The Goenkas, like other Marwari Business families from Calcutta, are delighted that the BJP has won by a landslide. West Bengal will now grow rapidly.
However, in the Goencka controlled Indian Express
P B Mehta writes: BJP’s triumph is a testament to its political energy,
TMC had political energy.
but it carries a shadow for Indian democracy
Because the party PBM doesn't like won.
Congress might exult in the fact that all its INDIA bloc rivals
allies. BJP is the rival. There was some talk of Mamta being a rival to Rahul. But she isn't a Hindi speaker. Kejriwal could have been a contender, but he has imploded. Akhilesh may have a big role in the the next general election. He has no objection to promoting Rahul at the National level. Vijay too may be happy with this. But, the fact is, Rahul is already LoP. There was no other national leader before Mamta lost her seat and that remains the case.
Far from 'exulting', the loss of Bengal is a calamity. It shows that Rahul has been a fucking disaster. 15 years ago, Congress won 42 seats. The BJP got nothing. Now the BJP has a 2/3 majority. Congress has 2 seats.
have fallen away. But Congress is nowhere near even putting up a minimal resistance and is no match for the BJP’s ruthlessness
Congress won in Kerala against the CPM. Priyanka is an MP from there.
Indian politics is a story of vanishing exceptionalisms.
i.e. the country is becoming more homogeneous politically speaking.
The two most entrenched and enduring regional formations have collapsed.
Nonsense!
Kolkata has fallen;
Adhikari is from a Congress family. He switched to TMC under Mamta after she broke with Congress over their alliance with the Left Front. Then he split from her & he and his family are now with the BJP which had zero seats 15 years ago (when Mamta took over with help from Congress) and which now has a two thirds majority. Mamta has fallen. Kolkata has not. A younger, higher class, dynast has taken over from a crazy biddy & her bunch of goons.
Chennai has cracked.
Nope. The 73 year old son of a former Chief Minister, who rose as a writer for the movies, will be replaced by a 51 year old film star similar to MGR, NTR & Jayalalitha. In other words, 'reel society' continues to rule over 'real society'.
Kerala, true to form, has seen anti-incumbency;
Congress & CPM have had a pendulum politics for decades. Lat time around, CPM retained power because of its very good handling of COVID.
the BJP’s hold over Assam endures.
Rahul mistreated the Congress CM there. He went over to the BJP & has gone from strength to strength.
My point is that nothing has changed. True, Rahul fucked up & Mamta fucked up & even Stalin fucked up by banging on about shitty Dravidian shite nobody gives a fuck about. You don't get votes by pretending the BJP would stop Bengalis eating fish or force Tamils to speak Hindi. You need to show you can curb extortion & boost development.
These results consolidate the unprecedented national electoral prowess of the BJP
Sarma did well in Assam. Adhikari did well in Bengal. Both started off in Congress. No doubt, the BJP high command helped them but, the fact is, it couldn't have grown with out such senior people getting disgusted with the leaders like Rahul & Mamta & thus coming under the BJP umbrella.
and the ideological supremacy of Hindutva.
i.e. the need for Hindu consolidation in areas where the Muslim share of the population has been rising along with a more extreme type of Islamist politics.
It would be churlish to deny the unprecedented power of the Modi-Shah duo in the annals of electoral politics.
It would be foolish to expatiate too much upon it because of the 2024 General Election result. Mamta failed to heed the warning from across the border. Stalin was complacent. He thought his son, who is doing quite well in the film business, would be enough to gain him credibility with the young. But his goons were clearly not as well organized and decent as Vijay's fan-clubs. Stalin himself has lost his seat to his former election agent who had been side-lined & thus who jumped ship, first to the Anna-DMK, and then to Vijay's party.
In Bengal, a state that
was partitioned on Religious lines. It is where the word 'Hindutva' was coined. The first leader of the BJP was from Bengal.
prided itself on being as distinctive, the BJP has brought about a near-impossible electoral realignment. Even by the standards of its storied history, the BJP’s victory in Bengal is a remarkable tribute to its unmatched combination of ambition, perseverance, and political ruthlessness.
No. Atal had allied with Mamta. Suvendu Adhikari was her loyal lieutenant. But he was side-lined in favour of her nephew & thus jumped ship. However, demographic change was increasingly important in Assam & Bengal which is why both Himanta Sarma & Adhikari are now more vocal on the Islamic threat. Recent events across the border added to Hindu anxiety & probably played a part in mobilizing the Matua & other Hindu 'refugee' vote. If the local administration is in the hands of Muslims- because they have become the majority- their own citizenship & entitlements may be denied. They would have to move once again or else suffer the very persecution their families had fled from.
It is, in a literal sense, a triumph of the will.
Mamta & Stalin have plenty of will.
It has not been stopped by any conventional electoral arithmetic,
Yes it has
institutional propriety,
beating people?
identities like language, region or caste, or the embeddedness of a towering figure like Mamata Banerjee.
She has become a hysterical shithead. Still, unlike Sheikh Hasina, she hasn't had to flee the country.
Defeat in retrospect always seems overdetermined. The fatigue, boredom, the corruption and nepotism, creeping thuggishness, the limits of welfare politics, and regional symbolism created background conditions for a BJP victory.
In Bengal- sure. But that was because Adhikari & Co. split off from a demented biddy & her gang of thieves.
What Vijay's victory- like the victory of Dissanayake in Sri Lanka or Balendra Shah in Nepal-- shows is that people want good governance, job creation, better education & a crackdown on criminals & drug-dealers.
But they would not have translated into victory if three things were not in place. After all, there is no evidence that the BJP will address better many of the discontents that fuelled it to power.
In Assam & Bengal, yes there is. They benefit by deporting illegal immigrants or, at the very least, getting them off the electoral roll. That by itself is a reason for Hindus to vote for them.
The sheer determination of the BJP, the energy of the Modi-Shah duo to persist in hostile terrain, is remarkable.
How is the terrain hostile if senior people like Sarma & Adhikari come to you?
Then there is the belief that politically salient identities are not given. A new Hindu consciousness can be reconfigured through sheer mobilisation to the point where Hindu-Muslim polarisation nearly displaces all other axes.
Yet that is exactly what happened in 1946. PBM may have heard of a little thing called Partition. True, if the population share of Muslims in Assam or West Bengal had remained stable, then there would be no Hindu-Muslim polarisation there. But Rahul's being shit or Mamta's being shit, would still matter.
Longstanding grievances are now processed through that template.
No. The relevant template is whether the CM is shit. If the answer is 'fuck yeah!' then dump her sorry ass. If the alternative to the CM is Jungle fucking Raj, vote for the dude by all means.
And finally, something that will be studied for a while, the use of institutional tactics from the use of the Election Commission, the taming of the Supreme Court, to create a narrative of the cleaning of the electoral process and a violence-free election.
Did you know Biden lost the election to Trump? Also, the Post Office is actually a paedophile ring.
The actual effects of the SIR process will be studied over time.
It needs to be improved. Also, more Hindus must get expedited citizenship & voting rights in accordance with the law.
But what was remarkable about it was that the inconvenience and pain it imposed seemed to become a source of the BJP’s strength rather than a cause for punishment.
In the mind of this cretin. It has been suggested that more migrants returned to vote because they were afraid of being struck off the electoral roll. This is supposed to have helped the BJP.
Whether or not it decisively tilted the electoral outcome, it became handy for mobilisation and a demonstration of its institutional capture.
Also it proves that Modi & Shah are using mind-waves to make me stupid. How come people thought me smart 20 years ago?
The Assam-Bengal template will go national.
If there is a threat of districts becoming Muslim majority-sure. But the same could be said of the Reform party's prospects in the coming UK elections.
It seems to fuel support for the BJP rather than resistance.
PBM is famous for resisting Fascism by soiling himself incessantly.
The victory of Vijay-led TVK is no less a vanquishing of another exceptionalism.
No. It is a return to the days of MGR & Jayalalitha. True, Rajnikanth & Kamaal Haasan had dipped their toes into politics. But they were like Sivaji Ganesan- i.e. more interested in acting than in politics- whereas Vijay has the youth (he is 51) and fan-base needed to take on the gerontocratic Dravidian parties.
Anti-incumbency is the norm in Tamil Nadu.
No. MGR remained in office for ten years till his death. Jayalalitha took more time to establish herself but remained in office for ten years from 2006 till her death. My point is that Vijay expects to rule till his Seventies- at which point some younger star may challenge him.
But still, TVK’s victory is unprecedented in the way in which it breaks the duopoly of the DMK and AIADMK.
DMK has Stalin's son who has made some movies. Who does AIADMK have- star wise? Vijay saw his opening and took it. PBM doesn't know shit about Tamil Nadu. He thinks DMK was 'regionalist' but Vijay- for some reason- is not. He doesn't get that a child actor from the time when MGR was CM will take him for his role model. That's why he has only played one 'negative' role (Priyamvudan). But that was back in 1998 & wasn't actually that negative. A Sivaji or a Kamala Haasan or a Rajnikanth will take a negative role if it allows him to display his acting talent. MGR & NTR did not do so.
What is remarkable about it is that it breaks the standard assumption that the only way a party can win a regional setting is by playing the regional pride card more strongly
This is mad! Vijay is as Tamil as Stalin. He wants to win in his region & he is steering clear of the BJP which made the mistake of pinning the blame for a stampede in which people died upon him rather than on the administration.
— there is nothing natural about that regionalism.
Yes there is. Tamil is a different language from Telugu or Malayalam. Also we have problems re. water sharing with our neighbours.
But it is also a warning that even relatively successful states like Tamil Nadu, trailblazers in industrialisation and welfare politics alike, are in the grip of dissatisfaction and restlessness, in this case powered by young people.
Even in America, young people get angry if they can't get good jobs. PBM thinks this worthy of remark.
He has done what stars before him, like Vijayakanth,
the 'black MGR' looked like a frog. Vijay is handsome.
have not been able to do, without much of a party organisation or a social movement.
Vijay has 85,000 fan clubs in Tamil Nadu. These are his fanatical devotees. Now they are getting their reward. A rickshaw-wallah is now MLA for Royapuram.
Is this form of politics a new canary in the mine?
It is a bat in your belfry.
The BJP has demonstrated a triumph of the will.
No. It had better people than Congress or TMC in two states. It didn't gain much in Kerala & TN. Indeed, pissing off Vijay was a blunder.
But its triumphs, while a testament to its furious energy and political imagination, also carry a shadow for Indian democracy. This victory consolidates Amit Shah’s position as a national leader and his lead over rivals by a mile: Total command over the party organisation, and an ability to deliver wins in all kinds of contexts, including a straight two-cornered context.
I suppose PBM is hinting that Dharmendra Pradhan is a Shah loyalist. I think a guy from Orissa has insight into Bihar & Bengal which a Gujarati may not have. Cooperation is important. 'Total command' would be counterproductive. Sunil Bansal seems to have been in charge of 'booth management'. But the true author of Mamta's downfall was Mamta.
It is also a new experiment for India.
It began in 1923.
When one party acquires this degree of organisational dominance and ideological ascendancy, all countervailing forces and voices of dissent will gradually fall away.
Not in India. There is factionalism for ideological, sociological & purely personal reasons.
If Bengal’s history is any guide, the Trinamool will fade away faster than its proportion of vote share suggests,
if Mamta drops dead- maybe. Otherwise it will be like Mayawati's BSP. The fact is, if a guy doesn't get a BJP ticket he shops around to see if some other outfit will give him one.
and the DMK is not a Dravidian force in the way it was.
Stalin lost his seat. Will his siblings rebel? If not, his son becomes the de facto leader of the opposition. Maybe, like Mulayam Singh, the father will be displaced by the son.
The Congress might exult in the fact that all its INDIA bloc rivals have fallen away.
Rahul had attacked Mamta. Her people said this was good for the TMC as it would split the anti-incumbency vote. But Mamta might see things differently. She has been fighting the Commies all her life. She may think Congress & the Left conspired to hand victory to the BJP.
Is Rahul benefitted by the disappearance of Stalin & Mamta? Obviously, taking Kerala from Vijayan is a feather in his cap. But has his stature as a national leader suffered? Much will depend on how DMK & TMC MPs respond. If they follow Rahul, his status is enhanced. But, if Congress supports Vijay in T.N, this becomes awkward. Meanwhile Muslims may be going their own way. Humayun Kabir's 'Babri Majsid' gambit paid off for him personally but may have hurt the TMC- his former party. This may be a straw in the wind. What of the Left? It has lost its last bastion in Kerala. Can Rahul emerge as the head of a Left/Muslim combine?
But Congress is nowhere near even putting up a minimal resistance
They just took Kerala. They were already hors de combat in Bengal.
and is no match for the BJP’s ruthlessness.
Nobody is any match for Rahul's stupidity.
Its lack of leadership, backward-looking ideas of caste and region, and utter listlessness mean that the regional vacuums will be filled by the BJP more than Congress.
Congress was once strong in every region. Then it did stupid shit- e.g. trying to impose Hindi on Tamil Nadu- which caused it to lose out to regional parties.
Hindutva is now the reigning ideology and identity of the new India.
Because we no longer have a Brahmin dynasty.
This is not a moment that can be analysed purely in contingent political terms;
Yet, that is all that can be done- unless you aim to talk nonsense.
it is part of the inner conflict over the idea of India since 1857.
That conflict was resolved in 1947.
Much of the template of that conversation over India’s identity was
based on the fact that Muslims don't like Kaffirs. This is not to say that Hindus weren't clannish. Still, they can co-exist with Christians. It is only when the percentage of Muslims rises above a certain point that kaffirs have to worry about being stabbed in the street.
laid in 19th-century Bengal, beginning with Bankim.
All that ended in 1947.
It is only the myopia of the Left and Centre parties that they assumed that regions are irrevocable natural formations that can be opposed to Hindutva.
Mamta was saying that Bengali Hinduism was different. Modi wanted Bengalis to give up eating fish & meat. Modi made a point of visiting a temple in Calcutta which distributes non-veg prasad.
The idea that “Kali” would be pitted against “Ram” was the kind of cultural nonsense where the Left began to believe its own cultural illiteracy.
It didn't really. But it was easier to talk nonsense than to stop doing stupid, evil, shit.
For now, Hindutva is producing a culturally hierarchical order, where the claims of identity imperil India as a zone of freedom.
Not for Hindus. Jihadi terrorists- sure. Naxals- definitely. But Hindus are safer. But that was why Partition happened.
The check on this ideology is not going to be external.
It is going to be internal. You guessed it. It is PBM's fart.
We are on a wing and a prayer that the consolidation of this form of Hindutva does not result in deeper exclusion and violence, which is typically the denouement of such nationalisms.
i.e. shit which went down soon after Nehru became PM.
For now, India is in the grip of Hindutva supremacy; it has been sold as a utopian dream. There is no rival. What this supremacy does, or what brittleness it masks, only time will tell.
Modi will make PBM eat his own shit. But PBM is too smart for Modi. He is already eating his own shit. Rahul should do likewise.
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