What are the lessons of 2019 elections?
What are the implications for the second term?
So, it is death for the Congress party?
The exit polls have been dampening for one section and the NDA might be too much to be ready for their impact on the Indian mind! Yes, the 2019 elections have been a watershed, as they say. The redoubling strength of the BJP in the new opportunity might spell new developments and also new anxieties. The media is full of such anxieties, after looking around the world and the outside world and also the recent world history and events. “Is the cruellest month” said the great poet T.S.Eliot, the Nobel winner for his epoch making poetry. On April 25th Italy celebrated its Liberation Day! Remember on the April 25th, 1945 the Italian dictator, the fascist leader Benito Mussolini was disposed off from power. Today there is Rightwing resurgence everywhere, in Italy, Austria and even Spain. Is this an international trend? Thinking Indians can deliberate.
The only point we want to make is that today democracy is itself a word that is turned upwards down! In many parts of the world, politicians capture power, yes, through elections and also turn it towards an oppressive and suppressive instrument of state. Many features, many freedoms we hold dear might lose their meanings. So, there are so many sad things about democracy today.
How India would play its role and how it would earn its spurs in the comity of nations must be uppermost in many minds. Now, for the Congress party the message is clear. As this media has been focussing for long the Indian National Congress can’t remain anymore as family party. It can’t remain as one tied to Sonia Gandhi’s incompetence and for the ruin of a great democracy.
Please resign and go! This is the message. Restore inner party democracy. All the time servers and family retainers leave the CWC and other bodies. Go back and adopt a sort of Kamaraj Plan! That is the plain and blunt message! Criticism is the blood of life and democracy. Also came through the debate were the observations that the media in India is not a free world. And the pores are captive at many levels. Also there is criticism that the mainstream media, the big ones, both the print and the electronic media are in the ownership of the big industrial houses.
These are not new criticisms but now, after the 5 years of BJP rule the whole Indian media scene has changed. Anyway, the 2019 General Elections is an unprecedented event, so much violence and so much bad words and so much violations of model code of conduct and so much explicit bias in the EC and other agencies and so much bad blood and so much vulgarity and so much heat and anger is surely a blot on the good name of India, of Indian people.
We are not sure how the outcome of the election would turn out and assuming the takeover of power by the new government would give us some indication how the future of India pan out. For one thing, the level of public debate was debasing to say the least. Political morality took a beating and the good of the Indian people suffered an irreparable loss. All through the torrent of the rhetoric, mostly empty rhetoric not once, not for a brief moment we heard about the weighty issues of the day, weighty issues of the future India and the world is going to face. Indian agriculture, yes there were references to the agrarian distress?
But what response from the weighty people, the great leaders, the vociferous speeches of all the ambitious and aspiring Prime Ministerial candidates, can we take as the chief front runners to be Mayawathi, KCR, Chandrababu Naidu or Sharad Pawar all very able leaders no doubt. But can we expect from them some modicum of truth and honesty and perspective and vision and some degree of sobriety?
Let us hope so.
A Prime Minister to lead a country like, a great and diverse and a very ancient nation with so much to contribute to the world, we write on the Buddha Poornima day(!),so we have to couch our words with some duty to history. India should be able to win the confidence of the big and small nations. India under Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru days, V.K.Krishna Menon, his deputy used to say: India counts and Indian counts in the comity of nation. That was when India was poor, there were food shortages, we lived from ship to mouth etc. Poverty was widespread and Nehruji once said at a Santiniketan public meeting: The outside world asks: how can you develop? No resources then, after a small pause Nehruji would say: India has apanch varsha yojana hei, we have a five year plan, we would develop. And let the young readers of today also know.
By the side of Panditji sat none other than the great expert and intellectual, P.C.Mahalanobis, the author of planning and statistics then. It was P.C.Mahalanobis who laid the foundation for gathering statistics to draw up future plans! How thrilling and inspiring!
India did evolve in the years to come and today, after five years of so much rhetoric and much else we are talking like illiterate villagers, sorry to call the villagers to say so. They, the villagers might be the ones to deduce the outcome of the 2019 elections. Truth and honesty, humility and much else, the core values India is proud of, tolerance, decency etc are also values. To call the Godse as the patriot is the height of idiocy. So, Indian people are duty bound to safeguard democracy. Long live democracy!