Electoral scene

"सबसे कायर CEC राजीव कुमार इतिहास माफ़ नहीं करेगा...." Rajiv Kumar Trolled for Silent on Hindu-Muslim https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofQcQZE7ctE  May 5, 2024 

The Amethi conundrum https://prempanicker.substack.com/p/the-amethi-conundrum PREM PANICKER MAY 04, 2024 Now,RG gets to focus on the .. campaign across the country for not just the Congress but for the alliance as a whole. (Shortly after filing his nomination, he was back on the campaign trail, addressing what by all accounts was a massive rally in Pune).

It is not that he can ignore Rae Bareli — his BJP opponent there is no pushover. Dinesh Pratap Singh, who lost to Sonia Gandhi in 2019, is well entrenched at the grassroots level and a three-time MLC. It is likely to be no cakewalk for Gandhi, but neither is it likely to be the sort of distracting high-octane drama that a Gandhi-Irani battle would have turned into — a battle that would have dominated the narrative and drowned out the Opposition’s message.

 Reflecting on the last few weeks Chandan Gowda  05 May 2024 https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/reflecting-on-the-last-few-weeks-3008224 

Reminiscent of the powerful anti-Vietnam War student protests of the 1960s, these episodes of students striving to make their universities conform to high ethical standards have tacitly called out the moral unacceptability of the US government’s support for the Israeli violence, a stance that violates the liberal political values it claims to uphold in the country. ..

There is, of course, no taking the mind off the ongoing Lok Sabha election, which is witnessing the basest forms of electioneering -- the majoritarian appeals, the Muslim-phobia, the smear campaigns, all of which are taking India’s political culture to a new low. Might the lack of a pro-democracy student movement in India, which was last seen in the country decades ago, have brought about this unhappy state of affairs?

https://thewire.in/politics/is-the-modi-again-in-2024-script-going-awry i

In the watershed polls in 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party became the first party after a gap of 30 years to secure an absolute majority. That election was driven by then prime minister-aspirant Narendra Modi’s call for badlav (change) and promises of achhe din (good days) and vikas (development) in the backdrop of a plethora of corruption charges against the United Progressive Alliance government headed by Dr Manmohan Singh.

In the 2019 elections which handed the BJP an astonishing number of 303 seats, the narrative was altered mid-course by the twin incidents of the Pulwama terror strike and the retaliatory strike by Indian forces at facilities in Balakot, deep inside Pakistani territory.

It fanned the sentiment of hyper-nationalism, and issues which had been previously irking voters were submerged.

In the absence of the Election Commission of India providing final figures and sticking to only provisional data of voter turnout for the two phases, deductions have to be based on the surfeit of figures doing the rounds.

But variations in data sets apart, all of them establish that the turnout is significantly lower than in 2019. It is a truism to say that in countries like India, where voting is not compulsory, voter turnout is the most important indicator for health of democracy. 

Reduced turnout, near absence of the famed cadre of the Sangh parivar, lacklustre campaign of Modi, and the need to resort to his second nature – divisive and communally polarising spiel – all suggest the Modi script of 2024 has gone awry and over the next five phases, one can expect him to make an all-out effort to put it back on track.

by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay

30/04/2024