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As for Congress, its bank accounts were frozen at the start of the campaign, and party leader Rahul Gandhi’s helicopter was raided last month in an abortive search for illicit booty. These are not the actions of a confident party with abundant popular support, but rather of a party that feels power slipping from its grasp.
The BJP sailed through the last general election in 2019, winning every parliamentary seat in six states, all but one seat in three states, and all but two seats in two states. In all these states, the BJP has only one way to go: down. Even if it loses just a handful of seats in each, it will cumulatively lose its majority, which stands at just 32 seats.
And there is a good chance that will happen. After all, in 2019, the BJP got a major boost from a terrorist attack on a military convoy in Kashmir, which was carried out just a couple of months before the vote by the Pakistan-based group Jaish-e-Mohammed. With no such event galvanising Indian voters today, the BJP cannot hope to replicate its performance from the last election.
The public has had enough of the BJP’s broken promises, and the opposition is seized by a new confidence. Change is in the air.
[Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and former Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and Minister of State for Human Resource Development, is an MP for the Indian National Congress. He is the author, most recently, of Ambedkar: A Life (Aleph Book Company, 2022). This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.]
(Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024, in collaboration with The Quint. Read the original piece here.)
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