Dear So-Called ‘Liberals’,
You don’t have the monopoly over morality or wisdom. You are doing no good to your ‘liberal’ tag by labelling fellow Indians who voted for NDA and Modi as ‘bigots’ and ‘fascists’. If you continue with this browbeating, name-calling, mudslinging without doing any introspection as to how the vast majority of the people in this nation voted for BJP, 2024 will be a lost cause for you too.
This is not a victory of Hindutva per se, as many are claiming it to be. This is a victory of a mosaic of Hindutva, socialistic, welfare schemes, trickling down the benefits to those at the bottom of strata, and the last mile outreach that has resulted in the tsunami that swept away all the hopes of the opposition and the so-called intellectuals. You can’t teach rationality to a poor and a hungry man. There were two formidable alliances in Uttar Pradesh(Samajwadi Party + Bahujan Samaaj Party) and in Jharkhand (Congress+ Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha-Prajatantrik (JVM-P)+Rashtriya Janta Dal). It seemed on these 94 parliamentary seats of both the states, BJP wouldn’t be able to win more than 50, in the best case scenario. However, all the caste arithmetic, alliances arithmetic was washed away in the tsunami that ensued. Although it wasn’t really the Hindutva or the Modi’s name that propelled BJP to win 74 out of these 94 seats.
In all these states the welfare schemes came to the fore to protect the BJP juggernaut from getting stopped by these jumbo alliances. The people who were benefitted from the Ujjwala Yojana, PM Awas Yojana, direct benefit transfer gave their mandate to the person who took decisive steps to uproot ‘gareebi’ in the literal sense from the society. It is the aspiration and belief of an average citizen in the Modi that has helped him retain the top spot with a massive majority.
Since the result is different from your ideological inclination and personal affiliation, you cannot go around humiliating common citizens. This meltdown is utterly undemocratic as it based on the preconceived notions of hate against one individual who has received the mandate of people in a thoroughly democratic process. The labelling of people as gullible and deceivable is doing no good to the liberal millennial social media warriors. The people of this nation are very well versed with what they want and what they don’t. This is clearly apparent from the differential patterns of voting in Odisha where Lok Sabha and assembly elections were held simultaneously. The vote share of BJP in assembly elections was 32% while it was 38% for the Loksabha elections.
There are innumerable liberals who are terming the voters of BJP as backers of fascism. Going by this analogy, all those who voted for Nehru, Indira, P.V Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh were also guilty of the same then? I guess there are different yardsticks for different leaders. It is illiberal of liberals to condescendingly accuse the fellow citizens of being hate mongers and bigots. This selectivity and scaremongering was rebuked by Indians on May 23. The grandeur of delusion of fear created by the ecosystem was demystified on May 23. It is time the ivory tower intelligentsia living in their echo chambers stop sulking and introspect that why an average Indian does not relate to their ‘idea of India’.