April 5, 2024

The countdown for electing the members of Lok Sabha 18 has started. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the key poll mascot for the ruling BJP, is confident of clinching the hat-trick.

For BJP and its NDA, Modi 3.0, is a certainty, though Congress and other INDIA block parties might differ.

BJP and Modi are repeatedly harping on ‘Abki baar 400-paar’ or crossing the 400-seat mark out of the 543 seats for NDA in 2024, a feat achieved only by the Congress in 1994 when the party bagged 411 out of the 542 seats in the aftermath of the Indira Gandhi assassination.

In fact, Modi was earlier talking about touching the 370 mark, which itself if it materializes is quite a big peak to scale considering the tally of 336 in 2014 and 352 in 2019 for the combined NDA.

Modi is so sure of winning for the third time that he has already asked his ministerial colleagues to prepare a 100-day action plan to be unveiled after the government is formally sworn in following the counting of votes in the first week of June.

In what could be regarded as rather cocky or over-confident, he resorted to brag about ‘abki baar 400-paar’ and even boast of achieving the goal of ‘Vikshit Bharat’ or developed India by 2047, which also marks 100 years since the country’s Independence. One is not sure whether Modi born in 1950 will be around and even if he were, it is doubtful whether he will be politically active in 2047.

Assuming BJP and NDA manage to pull off the ‘abki baar 400-paar’ or hits the 370-mark, way beyond the halfway figure of 273, leaves one with the most obvious question: What about the non-BJP parties?

Mind you, it is no longer the question about the challenge from the Congress party, which had ruled the country either on its own or as part of an alliance with other non-BJP parties for most of the years since the country’s Independence.

‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ unfulfilled

Unfortunately for the Congress, it could not muster sufficient number of seats in the last two elections to be recognized as the principal opposition party in the lower house. No doubt, the Congress still is the only political party with a pan-India presence and, despite Modi’s repeated taunts of ensuring ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’, the self-avowed mission remains unfulfilled.

The grand old party is still alive and kicking. In fact, after its resounding victory on its own in Karnataka defeating both the then ruling BJP and JDS, which have since come together for the Lok Sabha battle, the Congress managed to wrest Telangana from Y Chandrashekar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samiti, renamed as Bharat Rashtra Samiti, to play a bigger role in national politics that came a cropper. It may be recalled that the JDS, which has now tied up with BJP for Lok Sabha polls, had joined YSR’s BRS before the 2013 assembly polls in vain.

Unlike the Lok Sabha polls in 2014 and 2019, the present election is quite different. The Congress party, which never ceded its prima donna status to other non-BJP parties, has climbed down from its citadel and has by and large played second fiddle to other parties. In an effort to forge united front to beat Modi, it allowed Sharad Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena, Mamatha Banerjee’s TMC, M K Stalin’s DMK, Nitish Kumar’s JDU before he switched sides and embraced BJP, Lalu Prasad and his son Tejaswi Yadav and even Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP to call the shots in cobbling the INDIA block to facilitate one-on-one contest against BJP as far as possible.

That AICC President Mallikarjuna Kharge has been made the convener of INDIA block owes largely to his stature as an elderly and by far the most acceptable Dalit face. Again, it was Mamatha, better known as Didi, who was mainly responsible for forcing the leaders of the INDIA block to root for Kharge by first mooting the idea of projecting him as the INDIA alternative to Modi.

Kharge, the battle-scarred veteran that he is, exhibited his sagacity by driving home the point that the first task before the combine was winning the election and then thinking about PM’s post.

If Nitish ditched the INDIA block to continue as Bihar CM to join Modi bandwagon, Didi queered the pitch by choosing to go it alone on account of her reluctance to accommodate her sworn enemies - the Left parties, especially CPM and CPI - or give in to Congress on its demand for a respectable number of seats in West Bengal.

For the record, however, the Congress leaders, particularly the scion of the Gandhi-Nehru family – Rahul Gandhi, the victory of INDIA block is a guarantee as is Modi’s exit. Rahul Gandhi and other INDIA leaders are already holding out promises on what the new government will do.

Given the hard reality of the dismal performance of Congress in the last two Lok Sabha polls, where the party failed to win the required number of seats to be accorded the status of the recognized Opposition leader, it will be a miracle of sorts if INDIA block somehow manages to form the government in June. But then, victory and defeat are part and parcel of life. Political upheavals or rather upsets are known to happen, and nothing can be ruled out.

Is trouncing BJP, a tall claim?

Optimists in the Congress are predicting defeat of BJP and NDA against INDIA combine, which they say will form the next government, and claim that the unleashing of the Central investigating agencies – IT, ED and CBI – against almost all key opposition leaders, particularly the arrests of chief ministers of Jharkhand and Delhi prior to the elections besides freezing of Congress party’s accounts and issuing notices from IT Department for payments of thousands of crores of rupees as past tax arrears and penalties as part of the game-plan to weaken the opposition.

If Didi was the first CM to predict the downfall of Modi regime and challenging BJP to first cross the 200-seat mark before talking about 400-paar, now even Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah has gone on record by claiming that BJP has started bragging about 400-paar following its own internal survey revealing its inability to win 200 seats!

Will defeat of BJP and getting the better of Modi be a tall claim? One never knows. The word impossible includes possible. Still, BJP after the rise of Modi-Shah over the last 10 years has become a well-oiled election fighting machine despite Modi consciously and deliberately avoiding holding interactions with media, especially press conferences or interviews, except under controlled conditions and choosing to directly reaching out to the people. That, however, has not affected his standing or popularity with the masses.

For Modi and BJP, ‘Abki baar 400-paar’ may be nothing more than rhetoric as even touching 370 or exceeding it might be good because the best tally that India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, who is constantly being vilified and blamed for everything considered wrong by Modi, got was 371 in 1957.

However, internal BJP calculations indicate that Modi-Shah might be enormously happy if the party manages to secure 362 seats, two-thirds of the 543-member Lok Sabha. Incidentally, the figure 370 holds special meaning to BJP and Modi-Shah because of the abrogation of Article 370 granting special status to Jammu and Kashmir and downgrading it from a full-fledged State into Union Territories! In addition, BJP looks like losing some seats in the northern parts of India and may not make much of a headway in the south, which indicates ‘Abki Baar 400-paar’ may not be more than a mere catchy slogan!

Irrespective of whether Modi scores 362, 370 or even reaches 400, the bugbear for his regime will be the 245-member Rajya Sabha, where BJP has 97 members and NDA 117 way below the half-way mark of 164. Therefore, without complete control of both houses of parliament, BJP would not be able to bring drastic changes in the Constitution as had been warned by Karnataka’s controversial Anant Kumar Hegde, who has been denied BJP ticket this time round, and many of his ilk.

If Modi 3.0 becomes a reality and the 2011 Census, already delayed beyond a decade, is finally held by 2026 as is being claimed by the BJP leaders, and the next delimitation of constituencies takes place necessitating an increase in the parliamentary seats based on population figures, the number of Lok Sabha members could go up to 888 from the present 453 and that of Rajya Sabha to 384 from the present 245, a Pandora’s box could well be opened!