The western democracies have been increasingly facing irate anarchists within their population. Revolutionaries with no emotional anchors carrying huge void with no belief systems keep jumping from one cause to another to challenge the authority, government, and society around them.
This anarchism, which specialises in finding new nails to hammer with their decadent ideology, has found its way to India too. And worse, it has been embraced by India’s leading Opposition party – the Congress.
In fact, the vast majority of Indians themselves remain positive, hopeful, and full of energy towards realising their personal and collective national ambitions. However, cut from the roots, it is India’s grand old party, which seeks to drag the country in the direction of nihilism, questioning the very institutional foundations on which India’s democracy rests and functions.
This behaviour was visible throughout the Lok Sabha 2024 campaign, when Congress kept promising dismantling of the Constitution to achieve its political objectives, making minority-ism the fulcrum of its promised policy pivot. While appeasement was always the Congress’s mainstay, this election cycle it moved to blatant discrimination seeking the transfer of influence and economic resources from the majority to the minority community.
The Congress has now reserved its renunciation of the Indian democratic edifice at the very end of the election cycle.
On June 1, all exit polls of the Lok Sabha election showed a clear impending return of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a historic third term – a renewed mandate, with an increase vote share, wider geographic footprint, and continued trust of all sections of the voters.
Generally speaking, the exit polls provide a good directional view of the possible outcome. The June 1 exit polls unanimously pointed to an overwhelming win for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led alliance.
Instead of respecting the implied mandate vocalised through the exit polls, the Congress and the INDIA bloc went on record to call these exit polls “Modi media polls”. The alliance stated that their exit polls gave them 295 seats, but refused to detail how were the poll trackers run and what computing models were used.
With such self-baselined, overly-optimistic opinion on seat count masquerading as data, the Congress has laid the groundwork for its next attack on Indian democracy. On June 4, when the collective voice of hundreds of millions of Indians reposes its trust in PM Modi, the Congress will say that the electronic voting machines (EVMs) have been manipulated.
Never mind that when Congress won the state of Telangana unexpectedly, mounting a rearguard surge just six months back, the EVMs were working fine. And when it put up a strong show in Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh a couple of years ago, the EVMs were of course not manipulated. The Congress anarchists will not see the irony of claiming a win for themselves and calling EVMs manipulated simultaneously.
For, the Congress does not want to reason based on logic. It wants to see the country burn. News reports mentioned that more than 120 civil society organisations were camping around the country to demonstrate against the Election Commission of India (ECI) should the result not favour the Congress.
Not only will they question the ECI, they will also discredit lakhs of political party representatives including their own under whose watch EVMs are sealed after the polls and opened before counting. They will also discredit lakhs of security personnel who stay away from their families, performing poll duties in burning temperatures.
The Congress has already alleged that the counting officers are under pressure from the BJP. The poll official heading each district is mostly an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, who are the backbone of the Indian governance system.
The ECI sought information from the Congress on who these officers were, who were apparently under pressure from the BJP. Obviously there was no response, for anarchists throw mud and scoot – they never have evidence for making unsubstantiated allegations.
This shambolic behaviour has been building up for a few days. Just before the exit polls, a senior lawyer made a video depicting ‘proper conduct’ for the poll officials. The ECI had to clarify that the said lawyer was simply reading out ECI’s own instruction manual, available publicly and followed meticulously in each election counting process. The Congress tried to make a ‘gotcha’ out of what has been happening election after election for years.
The Congress is not just about to tarnish India’s electoral process, it is seeking to destroy the country’s social fabric and the institutional edifice. The ECI routinely ranks amongst in top constitutional bodies in independent surveys when Indians are asked about which part of their democracy they trust.
The Congress has embarked on a dangerous path. This scorched earth policy, where they will burn the country if they cannot run it, poses a big structural challenge for the country – one of the biggest internal security risks in the Indian post-1947 history.
Indians have repudiated the Congress in elections. It’s now time for voters to confine this misfit, ultra-left, and negativist organisation in the annals of history – in every state and in the next Lok Sabha election.
(Amit Malviya is in-charge, BJP National Information and Technology Department. He is also BJP’s co-in charge for Bengal)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
