These are not the best times for anyone to be the prime minister of India, not even if you are Narendra Modi. The man who spooked his party men, the opposition, the entire country and even the world by romping home with a never-before electoral victory in India’s historic general elections two years ago is now a pale shadow of his former self.
His dream run started in September 2013 when the BJP chose him as its prime ministerial candidate for the general elections, which eventually took place in April-May 2014. This was not easy as a whole battery of senior party leaders like L. K. Advani, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Murali Manohar Joshi and Sushma Swaraj were opposed to his elevation as the party’s sole poll mascot. But Modi proved that all these big guns of the BJP were spent cartridges and he strode over a mountain of political corpses to emerge as the new Goliath.
Then came the much-awaited general elections and he defied every single political pundit of the country and even the international community by single-handedly giving the BJP a clear majority in the Lok Sabha for the first time ever.
He quickly moved in by pushing the powerful RSS into irrelevance and appointed his most trusted aide Amit Shah as the party president, ignoring objections from the RSS that both the prime minister and the party chief cannot be from the same state, in this case Gujarat. For those uninitiated in Indian politics, it is relevant to convey the importance of the RSS: The RSS has been to the BJP in past quarter century what Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress party, has been to the Congress.
The Modi juggernaut continued to maul the opposition even in state assembly polls. In 2014, within months of his unprecedented electoral victory on the national scene, Modi’s BJP won assembly polls in four states and formed its government in all these states — Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and surprisingly even Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority Indian state.
Modi’s biggest political kill was of course the way he pulped the Congress party in the last general election. All non-Congress political leaders have dreamt of decimating the political behemoth called the Indian National Congress for over six decades but none could do it. Modi achieved this feat in style so much so that the party could win only 44 seats, 11 short of giving it the official status of the principal opposition party.
High on the Modi wave, the BJP leaders started taking pot shots at the Congress party. One remark that would have galled the Congress leaders the most was that one bus alone was enough to ferry Congress Lok Sabha members to the Parliament.
But now two years later, the Modi charisma has waned substantially. The party with 44 MPs (now 45 as a result of a recent by-election) is proving to be a serious headache for the BJP’s 282 MPs. Now it’s not only the Congress but all opposition parties are taking potshots at the BJP and, more importantly, at Modi himself.
The tables have been turned. The hunter is being hunted day in and day out, both in and out of parliament. This is despite the fact that the political arithmetic remains the same as it was two years ago.
So what has brought about this change? There are several reasons. The “good days” have not arrived for the common Indian as Modi had promised during the campaigning in general elections. There has been no windfall in terms of new jobs or retrieval of black money as promised by Modi, the PM candidate. The economy hasn’t shown any spectacular improvement. Terror incidents have not stopped. Even on the foreign-policy front, the Modi government has tied itself in knots, particularly vis-à-vis two important neighbors, Pakistan and China.
Bihar assembly polls six months ago demonstrated how Modi and his BJP have lost the plot and the people’s support as the BJP lost the election badly. Bihar also showed that the opposition parties have learnt from their mistakes and are ready to forge a common front to defeat Modi. After all, Modi’s BJP had got just 31 percent votes in the 2014 general elections, meaning that 69 percent voters voted against the BJP. This is bound to become the new template for the opposition parties in future.
But even a bigger point of worry for Modi is that he is increasingly being personally targeted by opposition parties like the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as is evident in the $3 billion Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation scam (when he was the chief minister of Gujarat) and the issue of his educational degrees.
His dream run started in September 2013 when the BJP chose him as its prime ministerial candidate for the general elections, which eventually took place in April-May 2014. This was not easy as a whole battery of senior party leaders like L. K. Advani, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Murali Manohar Joshi and Sushma Swaraj were opposed to his elevation as the party’s sole poll mascot. But Modi proved that all these big guns of the BJP were spent cartridges and he strode over a mountain of political corpses to emerge as the new Goliath.
Then came the much-awaited general elections and he defied every single political pundit of the country and even the international community by single-handedly giving the BJP a clear majority in the Lok Sabha for the first time ever.
He quickly moved in by pushing the powerful RSS into irrelevance and appointed his most trusted aide Amit Shah as the party president, ignoring objections from the RSS that both the prime minister and the party chief cannot be from the same state, in this case Gujarat. For those uninitiated in Indian politics, it is relevant to convey the importance of the RSS: The RSS has been to the BJP in past quarter century what Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress party, has been to the Congress.
The Modi juggernaut continued to maul the opposition even in state assembly polls. In 2014, within months of his unprecedented electoral victory on the national scene, Modi’s BJP won assembly polls in four states and formed its government in all these states — Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and surprisingly even Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority Indian state.
Modi’s biggest political kill was of course the way he pulped the Congress party in the last general election. All non-Congress political leaders have dreamt of decimating the political behemoth called the Indian National Congress for over six decades but none could do it. Modi achieved this feat in style so much so that the party could win only 44 seats, 11 short of giving it the official status of the principal opposition party.
High on the Modi wave, the BJP leaders started taking pot shots at the Congress party. One remark that would have galled the Congress leaders the most was that one bus alone was enough to ferry Congress Lok Sabha members to the Parliament.
But now two years later, the Modi charisma has waned substantially. The party with 44 MPs (now 45 as a result of a recent by-election) is proving to be a serious headache for the BJP’s 282 MPs. Now it’s not only the Congress but all opposition parties are taking potshots at the BJP and, more importantly, at Modi himself.
The tables have been turned. The hunter is being hunted day in and day out, both in and out of parliament. This is despite the fact that the political arithmetic remains the same as it was two years ago.
So what has brought about this change? There are several reasons. The “good days” have not arrived for the common Indian as Modi had promised during the campaigning in general elections. There has been no windfall in terms of new jobs or retrieval of black money as promised by Modi, the PM candidate. The economy hasn’t shown any spectacular improvement. Terror incidents have not stopped. Even on the foreign-policy front, the Modi government has tied itself in knots, particularly vis-à-vis two important neighbors, Pakistan and China.
Bihar assembly polls six months ago demonstrated how Modi and his BJP have lost the plot and the people’s support as the BJP lost the election badly. Bihar also showed that the opposition parties have learnt from their mistakes and are ready to forge a common front to defeat Modi. After all, Modi’s BJP had got just 31 percent votes in the 2014 general elections, meaning that 69 percent voters voted against the BJP. This is bound to become the new template for the opposition parties in future.
But even a bigger point of worry for Modi is that he is increasingly being personally targeted by opposition parties like the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as is evident in the $3 billion Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation scam (when he was the chief minister of Gujarat) and the issue of his educational degrees.
