem oblivious to the reality that the Opposition no longer has a leader of the stature of Jayaprakash Narayan. Unemployment was a problem back then, and it is still a problem today. Inflation was a problem back then, and it is still so today. But the Opposition does not appear to be in a position to do much about all this because of its shortcomings. In addition, there does not seem to be any taint of corruption on either Modi or his ministers.

Take a look at the state of the governments in Maharashtra and Jharkhand, for example. Regardless of how much the Opposition claims that central agencies are being abused, it is clear that they act only when they have secured incontrovertible evidence.

Due to investigations by central agencies, two Maharashtra ministers have been arrested, and a third is under the scanner. The manner in which raids were carried out in Jharkhand has also sparked controversy. Even anti-BJP leaders are unable to see any reason to be hopeful in the face of such a situation.

This is why, in his ninth year, Narendra Modi is the only PM, after Jawaharlal Nehru, to have had such a smooth ride. This is yet another feather in his cap of enviable achievements.