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Elections 2024: It's complicated...

...just like this maddening, loveable country of ours. The RSS has woken up from its Modi/Shah-induced coma. Modi is on ultimatum that Shah cannot continue to call the shots. Rajnath Singh has been nominated to sheep-dog Modi.

By Prem Panicker
New Update
Elections 2024

This image best represents the results of the Lok Sabha elections 2024 | Photo courtesy: Public domain

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Elections 2024

On 5 March, two weeks before the first phase of polling in Elections 2024, television channels went into an overdrive over a report that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked top bureaucrats to come up with a 100-day plan for “path-breaking ideas for reforms, for accelerating growth”.

On 17 April, the inevitability narrative was kept alive with a well-time plant in the media that Modi had told his bureaucrats “when I come back in June” he wanted to review both the 100-day and the five-year plan and it better be ready.

On 2 June, the day after the last votes had been cast, exit fantasy polls had gifted the BJP/NDA with a super-majority and Modi had finished his TV mini-series on meditating in Kanyakumari, the media was again in a tizzy about how the tireless PM had gone straight back to work. He chaired seven meetings that day, we were told, to review the 100-day plan.

In that timeline lies the narrative arc of this elections 2024 cycle. It is also Modi’s first moment of realisation of the Pyrrhic nature of his “victory – with the BJP at 240 seats falling well short of even a simple majority of 272, his days of running the country by imperial fiat are over.

The word in political circles is that the agenda included the hindutva version of a Uniform Civil Code, the implementation of One Nation One Election, and the implementation of both the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and of a delimitation exercise so fashioned as to raise the number of Lok Sabha seats to 846, with Uttar Pradesh getting a whopping 143 seats (up from 80), Bihar 79 (up from 40), Madhya Pradesh 52 (up from 29), Rajasthan 50 (up from 25), Maharashtra 76 (up from 48) and Gujarat 43 (up from 26). This would mean that a party holding those six states would effectively rule the country, and the five southern states, with a total of 164 seats (up from the current 130) would be rendered politically irrelevant despite their economic heft.

On 5 June, the day the NDA allies met in Delhi to endorse Modi as PM for a third term, came the news that his 100-day agenda would be redone because the allies on whom he depends to form a government wanted various changes made.

This was inevitable. Say what you want about Nitish Kumar’s dizzying U-turns, the one constant in his ideology is that he does not, personally and as leader of the JD(U), endorse Hindu majoritarianism, and neither does Chandrababu Naidu. In fact, as recently as 4 May, in the middle of an election cycle where one of Modi’s, and the BJP’s, central c

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