Now that the results are out, my vote goes for Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath. For once, I am not ready to accept that they won because of any manipulation of the electronic voting machines they might have attempted. 

They won because of the gigantic efforts they made to win, unlike other Opposition parties.

Aesop’s famous fable comes to mind. A tortoise who, ridiculed by the hare for being slow, challenges it to a race. The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind and, confident of winning, takes a nap midway. 

Upon awakening, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, is already waiting for its arrival at the destination.

Soon after Yogi became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, a by-election was held for the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat vacated by Yogi himself. It was a triangular contest among the BJP, the SP-BSP combine and the Congress. The BJP lost by a huge margin. 

In the municipal elections held around the same time, a Muslim lady won the constituency in which Yogi’s mutt is situated. A double whammy for Yogi!

Like the hare, the Opposition ridiculed the tortoise of Modi-Yogi. The tortoise began running while Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party and Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party took not a nap like the hare but a slumber like Ravan’s brother Kumbhakarna.

By the time the Opposition woke up in 2019, the tortoise of Modi-Yogi had wrested the Gorakhpur seat by a record margin. Now let me use only Modi’s name. He is a political vulture who knows what to prey on.

Many of you would remember an Akshay Kumar-Nimrat Kaur starrer Airlift, based on the heroic evacuation of Indians in Kuwait, when Saddam Hussein declared Kuwait as the 19th Province of Iraq. 

My friend, K P Fabian, as the joint secretary in-charge at the External Affairs Ministry, played a stellar behind-the-scenes role in the whole operation.

Did any political party get any mileage from the operation? The recent elections in five states had nothing to do with what happened in Ukraine. But when Modi realised that thousands of Indian students were trapped in Ukraine, he used it subtly for political purposes.

Whenever a plane carrying students from Poland or Romania arrived in Mumbai or Delhi, Modi asked one or two ministers to reach the airport in advance, get into the plane, use the plane’s public address system to welcome them and also tell them how Modi cared for them. The media did the rest of Modi’s job.

No, Modi did not exceed the limit of expenditure fixed by the Election Commission. Nor did he ask for votes from the aircraft. In the popular perception, Modi was the one who saved them from the war zone. 

Of course, one remembers how the bodies of the victims of the Pulwama attack were sent to their homes and how it was used to stir up emotions. Modi knows how to make use of an opportunity and if there is none, to create one.

Experts pontificated on hijab being an inalienable right of Muslim women. Television channels debated for hours and hours how a few women covering their hair and neck was a threat to Indian civilisation. 

Even as judges in Karnataka and at the Supreme Court read and re-read every book on sartorial evolution from the days of the fig leaf to the costumes Modi wears and discards in rapidity, the controversy was polarising voters in UP and fetching the BJP more and more votes.

Now nobody talks about hijab, except when hijab-wearer Bushra Mateen, a civil engineering student, wins a record number of 16 gold medals in the history of Visvesvaraya Technological University, Raichur, Karnataka. If Modi knows about her accomplishment, he, too, may send her a congratulatory message!

Again, those who were alarmed by the calls for genocide of Muslims from a religious platform at Haridwar did not realise their “beneficial” impact on voters in Uttarakhand of which the sacred spot is part and Uttar Pradesh of which Uttarakhand was once part. 

Modi did not condemn the calls. Neither did he support them. But they helped in the polarisation of voters. The BJP Chief Minister in Uttarakhand lost but his party won hands down. Now, return to the story of the tortoise and the hare.

Please check the newspapers and look for a news-item in which Mayawati is seen criticising the Yogi government during the last five years. Where was she when millions of people came out on streets to protest against the citizenship laws? 

Where was she when Yogi’s policemen used brute force against migrant workers leaving cities like New Delhi in the wake of the lockdown when the choice was between dying of the virus and dying of starvation?

When Mayawati reluctantly made an appearance in UP, she spent more time attacking the Congress, rather than the BJP. She had a vote bank of her own. She was touted as the one who alone could shift her votes at her choice. Now, how many seats did she get? She got half the number of seats the Congress won, i.e., a solitary seat.

The Samajwadi Party and its allies together won 125 seats, including the SP’s own 111. True, Akhilesh Yadav had been campaigning vigorously since the Lakhimpur Kheri incident in which a BJP Minister’s son drove his SUV into the farmers killing some and maiming many.

Yadav could inspire confidence and people voted for him as the voting figures suggest. Nonetheless, where was he during at least four years of the five years that Yogi ruled? Did he make any political intervention to stop the Yogi juggernaut in its tracks except addressing election gatherings? During a major part of the campaign, he did not question the BJP on any of its core issues, except questioning Yogi's competence!

My readers are advised to check what his father Mulayam Singh Yadav said on the concluding day of the Lok Sabha when it met last in 2019.

In a moving speech, he said he wanted Modi to return to power. Did he ever wish for a Congress Prime Minister like Dr Manmohan Singh in this manner? Why were these people silent all these years? Just add the votes of the SP and the BSP, if not the Congress, and you will find Yogi returning to his Mutt in Gorakhpur!

The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) was once again in the field to split Muslim votes. Who funded it? It could get only less than 0.5 percent votes but the few votes it got helped the BJP at the cost of the SP. In other words, the BJP’s victory is the sum total of the failure of all the Opposition parties.

In 1984 when the Congress fought the elections under the leadership of late Rajiv Gandhi, it employed an ad agency in Bombay to plan the party’s media campaign. Every day, the newspapers carried full page and half-page advertisements very intelligently prepared.

It portrayed terrorism as the vulture that would devour Bharat. The campaign was planned in the wake of the assassination of Indira Gandhi at the hands of her body guards. There was no mention of the religion of her killers but the message was clear.

It is true that Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister could not do much to prevent the killings of the Sikhs and the killers were not Congressmen alone. In fact, the Congress does not have that kind of foot soldiers anywhere.

In the 1984 election, the hardcore BJP cadres voted for the Congress rather than for their party, with the result that the BJP got only two seats, one, surprisingly, in Andhra Pradesh. Rajiv Gandhi owed his success as much to the Congress as to the Sangh Parivar.

The BJP owes its success to all the Opposition parties, not just its cadres. Of course, everyone would now blame Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi for the defeat of the Congress. The fact is that the lady’s campaign was no less-spirited than Modi’s, though she could not translate it into votes.

Modi has one dream. He wants a Congress-mukt Bharat! Why does he not want a Samajwadi Party or Trinamool Congress or BSP-mukt Bharat? Because he knows that the Congress has the potential to defeat him, unlike the other parties.

A word about the Aam Aadmi Party would be in order. Arvind Kejriwal was in the forefront of the agitation for a Lok Pal that Anna Hazare launched in the final years of the Congress rule at the Centre. He was in cahoots with the BJP.

Kejriwal once contested famously against Modi in Varanasi but in this election, he did not field any candidates in UP at all. Why? Because he could have split only the BJP votes. Not the Congress, because the Congress did not have any vote to split.

In Uttarakhand, the Congress had a chance. So, the AAP was there to help the BJP. Again, the Congress had a chance in Goa, where, too, the AAP was there to split the Congress votes. In other words, Kejriwal heads the B team of the BJP. Thus, it is the BJP which won Punjab, though it has only 2 seats in the new House.

Interestingly, Mamata Banerjee, too, played her role in Goa to help the BJP. Last year, she devoured the whole Congress legislature party in Meghalaya! Congress-mukt Bharat is not just the dream of Modi but also of leaders like Kejriwal, Banerjee, Mulayam and Owaisi.

The Congress could have easily retained Punjab but for the group fighting in the organisation. If any single person could be described as the Congress party’s nemesis, it is loudmouth Navjot Singh Sidhu, who thought the chief ministership was his birthright. Thankfully, he was defeated.

Captain Amarinder Singh would like to be called Maharaja because his father was the king of Patiala. It was the Congress which allowed him to be the Chief Minister for so long. When he should have realised that his political days were over, he thought of forming a party and even supping with the devil. And the result is there for everyone to see.

The Shiromani Akali Dal, which once represented the Sikh community, now represents the Badal family. What a farce it was to let the five-time former Chief Minister and nonagenarian Parkash Singh Badal contest from his traditional seat of Lambi! Thank goodness, everyone from the family who contested was defeated.

The AAP does not have any ideology to stand on. It has only a few rebuilt government schools and mohalla clinics in Delhi to showcase. Corruption rules the roost in the education department in Delhi, about which I know a little. When riots happen, Kejriwal goes to Gandhi smriti to pray.

He builds a large model of the Ram temple in Delhi at enormous cost so that he and his MLAs can pray and post the videos. The next day, he demolishes it. His budget for advertisement is second only to that of Modi. 

One greatest idea he has introduced as a ruler is to send senior citizens at state cost to pilgrim centres. And the first trip was to Ayodhya! No ruler in the world has ever done this! 

To be fair to the AAP, its MLAs are ordinary people like the mobile phone repairer who defeated the Chief Minister in Punjab. Will they be able to see through the machinations of the Sangh Parivar which in its heart of hearts does not believe in democratic ideals? When it is a matter of life and death, a mohalla clinic or a smart classroom does not count.

Once I shared the dais with BJP leader and former Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad at a seminar organised by the late Manoj Shrivastva, IAS, at Maurya Hotel, Patna. He wondered aloud how the DMK lost despite providing good governance.

Now I wonder how Modi won despite providing bad governance. We all can revile him but at the end of the day, he remains the most popular political leader in the country. At this rate, 2024 will be just a cakewalk for him. Make no mistakes about it.

(ajphilip@gmail.com)