The View From 2025: One Year On, A Relook At 'Verdict 2024'

A year ago, to the day, as a dipping summer sun cast long shadows of dusk upon our land, votaries of Hindutva sat still, gripped by despair, despondency, and gloom.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had fallen short of the halfway mark in parliament by 32 seats. Apprehension rose with the darkness, of what would now befall us, as the true extent of the debacle came tumbling out of the ballot boxes, negative vote, after vote, after vote.

The repeat clean sweeps of large states like Gujarat, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and the grandest electoral prize of all, Uttar Pradesh, were brushed into history by palpable voter fatigue. Brand Modi had stumbled. ‘Make in India’ had hit a hurdle.

‘Ab ki baar, 400 paar’ had slumped to 240 seats, and the nation’s growth story was once again at the sufferance of loathsome, fearsome, coalition politics which threatened to send us back into the past, rather than herald the ‘Amrit Kaal’ we deserved.

The identity vote was back. Rahul Gandhi was smirking again. Akhilesh Yadav and his Samajwadi Party were back. Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress were back. The Yadav family was back in Bihar. The Hoodas were back in Haryana. The Congress was back with a bang in Maharashtra. The Annamalai experiment was over in Tamil Nadu even before it had begun. Only Madhya Pradesh, Assam, and Odisha stood out.

Caste was back with a vengeance, snarling its divisive roars in seat after seat. Dalits, the true legatees of Hindutva, if ever a community deserved that title, rejected the BJP in droves, undoing the work of a century.

Numbed by disbelief, people cast their nets for reasons on why this debacle had come to pass. Anything, just anything, that would explain why a party and a movement which had striven so assiduously for 10 years, to compose a magnificent story of recovery, revival and demonstrable progress, were left in the lurch by the very people they had sought to serve.

SC, ST, OBC and FC, instead of meaning surcharge, sales tax, on board courier, and first class, now once again sadly meant Scheduled Class, Scheduled Tribe, Other Backward Class, and Forward Class. The pain was real, and it was not going to go away for five full years.

And yet, even as despair and hopelessness over an unexpected verdict became the new normal, things did not stand still, or deteriorate. Instead, the BJP took the hit on its chin, manfully, and assembled a working, workable coalition of like-minded parties which has endured without bickering or confusion for a full year now. And then it went to work, at the grassroots, with a greater vengeance than either caste or identity could imagine.

The results showed swiftly, in style, in the three crucial legislative elections of Haryana, Maharashtra, and Delhi. That smirk became a frown. The 99 seats which the Congress won, and which they preened about like 99 was 272, was shown up for what it always had been – a third consecutive drubbing for a party which has lost the moral right to function in the public space.

In Haryana, the BJP went back to the drawing board to devise and run what can only be called a ‘Sangh’ election. The detailing was at the microscopic, booth level. There was no hype. The sitting Chief Minister was a relative unknown, having taken over but recently from Manohar Lal Khattar. Everything screamed anti-incumbency. Everyone said the BJP would sink like a stone. After all, the Congress had clawed its way back to win five seats of 10 in the 2024 general elections, after helplessly watching the BJP make a clean sweep in 2019. And these five Congress wins included the politically significant SC-reserved constituencies of Ambala and Sirsa.

Yet, for all that, when the results were announced, all were surprised to see that the BJP didn’t just secure the popular mandate for a record third consecutive term, but it also improved its vote share by three percentage points as well.

Next, was Maharashtra, the second biggest electoral prize in the country, and by far the richest state. Again, it was pessimism to the fore, mixed with utter confusion. In the general elections of 2024, the BJP had managed only five holds from 2019, and not one of those was an SC or ST seat. Indeed, where the BJP and its ally, the Shiv Sena, won eight of nine SC and ST seats in 2019, it managed to win only one in 2024 (Palghar constituency). The identity vote was the toast of the seculerati once more.

Yet, once again, psephology was shown the door by a remarkably mature electorate which voted for a BJP-led coalition from amidst a befuddling kaleidoscope of splinters, rebels, and fragments. To quote a colleague, also a dear friend, who is periodically predisposed to vacillating between desolation and exhilaration, “Maharashtra was intravenous glucose!” The BJP nearly made it to the halfway mark on its own, and, along with its allies, swept 82 per cent of the seats (235 of 288). The frown became a pout.

And, saving the best for last, the good people of Delhi handed the mandate to the BJP on a platter earlier this year; and for good measure, ensured that Arvind Kejriwal lost.

These three provincial elections, more than anything else, provided the much-needed balm which BJP supporters had been anxiously waiting for, and re-infused the party with fresh vitality.

Thus, looking back upon the year gone by, we may conclude that the 2024 general elections established a new benchmark of sorts in Indian politics: 240 seats for the BJP represents the low-water mark of Hindutva, and 99 seats for the Congress is the high-water mark of 'secularism'. That is how fundamentally our land has changed in the past decade, and we are the better for it.