Modi Mela – Post Election Developments
TU Senan
The complete conquest of the Indian parliament by finance capital is almost complete. The victory of the BJP, the Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party, with 282 seats, has utterly defied what had become the norm in Indian politics – coalitions with reliance on regional alliances.
Although it was in fact the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that won 336 seats out of the 543 available, there is no doubt which party will dictate governance. This is a historic first – with the centre in the control of one party and that party not being Congress.
In some northern states (Jharkhand, Delhi, Goa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand) no other party managed to win even a single seat. Even in the southern states the BJP did not perform as badly as expected in terms of the number of votes they obtained.
On a national basis, no other party managed to obtain more than 10% of the vote, the requirement to form an official opposition. The Congress Party has been pushed to the level of a regional party with a mere 44 seats. They couldn’t even manage a double digit result in any state. But, given their immersion in the immense corruption scandals, their fall was expected.
It is no surprise that 13 out of the 15 ministers who stood for re-election lost their seats. Some, like ex-finance minister P Chidambaram, saw the writing on the wall and ducked down. He did not even contest the election. Chidambaram claimed during the election in a televised interview that “Narendra Modi’s politics border on fascism”. He went on to say that India doesn’t need ‘another Hitler or Mussolini’ to solve its problems.
But what he didn’t say is that Modi’s politics, a vicious neoliberal offensive, have their origin in India with the Congress Party. The outgoing Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spearheaded it when he was the minister for finance.
