"This cure is worse than the disease": Hartosh Singh Bal offers a dissent on the majoritarian verdict

In the cacophony of support for Modi, there will be no shortage of those like BJP's national treasurer Piyush Goyal, who on Times Now on the very day of the verdict, faced with a few journalists who disagreed with him, labeled them Congress sympathisers. As a matter of fact, over the course of the past few years, the only public critics of the dynasty were to be found among this limited set of journalists. Having shot from their shoulders, men like Piyush Goyal today, in their moment of triumph, appear fearful at the prospect of being at the receiving end. This intolerance of dissent was one of the fears of a Modi victory. We can wait and see whether the tendencies Goyal so vividly expressed will be heightened over the next few days or whether the party will seek to curb them, but there is no reason to be so uncertain over one of the implications of this verdict: it is emphatically majoritarian....

The combined vote share of those accused of playing identity and caste politics—the Congress, Nitish Kumar and Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar, and the Congress, Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh—far exceeds that of the NDA. If the perception of the mandate overrides this reality, eventually the mandate will be overturned because reality cannot be wished away, as Rajiv Gandhi so quickly found out.

I was hoping for some acknowledgement of this fact in Modi’s speeches on his day of victory. His failure to use the words “Muslim” or “minority” was striking. These are not difficult words to pronounce; their absence and the rhetoric that was in their place suggest a literary parallel with George Orwell’ s 1984. Development for everyone, say Modi and his supporters. Electricity does not discriminate, they add. But of course it does. Development that does not recognise inequality heightens it. In the same way, to fail to recognise Muslims and other minorities as categories is to not be able to cater to their specific problems, whether economic or those stemming from apprehensions about this verdict. It did little to reassure such anxieties that one of Modi’s first public acts as prime minister-designate was to perform a grand puja in Varanasi, accompanied by priests chanting hymns and the din of conch shells.

There is no shortage of cheerleaders for this verdict, but for democracy to function, the sceptics have to find their voice. We will all have to recognise that no mandate is a mandate to silence opposition. Neither is this mandate reason to silence oneself.

- See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/no-mandate#sthash.OAzvoeGR.dpuf