DNA Edit: PM’s juggernaut - Like Jawaharlal Nehru, Narendra Modi has won every election he has contested

In 1975, during the ‘Emergency,’ novelist V S Naipaul came back to India, the country his ancestors had left a hundred years ago to settle in the West Indies. 

Out of that journey he produced a masterpiece, an unsentimental portrait of a society traumatised by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythical vision of its past, ‘India: A Wounded Civilisation’.  Had Naipaul been alive today, he may have reason to write another sequel, perhaps, on how India had shrugged off the wounded civilisation tag, and was coming into her own. If the sweeping results of Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s victory is anything to go by, than it would be fair to say that the wound is on the way to healing.

Conservative Indian writers, who have stressed on India’s ancient civilisation and its dismemberment by years of foreign rule, seem to have found their metier in the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There is no way to explain why a voter in Odisha on the east coast and Maharashtra on the west, feel the same about electing a party to office.

It is not as if the Modi government’s last five years were an epitome of economic success, where every mouth was fed and every house had their unemployed get gainful employment. It is the Hindu identity. What has mattered most to voters is the emergence of a strong leader. Until the Balakot strike in February this year, Modi did look on a shaky wicket, despite a plethora of flagship schemes like like Jan Dhan, PMAY, Ujjwala, Ayushman Bharat and Swachch Bharat, reaching out to the people in the remotest corners of the country.

When it was finally established that the Indian Air Force (IAF) had successfully penetrated Pakistani airspace — never mind the debate about the number of casualties — a big load seem to have been taken off the shoulders of Indian voters. The calibrated handling of a military behemoth like China during the Doklam standoff in 2017, convinced Indians that Modi is their man. And they have stood by him and his team. 

A strong man attracts followers and the Indian prime minister is no different. His record as Gujarat chief minister, marked him out as different even from other leaders of the BJP. His unrepentant persona during the 2002 Gujarat riots — the classical hard man — has built many a fable around him.

Sure there have been naysayers, a healthy feature of democracy. There are occasions when their doomsday prophesies come right, but there are other occasions when they have gone horribly wrong — particularly when it comes to the Indian Prime Minister.

Narendra Modi has, through some providence, scoffed at them and got away with it. He was written off in three Gujarat assembly elections and one Lok Sabha election, by political pundits who swore by the Nehurvian legacy of secularism and India’s natural pluralism.

Yet, every time, Modi has defied logic and reason, emerging triumphant. Riding on a massive Modi wave sweeping through most parts of India, the BJP is all set to storm back to power. It nearest rival, Congress, is way behind in the sweepstakes.

The RSS has searched high and low for a man like Modi among its cadres for years. It was only at the turn of the last millennium when they found him in Gujarat. Boundless hard work, no family affiliations and sufficiently single-minded to take a plan to its logical conclusion. And it has shown during the course of the recent poll campaign. After the Congress whitewash, its allies want to know why Rahul Gandhi called the prime minister a thief.

In hindsight, no other party leader from the UPA alliance, except the Congress president used this, fearing a voter backlash. And they have been proved right. It would be reasonable to say that other factors have contributed to paint the larger picture. His relentless energy and schedule can put much younger guys to shame.

In party president Amit Shah, Modi has the ideal foil. While he looks at the larger picture, Shah scrutinises the micro-script. Scanning the political chessboard, Shah has looked closely at one constituency after the other, the caste equations in each one of them, rebels and dissatisfied members of other parties looking for an opening, co-opting them and bringing them on board, and then building solid caste and political alliances that the opposition parties have simply failed to do.

They have been helped along the way by secularists, who in an effort to beat back the Hindu Right, have played right into their hands. In the India of today, there is no point in attacking a Ramnavami procession. By doing so, unwittingly, you are apparently digging a dagger into the heart of a healing civilisation.