NARENDRA Modi has won his third term as the Prime Minister. It was not the cakewalk that the exit polls had predicted.

It will have to accommodate its partners in the NDA in order to govern. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP), the Janata Dal (United) and others together picked up 50-odd seats; this will pose a problem for Modi in allocating Cabinet portfolios.

Modi will have to rethink his strategy of governance, particularly how he treats political opponents and the minorities.

He will have to rethink his strategy of governance, particularly how he treats political opponents and the minorities.

He will have to change his approach. Clearly, it is not a winner anymore. He needs to discipline the fringe elements in the Sangh Parivar who had free rein in the first 10 years of his reign and had tasted blood. Taming them will take some doing. It is not easy to rebottle the genie once it is released.

Modi will have to concentrate on jobs and unemployment. This should be his first and foremost concern in his third term. His meditation at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial must have filled him with thoughts of things to do and also, I hope, things he should not do. All that will need to be revised in the light of the harsh message that Indian voters have delivered. He will have to start with the basics — education and health.

For productivity to improve, the levels of education and health of the lowest economic brackets have to be lifted by their bootstraps.

With the BJP failing to secure a majority on its own, stability is not assured. Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP and Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) do not share the BJP’s Hindutva ideology. What is needed now is course correction on the lines spelt out by me earlier. That course correction is necessary to retrieve Modi’s fast-fading reputation as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ leader with the qualities that befit a statesman.

 

The INDIA bloc had come together to oust Modi from power. Its members were aware that when he ruled from his vantage position as the elected leader, he was likely to crush them one by one, like he had disposed of the old leaders in his own party and kept upcoming leaders guessing.

They have disproved Modi’s and Shah’s prediction of a runaway victory for the NDA as a gross miscalculation. It could even be interpreted as a slap on the face of the two leaders. The BJP enjoys only 37 per cent backing of the Indian people. The NDA collectively is slightly better at 41 per cent. The majority of the Indian electorate is not with Modi and his ideology.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) was the recipient of much flak, mostly uncalled for but some well-deserved. Its hesitation to rein in the PM, particularly for vituperative remarks bordering on the scandalous, was the real cause of the epithets hurled at the commission. The loss of credibility of the ECI is the biggest negative outcome of this year’s Lok Sabha polls. That could have been avoided in the ‘Mother of Democracy’.

Even the monthly dole of 5 kg of rice or wheat for each ‘below poverty line’ ration-card holder seemed to have swayed them. The direct transfer of subsidy to individual bank accounts, the pension payments to widows and welfare grants to women for education or their marriage expenses — all these played on the minds of the less fortunate, without whose votes victory was out of the question.

The salaried and, more than them, the intellectual class, which would normally have supported a right-wing dispensation, had begun questioning the government’s approach to human rights and freedom of speech. Some of the political moves against its adversaries also came up for scrutiny. The BJP lost the votes of these people, but the loss was compensated by the freshly minted votes of the poor.

Highlights Forwarded By: Balbir Singh Sooch-Sikh Vichar Manch

https://www.sikhvicharmanch.com/home1.htm

https://www.facebook.com/balbir.singh.355

A salute to the personalities-To save India

https://www.sikhvicharmanch.com/B10.htm

“Modi used the ‘Hindu majority versus Muslim minority’ card: Julio Ribeiro”The Tribune, Chandigarh