Macho Nationalism v/s Fragile Democracy
Prime Minister, Narendra Modi and his party have scored a second general election victory. It has stunned pundits and political analysts across the board. Given the tumultuous period of the last five years under Modi’s style of governance, it was expected that at these 2019 elections the BJP would find it difficult to sell its divisive ‘saffron’ agenda based on reactionary Hindutva ideology.
Of the 900 million electorate across India, voters have in fact boosted their support for the BJP to 38 per cent, resulting in 303 seats, compared with 31 per cent of the popular vote in 2014 and the 282 seats.
Unprecedentedly, the BJP has got more than half of the votes polled in at least 13 states – 69 per cent in Himachal Pradesh, 62 per cent in Gujarat, 60 per cent in Uttarakhand, 58.5 per cent in Rajasthan, 58 per cent in Madhya Pradesh, 58 per cent in Haryana, 57 per cent in Delhi, 51.4 per cent in Karnataka, 51 per cent in Uttar Pradesh and 51 per cent in Jharkhand.
Narendra Modi is the first prime minister to return to power winning a bigger vote share for the party and enjoying a full single-party majority in the Lok Sabha parliament since Jawaharlal Nehru’s victory in 1957! Back then, Nehru’s Congress improved its vote share by 2.79 percentage points over its 1951-52 polls.
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