When Modi was elected by a simple majority in 2014, I had said that India had shifted on its axis and elected a ‘supreme leader’ and that the emphatic mandate had ended years of coalition rule. The nation was first given a campaign that was extraordinary in its focus on one man, and then, defying even the most optimistic estimates of his own party, Modi turned the pitch into reality. He created a wave, with the media and advertising acting as force multipliers, and then deftly rode it to a stupendous victory.
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The cult of ‘absolute’ leadership, truly a remarkable phenomenon in a nation as large and diverse as India, had to be understood more closely.
Modi’s win also came at the cost of utter devastation of the Congress, and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), besides a poor showing by Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP), Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). In 2014, we analysed whether the Modi campaign had overcome traditional caste divisions and whether the process of ‘secular’ mobilization by a slew of parties would have to be re-examined.
Some of those suppositions turned out to be correct. As his term draws to a close, Modi still emerges in opinion polls as the single-most popular leader. His tenure has also seen the Congress party transform its pitch: It no longer goes for the secular victimhood narrative, and the president of the party, Rahul Gandhi, makes an overt effort to stress his ‘Hindu’ antecedents by visiting temples, as do party colleagues such as Kamal Nath, recently elected Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh (who stressed that he would build shelters for cows in each panchayat). These are straws in the wind, but they point to a larger picture.