‘Ambedkar is alive and kicking the far-right again, even from his grave’

— a Dalit activist from Assam

‘The people of India will not allow a single attack on the Constitution’

— A trade unionist on election results

In June, India has concluded its 2024 general elections. Narendra Modi, India’s far-right Prime Minister from the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) has won again and is now seated – for the third time in a row – in the highest political position of the world’s largest democracy.  However, the elections also exhibited a shift in the dominant model of political governmentality in the country. The battle between the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) led by the Indian National Congress (INC) and other democratic formations including the left-wing (parliamentary and extra-parliamentary) forces, resulted in a victory of the NDA which triumphed over the opposition by claiming 293 seats out of 543. The INDIA bloc won a total of 230 seats. Notable victories of independent candidates featured the Dalit activist Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan of the Bhim Army from Nageena, UP, and Pappu Yadav from Bihar. Some notable losses included the loss of Kanhaiya Kumar in Delhi and Mohammad Selim in West Bengal. The Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) emerged as the second and third largest members of the INDIA bloc with 37 and 29 MPs respectively. The leftwing forces were able to win as many as 9 seats with 4 by the CPI(M), 2 by the CPI, 2 by the CPI (ML), and 1 by the RSP. The INC’s tally went up this time to 99, from the 44 that it had won in 2019. The BJP’s tally in 2014 was 282, which increased to 303 in 2019, and then decreased to 240 in 2024. The NDA in 2024 led by the BJP included smaller formations such as the Telugu Dasam Party (TDP), the Janata Dal (United) (JDU), the Janata Dal (Secular) (JDS), and Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) among others.

The 2024 election, as many have claimed, was one that was not only contested among the various political formations but more so between the far-right BJP and the We, the People of India. The people of India showed that it continues to abhor dictators and can exhibit disastrous results for them when the time comes, be it the East India Company in 1857, Indira Gandhi in 1977, or the INC in 2014 – and Narendra Modi in 2024. Although Narendra Modi has not been defeated, the opposition has heralded its performance in the election as a moral victory, which is because the ruling government was not contesting the election alone but rather with the help of all the administrative and political machinery at its disposal including the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) – which left no stone unturned in registering cases against ministers and activists; the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which did not waste even a day in raiding the offices of activists and intellectuals; and the Election Commission of India (ECI), an erstwhile neutral body which was forced to obey the diktats set by the BJP because of its strongarming policies. The rot within the system has entrenched so deeply that even the decisions of the Supreme Court have become synonymous with the political line adopted by the BJP. In the past few years, the SC has pledged its allegiance to the BJP through the numerous verdicts given by it favouring the BJP, including the much controversial verdict on the Ram Temple at Ayodhya.[1] Some of the judges of the SC, such as Ranjan Gogoi, were directly inducted into the BJP upon their retirement.

After the judiciary, the most essential part of the smooth running of the government in India are the bureaucrats. The relationship between bureaucrats and politicians in India is an old one, with many examples of bureaucrats becoming close to sitting ministers and then becoming politicians themselves. This occurred during the years of the Modi government as well, but the trend went a notch up with far-right inclined bureaucrats – in administrative and legal posts – preferred over others. This has led to a gradual degeneration of the bureaucracy of the country, which has left no stone unturned to help file legal and extralegal cases on people who were against the ruling disposition. The 2024 election thus basically was a contest between the BJP with its administrative allies and the governmental machinery at its disposal, and the opposition, which was represented mostly by the INDIA bloc. The BJP left no stone unturned to portray INC leader Rahul Gandhi as incapable of leadership and to inflict various forms of legal harassment on him and the Gandhi family. With other prominent leaders of the opposition – including Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal of Delhi and Hemant Soren of Jharkhand – behind bars, the BJP made sure that it did not have to face the full force of the opposition. Despite all of that, the opposition made a significant dent in the Brand Modi that the BJP had built during the last decade by focusing on his image as a change-maker, a Hindu nationalist, and a vishwaguru (world leader), with the term being evoked during the state-sponsored massacre that had happened during Covid-19 in India.

Some of the most important cabinet ministers of Modi 2.0 such as Arjun Munda, Mahendra Pandey, Smriti Irani, and R. K. Singh lost their elections to the opposition. Such races with cabinet ministers losing their elections are quite natural in a diverse democracy like India. However, the important point to be mentioned in this regard is that all of these ministers lost their seats after proclaiming themselves to be victors with pomp and glamour even before the elections had been held, mainly because of their belief in Brand Modi, as Rahul Gandhi put it in a press conference after the elections. R.K. Singh, the previous Minister of New and Renewable Energy, lost to Sudama Prasad, a longstanding activist from the CPI(ML)-Liberation from Bihar. Amra Ram from the CPI(M) registered a thumping victory in Sikar, Rajasthan, against BJP’s candidate in a state that has otherwise been swept over by the BJP. Smriti Irani – who has not spared an opportunity to spit venom against the opposition, and who has left no stone unturned to label activists as anti-nationals – today finds no space in the Indian parliament after losing to Kishori Lal Nanda of the INC, somebody whom she had rebuked as being Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Personal Assistant’.[2] The BJP’s slide in this election was also noticed in the way in which the Prime Minister had to – during the later stages of the election – resort to hateful speeches demonizing the Muslim community and using the now notorious ‘M’ words in Indian politics: Mullah, Musalman, Mujra, and Mangalsutra. The Prime Minister’s speech at Banswada, a constituency in Gujarat, which went viral on the internet (and which BJP subsequently lost), reflected the deep-seated hatred against the Muslims that makes the core of the BJP regime controlled by the RSS.[3] The Prime Minister carries forward the hate propagated by the early leaders of the RSS. The social basis for fascism in India, constructed out of a hatred for Muslims and Islamophobia – which has now been expanded to hatred against all the Abrahamic religions – found itself slipping during the 2024 elections because of the impact that the economic policies of the BJP have had on the marginalised people, where rural distress and agrarian crisis have become menacingly high with farmers’ suicides are becoming a regular feature in rural India. The PM remained silent on such issues throughout the election rallies. Most of these activities by the PM had an impact on his narrow victory at Banaras against INC’s Ajay Rai, where it had been reported that Modi was even trailing for a significant part of the counting day – a historic day for post 2010 Indian politics which has mostly been dominated by Brand Modi. The journalist Ravish Kumar pointed out: ‘It is historic that in a state of affairs like today, even though the PM lost, the TV channels were forced to carry out a headline that the PM was trailing in his own constituency’.

From ‘Vikas’ to ‘Musalman’

The decline of Modi is also evident in the ways in which the discourse centering on the elections was constructed. While in 2014, the major tagline was focused on inclusive development, the 2019 elections were fought by the BJP along the lines of nationalism – focusing on the Pulwama attacks. In 2024 however, the BJP failed to pick up any such themes and consistently kept on attacking the opposition along religious lines, stooping to new lows of alleging that the opposition would take away the buffaloes and Mangalsutras if Hindu people is voted to power.[4] Its major agenda was a complete demonisation of all the opposition parties which refused to toe the socio-economic and political line framed by the BJP. However, halfway into the elections, came a turning point in the BJP’s campaign which decided the trajectory of the elections as far as the BJP was concerned. The BJP’s opposition to affirmative action became explicit in its regular usage of slogans such as ‘Modi hai to Mumkin hai’ [If Modi is there, it is Possible!], ‘Modi ki Guarantee’ [Modi’s Guarantee] and ‘Abki baar 400 Par’ [This Time, the tally will go beyond 400], which spoke in terms of how it would achieve unthinkable feats if BJP was voted again to power, ensuring the supremacy of Hindus in India.

The BJP’s focus on 400 was based on its agenda of altering the constitution of India, a point that it consistently highlighted in its election campaign, which would amount to doing away with the socialist and secular character of the constitution.[5] Ambedkar’s constitution, which had been time and again tarnished by the BJP’s Hindutva stood the test of time in 2024 again and became one of the major players in the electoral fight against the BJP. Rahul Gandhi (of the INC), Sitaram Yechury (of the CPM), D. Raja (of the CPI), and Akhilesh Yadav’s (of the Socialist Party) constant electoral positioning of the Constitution as the founding document of the country in opposition to Savarkar and Golwalkar’s hate-mongering Hindutva, played a key role in ensuring the support of the marginalised (the Pichras, Dalits and Adivasis). The grassroots campaigns focusing on unemployment, religious disharmony, and social upliftment became key questions in an election season that has otherwise been marred with the hate-mongering speeches made by the Indian Prime Minister, in one of which he had actively proposed that he was not even a biological human being but rather that he was a reincarnation of the Hindu deity Krishna.[6]

The battle for this year’s Indian general elections had begun with Rahul Gandhi’s – whom many had already started referring to as a failed politician – Bharat Jodo Yatra (Trans. India Unity March) which was followed up with the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra (Trans. India Unity and Justice March). Both the journeys made by Rahul Gandhi – the second also included a tussle with the BJP Chief Minister of Assam Himanta Sarma – exhibited that the people of India were ready to, as The Week mentioned it, ‘cut Modi to size’. However, despite the electoral set-back of Modi, it is important to mention that his charismatic leadership is by no means over. He continues to hold sway over a large section of the populace who continue to see him as a messiah, as an RSS activist narrated to me: ‘He might have lost the elections, but we are still with him. He will save the nation from the Muslims and Christians. The Bharat Jodi Yatra has illusioned people’. The Bharat Jodo Marches of Rahul Gandhi, as the activist also mentions, proved crucial in these elections because these marches provided the much-needed support that the opposition needed to justify its hastily made alliance against the BJP.[7] The importance of these marches reached great heights when Nitish Kumar, the reigning Chief Minister of Bihar and one of the major progenitors of the INDIA alliance, made the switch – perhaps the umpteenth time in his political career – to BJP which also made it possible for the Modi to remain in power after 4^th June because Kumar provided him with as many as 12 MPs. Throughout the march, it was visible that the left-of-centre INC had been slowly regaining its lost ground.

The left proclaimed that the INC had slowly become more accommodating of differing views and that this accommodating nature was one of the key factors behind the success of the opposition against the BJP. This was particularly visible in Uttar Pradesh, where despite the bulldozer raj of the BJP under the Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the INC-Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party) was successful in dealing a crucial blow to the BJP. The combined force of Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav – the young socialist yet dynastic leader of UP – made many remember the reign of Mulayam Singh Yadav, Akhilesh’s father, who did not hesitate to use force to halt the march of the RSS activists en route to demolishing the Babri Mosque in 1992. The rise of Yadav, this time, also however again exhibited the continuous relevance of caste in post-Mandal Indian politics, and the slow decline of Mayawati, India’s fiercest woman Dalit politician. Interestingly, it was quite evident that at the sites through which Rahul Gandhi’s march had passed, the INC could do considerably better than the BJP in comparison to the 2019 elections.

The reverse, contrastingly, was true for Narendra Modi. In most of the sites where the Prime Minister had given hateful speeches, the BJP suffered a defeat, including Ayodhya, the formally recognised Faizabad constituency where the Dalit candidate from the Samajwadi Party, Avadesh Prasad, won a thumping victory. Despite spending millions on the construction of the Ram Temple and using it for propaganda purposes, the land grabs at Ayodhya coupled with the bulldozer politics of the UP CM ensured that the BJP lost one of its most prestigious seats even after all the grandiose actions surrounding the inauguration of the temple at Ayodhya.

Coalition Dharma

The left in India has constantly emphasised the critical importance that coalition governments have in the context of India, and more so in light of the grandiose image that Modi carries with himself that threatens the very existence of Indian democracy. Across party and ideological lines within the left, there has been a general consensus that coalition governments are generally better than one-party governments because of their role in ensuring better compliance with federal policies. The benefits can be largely said to be along the following points:

1. Coalition governments are better at ensuring that the demands of smaller and poorer states get attention.
2. They ensure that governments do not function along unilateral lines of engagement but take a diverse array of opinions into account that come from regional political formations.
3. Coalition governments remain vulnerable to political changes and as such is less likely to obey authoritarian diktats.

The BJP’s ascension to power in 2024 rests upon a coalition government, formed with the support of the Telegu Dasam Party (TDP) led by Chandrababu Naidu and the Janata Dal (United) (JDU) led by the Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, which contributed 12 MPs respectively to the coalition government. That being said, though both parties have provided support, it is important to remember in this context that both TDP and JDU depend upon a significant Muslim voter base in their respective regions. The TDP, for example, in the 2024 assembly elections had promised that if it came to power, it would bring in 4 percent reservation for Muslims in Andhra Pradesh. The same goes for Nitish Kumar’s JDU, which also commands a significant presence among Muslims in Bihar. Modi criticised these policies of both of them during his initial election campaigning and labeled them as being anti-Hindu. Nevertheless, he did not shy away from taking their critical support in forming the government. This is the first time in India’s history that a sitting Prime Minister’s party has been voted out of power and the same PM has again resumed Prime Ministership of a coalition government. The last time when something of this kind happened was in 1987 when Rajiv Gandhi’s INC lost the elections on its own and was forced to form a government through a coalition with others. But in that instance, Rajiv Gandhi had openly stated that he had lost the mandate of the people and hence had no moral right to assume the position of Prime Minister. Subsequently, V.P. Singh became the Prime Minister.[8] Narendra Modi, however, has no such moral responsibilities, perhaps because, as a journalist put it, ‘he is not biological so his moral standards might be different’.

The opposition, on the other hand, has finally had its taste of power after a decade. With more than 230 MPs, the opposition to Modi in the parliament is now significant. Today, the Indian parliament has an official Leader of Opposition – that requires a political formation to win more than 10 percent of seats – who will now have a role to play in how the government uses the administrative and political machinery such as the CBI, ED, and the ECI. The last ten years have exhibited that an oppositionless regime has a greater propensity of becoming authoritarian, as was the case with Indira Gandhi in the 70s, and as is the case with the Modi regime. These are regimes that have been known to use everything in their power – constitutional and extra-constitutional means – to keep themselves in positions of authority. The question of money-muscle in Indian elections in an old one. Almost all the major political formations have engaged in it in some capacity. Take for instance, the electoral bind scam that erupted in the Indian media before the elections where it was exposed that most of the political formations – including both the INC and the BJP as well as most others, except the communist parties – had been engaged in taking electoral bonds, i.e., getting major anonymous donations from large conglomerates or capitalists. The public outcry against this made the BJP – which had ridden on the success of the anti-corruption movement and had claimed that its claim to power in India rests upon the fact that it is the only political party that treads down a path of dharma that does not allow it to become corruptible. The exposure of the electoral bonds scam, however, has burst that bubble as well. The PM’s silence over the violence in Manipur and the land grabs at Ayodhya cost the BJP dearly in these places. In India’s North-east, the BJP failed to win any of the seats that it had won during the 2014 and 2019 elections. The ethnic violence unleashed in Manipur and allowed to continue by the governments – both the central and state governments during the period were under the BJP – has led to a whitewashing of the BJP in the Northeast but the struggle against them continues to be an important issue because even though they have been politically defeated, their interference within the civil society continues to remain strong.

A coalition government can significantly affect such structures because coalitions of this kind demand adjustments which the BJP under Modi is not accustomed to do. This occurred despite the uncritical support of the mainstream media, which predicted that the BJP was going to win a thumping victory with most exit polls confirming that the seats won by the BJP were going to go over 400. Going by this trend, the PM himself urged people to buy stocks because the market ‘will break records on the 4^th of June’. Ironically, however, the market contrastingly crashed on that very day, causing more than 10 million people to lose their invested money.[9] The failure of the politics of communal violence in important sites such as Ayodhya has even led to intra-Hindu violence in these areas, with many far-right activists declaring the people of Ayodhya to be inferior Hindus. Even Narendra Modi, during his victory speech at the BJP Headquarters, shifted from ‘Jay Shree Ram’ – the traditional war cry of the BJP – to ‘Jay Jagannath’ referring to the victory that the BJP has had in Odisha which has the Jagannath Temple as its state symbol. This showed the opportunism that lies embedded within the core of the BJP, and its usage of Hindus for political benefits.

The way in which the elections were contested and the reactions that they evoked among people make one realise the constant suffocation of free will under the current stage of neoliberal capitalism in India. The people of India in 2024 could only be given the choice of choosing the lesser of the two evils between the INC-led alliance and the BJP-led alliance, between which the people choose the latter while ensuring that the former remains there to keep the BJP’s authoritarianism in check. The Indian people, for now, have to do with the loosely held INDIA coalition. Indian democracy has still not been rescued from the clutches of the neo-fascist authoritarianism of the Modi regime, because he still remains at the helm of power in India. However, the general election of 2024 has shown that if contested with the right agenda that engages with the grassroots issues that people face, it is indeed possible to counter the far-right. However, while on the one hand, the grassroots campaigns run by the opposition need to be highlighted – and praised as well – on the other hand, it is necessary to take into cognisance that the seeds of communal hatred on religious lines sewed by the BJP during the last ten years will take quite some time to heal. This has been evident in the numerous instances of violence against the Muslims which have erupted post the election results on the 4^th of June, especially centred around Eid-ul-Adha. The lack of principle of the opposition is manifested in the fact that almost all the political formations – except the CPI(M) and the CPI(ML)-Liberation – have decided to not make a public statement about these incidents. This is despite the Muslim people giving an overwhelming majority of their votes to the opposition, as many poll analysts have demonstrated after the elections by looking at the ways in which Muslims have voted, especially in rural areas.[10]

The campaign run by the INDIA bloc exposed the massive discontent that has been generated among the people because of the misrule of the BJP. The slide of BJP’s vote share in rural areas, shows that the major social base of the neoliberal and semi-fascist authoritarian regime of the BJP has suffered a major dent. The dent was particularly visible in non-urban India. The consistently falling rural income levels and the growth in hate crimes manifested themselves in the ways in which rural India voted. The vote share of the BJP in rural and semi-urban declined significantly in comparison with the opposition, especially the INC. Urban India however continued to have its belief firmly placed on the BJP, with the BJP garnering 40.1 percent of the urban votes.[11] And because rural and semi-urban India harbour most of the marginalised populace in India, the verdict can be referred to as one that is directed against the ruling formation by the poorest of the poor.

It also exhibited that the growth of the far-right in India has not been able to completely do away with the social and economic discontent that has been generated among the marginalised people of India. However, the moral victory of the democratic opposition to Modi in 2024 has been unable to do away with the political behemoth that the BJP has become, which is reflected in the ways in which the BJP has been able to continue its domination over its opponents – and its own alliance partners – by political bulldozing. This reflects a failure of the democratic forces in the country, which have been unable to realise that the dialectical progress of the society is ‘a continuous process of self-development, a process of development through contradiction, through alienation, through double-negation’ (Dunayevskaya, 1973, p. 10). The negation of negation can only be possible with a total overhaul of the system, but that being said, it is also important to appreciate the periodic victories of the democratic forces. The moral victory of the opposition in the 2024 elections, however, cannot be considered to be a decisive victory for the anti-Modi forces because of the violence that the far-right under Modi has penetrated into the psychology of the society. This is evident in the ways in which since 4^th of June, as many as 6 Muslims have been lynched in India, five student activists have been suspended in the University of Hyderabad, and scams have taken placed within the entrance examinations of NEET and NET.[12] However, that being said, it is also important to mention that the success of the opposition comes in at a critical time for Indian democracy, where hate crimes against Muslims and Dalits have been on unprecedented levels, and when the Prime Minister of the country himself has been quoted saying that the opposition to him wears a specific kind of clothing referring to traditional Islamic dresses.

While the INDIA alliance has stood against these claims and demonisation made by the PM, it is important to mention that the INDIA alliance rests upon the support of the Shiv Sena, one of the ideological supporters of the RSS and who have subsequently come out of the RSS fold because of political differences – not cultural or social ones. In such circumstances, it is important to understand that electoral victory is a part of the larger strategy against capitalism and neo-fascism, and while it is important – and undeniably so – to celebrate minor victories, it is equally important to keep the larger political picture in mind.

The Way Forward

The struggle against the far-right in India is not a unidimensional one, but rather a multidimensional one which encompasses diverse aspects of social struggles. It cannot be merely a struggle based on caste lines – like how the Socialist Party or the Rastriya Janta Dal makes it in realpolitik terms – or one that is purely based on class lines, like how most of the left in India (both the Stalinists and Trotskyists) defined the struggle in India until the late 1990s. During the late 1990s, most of the left in India had to change their position on caste because of the changes that had come within the Indian psyche with the Mandal commission declaring reservations for the OBCs in India. The political agenda that the far-right in India carries within itself goes beyond mere elections because it attempts to bring in a fundamental change within the very nature of the Indian society. It is in this light that one has to see the inclusion of the Shiv Sena, a far-right organisation within the INDIA bloc, and the exclusion of the AIMIM, AIUDF and ISF, which though far-right but are repeatedly accused of being the ‘Team B’ of the BJP because of their polarisation of the Muslim votes. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the Hindu politics of the INC, the AAP and the appeasement politics of the AITC, which is regularly used by the BJP for their own benefits.

During the 2024 elections, the focus of the INDIA bloc was on the Constitution but it failed to adequately reflect upon the pitfalls found in the dynamics of democracy, something which leaders such as Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav represent. As Marxist-Humanists, it provides us an adequate juncture for a detailed analysis of the situation that India faces. Our analysis also becomes important because Marxist-Humanism is a tendency that uses dialectics at the core of its analysis, which becomes critically important in the corpus of contradictory political relationships that exists in India, especially the one between the dynastic democracy of the INC, the TMC and the SP, and the neo-fascist authoritarianism of the BJP and the RSS.

Raya Dunayevskaya’s books continue to remain in circulation in India, with a wide readership, and Marxist-Humanists in India, though low in number, will continue to endeavor to bring forward more critical analysis as well as build bridges between philosophy and organization in the coming years. The IMHO India chapter is actively pursuing holding public meetings in India online, as well as working towards bringing out an Indian/South Asian edition of our edition of the Critique of the Gotha Program in 2024. It is also actively pursuing to bring forward more critical analysis of the diverse Indian political thought, especially those from the Royists and the (Indian) Socialists, which exert a significant political and intellectual influence in the country.

[Brief excerpts of this article were published on July 4 in SD Roy’s article “India’s 2024 Elections, a Moral Victory over the Far Right” https://imhojournal.org/articles/perspectives-on-the-spring-elections-in-india/ ]

[1] See https://www.scobserver.in/journal/timeline-key-events-in-the-babri-masjid-ram-mandir-controversy/

[2] See https://www.freepressjournal.in/india/calling-kishori-lal-pa-steno-is-offensive-rahul-gandhi-on-giant-killer-who-defeated-smriti-irani-in-amethi-lok-sabha-seat-watch-video

[3] See https://thewire.in/communalism/real-target-of-modis-banswara-speech-was-idea-of-equitable-distribution-of-wealth

[4] See https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/elections/congress-will-snatch-mangalsutra-of-mothers-and-sisters-modi/article68094910.ece

[5] https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/removal-of-secular-socialist-from-constitution-shows-bjp-s-biased-mindset-123092000448_1.html

[6] See https://www.businesstoday.in/india/story/god-has-sent-me-convinced-that-my-energy-is-not-biological-prime-minister-narendra-modi-430606-2024-05-23

[7] See https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/india-alliance-makes-a-comeback-in-several-hindi-heartland-states-101717500317963.html

[8] For full details, refer to the Encyclopedia entry https://www.britannica.com/biography/V-P-Singh

[9] The INC and the CPI have claimed this to be a scam. For more details refer to https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cekkddndldeo

[10] See https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/8-why-some-muslims-voted-for-modi/

[11] The Urban Rural divide is explained in this article in the Economic Times and is available without any paywall: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/elections/lok-sabha/india/bjp-wins-more-vote-share-in-urban-india-but-its-a-different-tale-in-the-rural/articleshow/110755949.cms?from=mdr

[12] Exams mandatory for getting admitted in state-sponsored medical and doctoral programmes in India.