THE SUN IS SETTING ON THE MODI-SHAH DUO
Anand K. Sahay
Hegemony ensues when other actors in the system seek to emulate the hegemony-wielder. However, tracing the path of the BJP regime under its current stewards is likely to invite odium instead of bringing approbation to a political party.
The Bharatiya Janata Party holds power in 15 states and Union Territories, and is in a coalition government with its allies in six, not to mention the hectoring and overpowering presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his chief lieutenant Amit Shah, the feared Union home minister – feared more by colleagues and allies than by opponents and dissenters who have probably already seen the worst.
In fact, the extent of comprehensive governmental power wielded by the ruling party is far superior to that of its opponents, singly or jointly. Its leaders control all the levers of state in most parts of the country, and where they don’t, the Union government can be brought into play through one of its several agencies.
Apart from the conscious acts of government like sending the coercive instruments of state – the Enforcement Directorate, CentraI Bureau of Investigation, Income Tax Department – after anyone they wish to subdue, win over as ‘friends’ or topple and threaten elected governments in a variety of ways, the two top regime leaders also happen to control their party, the BJP, and plot its every move. The president of their party is their servitor and he had better be if he knows what’s good for him.
The country’s two most powerful individuals, who have the wind of governmental authority with them, are also on a roll in parliament, thanks to critical support derived from “secular” allies whose blind lust for office astounds observers.
With only a small adjustment of the imagination, it may be proposed – given some of their recent actions such as seeking to be arbiters of who should be the next BJP president – that the protagonists of ‘duopoly’ have, by now, developed such overweening ambition that they now see it within their grasp to exert decisive control even over the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Hindutva’s mother-ship that spawned the BJP and from which Modi and Shah themselves grew out.
Small wonder that the ‘Mahamana’ in Nagpur is desperately seeking to guard his citadel. Looking around, one can’t but gain the impression that grizzled RSS volunteers seem to be placing greater faith in New Delhi these days than in Nagpur – though, looking at what they did to Modi in the last year’s Lok Sabha election, it has to be said that they can be an unpredictable lot.
All things considered, the duo in New Delhi, who for now sit in a mutually reinforcing relationship, are very powerful indeed. They are in a position to wield muscular control of the totalitarian variety – over state and society, and they enforce this with the brute constitutional and statutory force at their disposal.
In a broad sense, then, things look much like the old days – the first ten years of the Modi dispensation, when the BJP didn’t need to depend on allies in parliament. But there is a crucial and basic difference today that is becoming increasingly visible.
First signs of a crack
The regime has dissipated the hegemony on the socio-political landscape it may have once held, whatever its extent it may have been. And this links to the political crisis it now faces as it heads into the Bihar Assembly election. A time comes when all the wealth and power of Croesus are of no avail, and the waves are no longer there to command.
Hegemony ensues when other actors in the system seek to emulate the hegemony-wielder. However, tracing the path of the BJP regime under its current stewards is likely to invite odium instead of bringing approbation to a political party.
For all the high-pitched noise about restoring the glory of the Hindu nation and of sanatan dharma, doubts now appear to assail the country on the trajectory adopted in the past decade, considering the meagre results the glaring failures for the average Indian (or even the average Hindu) on the economic front, divisions and violence on the social front, and the sense of despair on the military and the geopolitical front. Just look at the relationships in the neighbourhood and with the US, with the world situation making us run to start rubbing noses with China though the wounds of Galwan still need regular dressing.
The Modi-controlled BJP has quite simply failed to create a ‘BJP system’ of equivalence to the earlier ‘Congress system’ that the eminent political scientist Rajni Kothari spoke of.
MIGA or ‘Make India Great Again’ – Modi’s inelegant and forgettable coinage, as he sought to march fawningly in lockstep with President Donald Trump’s MAGA on his last visit to the US not so long ago – failed to produce the ‘MEGA’ that Modi spoke of sitting with Trump; in fact it turns out he produced a huge rift between America and India as our prime minister forgot that managing geopolitics goes beyond reciting nursery rhymes and doing chest embrace between un-equals. Modi’s India simply failed to read the tea leaves in world affairs
Were it not for the stripping off of the hegemony, including even the small amount of soft power it may have had in relation to a section of Hindus, the Modi government would not find itself in all manner of political difficulties, as it does today.
Desperate attempts to remain in control
It is in fact the slow desertion of the partial hegemony it once enjoyed that obliges the top BJP leadership to do things that arouse suspicion about the constitutional independence of the Election Commission of India, which is now obliged to play ducks and drakes with the election process in order to present the opposition parties with an un-level playing field.
The first step in this direction came three years ago when, through a change in the law, the Chief Justice of India was dropped from the panel to select the Chief Election Commissioner and his companion commissioners. Furthermore, the CJI was substituted by a cabinet colleague of the prime minister, giving the government a majority in selecting the top personnel of the poll body. This new body can no longer be said to enjoy constitutional autonomy in relation to the regime.
At one stroke, the CEC was reduced to the level of a petty regime ‘mansabdar’, slipping from his once lofty perch from which he could put the fear of God even in an all-powerful ruling party, as several of the current CEC’s predecessors had demonstrated.
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll in Bihar is the most ulcerous manifestation of the malady on view. And, as the ECI has assured the country, SIR will be held in every state, one by one. In the sharp rhetoric of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, and his INDIA bloc mates, the voter-elimination scheme currently underway in Bihar is a massive “vote-theft” exercise to benefit the regime.
And why has this become necessary? The answer is quite simple: If you can’t win in the normal way, do what you can to stop your opponents from winning. The Congress leader demonstrated beyond doubt that his criticism of the regime and the Election Commission was well grounded when he had a tea party with ‘dead souls’ – a clutch of Bihar voters shown as deceased in the state’s electoral roll.
The shift
When Modi first won power in 2014, he aroused expectations, especially of the poor, although he left few in doubt even then that he would seek to relegate the minorities to the margins, and do little for other marginalised sections even as he invoked ‘their’ heroic figures for propaganda. Unprecedented levels of unemployment and rising prices for much of the time, and conscious policies and tax breaks for the big shots in the system, appear to confirm the pro-rich tilt of the ‘Modi system’.
Looking back, it is interesting to see that Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra roughly coincided with the change in the law for selecting Election Commission’s leaders. It preceded the fiddling of the law appointing EC bosses by three months and may be seen as a political causative factor. Evidently, the regime figured right that something new had unexpectedly developed, and it had to be forcefully countered.
The Yatra certainly did one thing – it gave the less privileged Indian the strong sense that Gandhi was speaking their language and giving expression to their life experience. And that has since become the turning point in national affairs, giving rise to a new parallelogram of forces.
The Congress leader who was sought to be ridiculed through Modi’s highly motivated social media universe as a foolish child of privilege had suddenly emerged before the people in a new light, exuding a new energy.
This is when hegemony began to shift away from Modi and his ecosystem. Intimation of this became available in the Lok Sabha election of 2024 when Modi’s BJP dropped more than 60 Lok Sabha seats and the much-vaunted leader himself barely scraped through in Varanasi. The RSS cadre were not found sweating it out in the field to make the prime minister win, as they used to.
The slide away from Modi’s party in Uttar Pradesh – its much-touted bastion and home to some of India’s most famous Hindu pilgrim sites that the BJP frequently invokes – and toward the forces confronting Modi with a copy of India’s Constitution in their hand, remains the conspicuous marker of changing times. But the Bihar election is still two months away and much can happen in this time.
Eyes on Bihar elections
While the Gandhi-led Bihar march has been a huge attraction, two months can be a very long time in politics. The state does have long, coercive arms. Therefore, it is not enough to arouse people’s power, the point is to strategise and channelise it. Such a move deserves priority.
But it is good to remember that Gandhi and his cohorts have already won the “war of position”, to use Gramsci’s grammar of politics. Now the attention will be on the “war of manoeuvre”. In the public consciousness, a new leader is already striding the stage.
The Modi regime tried to freeze Gandhi’s party’s bank accounts on the eve of the last Lok Sabha election. Had the game succeeded, Modi’s BJP would have won without firing a shot. But the game did not succeed and Modi suffered a further loss of hegemony instead.
Any such punitive move on the part of the regime now is guaranteed to backfire. As the old song goes: “Something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
The regime is putting in all it has into the Bihar election, and SIR is only a part of it. Should Bihar slip from the regime’s grasp, then the ghost of former vice-president Jagdeep Dhankhar’s sudden resignation (or is it dismissal?) will come to haunt the movers and the shakers.
The loss of Bihar will probably also mean Modi and Shah can’t get their way on deciding the BJP’s next president and the RSS leadership will become a strong stakeholder. The corroding of the hegemony of the Modi and Shah empire have the potential to impact Lok Sabha numbers too. Those who matter know this.
Anand K. Sahay is a veteran journalist.