The results of the recently concluded Lok Sabha Elections 2024 have reestablished political equilibrium in India. With more voices of resistance in the Lok Sabha, the full-throttle engine of BJP’s self-centred unilateral decisions will come to a screeching halt. Once again, voices of dissent will make themselves visible. Those Members of Parliament who smirked and clapped at racist, sexist, casteist and communal speeches and statements will reduce substantially. Hopefully, shameless bigotry will also take a backseat. However, the biggest celebration in this Lok Sabha election, at least for those who cherish the secular ethos of this country, is the reasonably impressive number of Muslim candidates making it to the Lok Sabha. A more recent fear that Muslim faces, names and voices would eventually vanish from the Lok Sabha turned out to be wrong. Maybe this is what is called the power of democracy: the spirit of resistance to repression and resilience to reclaim the democratic spaces for the defence of pluralism and diversity.
The outcome of the 2024 Lok Sabha election has immensely dented the aspirations of the BJP in general and Narendra Modi in particular. Modi shed all pretensions of decency while making hate speeches against Muslims in particular. His Islamophobia was laid bare in his repeated references, painting Muslims as eternal enemies of ‘Bharat.’ He left no stone unturned to directly attack the Muslim minority in India. In the past, he had called them ‘Baby making factories’, ‘Puppy under wheel’, and ‘enemies of Gau-mata’, and urged the masses to identify the Muslim troublemakers by their clothes during the anti-CAA protests in Delhi and other parts of the country. His hate speech in 2024 touched new heights when he categorically called Muslims ‘infiltrators’, ‘those who have more children’, ‘the ones who will take away reservations from other communities’, and on certain occasions argued in his speech that Muslims wish to bring Congress back to power so that it can put ‘Babri Lock’ on Ram Mandir. Not to mention his insinuations of ‘Mutton, Mughal, Muslim’.
There are two ways of looking at such hate speeches. First, this might have been Modi’s real ideological underpinnings, and he just took occasional breaks of decency while also feeling chained in his constitutional position. Second, he had sensed his decline despite the surveys and exit polls arguing otherwise. By restricting BJP’s so-called juggernaut to below 300, the majority of secular and democratic citizens of India have shown that the screams, sobs, and whispers of the oppressed Muslim minorities, the underprivileged and the marginalised in this country did not go unheard. The seculars have emerged from slumber to the rescue of the downtrodden. In the process, laying the foundation of a new politics of social justice that will only grow stronger. In many cases, some argue that the toxic effect of weaponised religious hatred had waned and brought many blind followers to their senses before they were to take their final plunge into the eternal pit of darkness, condemning this nation to a pack of brutalists who could go to all lengths to hide the vulnerabilities of their political project.
Even though the NDA will form the government, it will be weak. The new government will have to face the constant challenge of lack of confidence and absolute numbers supplemented by the shame of substantive defeat of bigotry peddled as reclaiming losses in history. The unbridled madness of Hindutva forces leading the march towards a uniform and sanitised future will have to be shelved for now. The opposition, with its renewed vigour and substantive electoral gains and amplified voices in the Lok Sabha, will ferociously pursue the politics of social justice centred around issues of castes and other varied marginalities will once again take centre stage. The politics of the poor will overtake the poor of politics.
Javed Iqbal Wani (Assistant Professor at Dr. B.R Ambedkar University Delhi)
