The monumental elections for the renewal of the Lok Sabha, the House of Representatives of the Indian Parliament. And all forecasts already take for granted the confirmation of the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the third consecutive mandate, at the helm of a nation which with 1,440 million inhabitants has now surpassed the population of China: one seventh of the world population.
If this will be the case and if he also completes the next five-year term, Modi will therefore be the third longest-lasting prime minister in the history of India: after Jawaharlal Nehru, who governed for almost 17 consecutive years and after Indira Gandhi, his daughter, who ruled for almost 16 years.
But all the numbers are impressive, for this electoral round which opens in the Indian subcontinent today:
– almost one billion, 969 million to be exact, those entitled to vote, including 17 million young people who will vote for the first time;
– as many as 2,660 registered acronyms, also counting the micro-parties which however enjoy a certain popularity at a local level, each with its own easily distinguishable logo for that share of the population (almost a quarter of the total!) which remains illiterate;
– 15 million people supervising over one million ballot boxes; particularly this year theElection Commission he emphasized the heroic dedication of those workers, who will have the task of reaching the most remote places of the subcontinent so that everyone can vote, in the Himalayan arc as well as in the forests of central India;
– 5.5 million the so-called EVM, Electronic Voting Machinewhich should guarantee the reliability of the vote (but for days there have been quite a few doubts in the media);
– over 14 billion is the total expense of this real electoral colossal, a figure more than double compared to the last elections in 2019 which, including salaries, travel, perks and various gifts, even exceeds that of the presidential elections in the United States.
It will be an “event festively democratic for everyone” has festively assured by the incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has never been so popular as in recent weeks, and who all the forecasts already point to as the winner.
And when the polls close on June 1st, it will only take a couple of days for confirmation: the definitive count will be announced on June 4th and the only uncertainty concerns only the dimensions, i.e. the numbers that the NDA (there National Democratic Alliancethe coalition within which the BJP of Narendra Modi) will be able to score. If the objective of 400 seats out of 562 is reached (this is the target repeatedly advertised in an electoral campaign that has never been so thunderous), many will fear for the very future of a democracy that has already been under siege for some time: because with such a plebiscite Modi will have the numbers to overturn what he wants, starting with that only remaining bulwark, the Constitution.
The comparison is therefore between a Narendra Modi who is more popular than ever, pampered by the tycoon of all the driving sectors of the Indian economy, honored everywhere on an international level, loved even by the people – and a Rahul Gandhi who over the last two years has given his all, from that epic march (the Maha Bodo Yatra) which last year and again in recent months led him to cross all the most remote corners of India, to the continuous denunciation of a style of government which, by blowing on theHindutva (the affirmation of Hindu supremacism over all other minorities, primarily the Muslim one), actually takes the form of autocracy.
“Is there a danger of India becoming a dictatorship?” asks Dhruv Rathee, a young and highly clicked You Tuber, with over 21 million followers.
Undoubtedly yes, there is this danger and not just today. It would be enough to consider the many who have languished behind bars for years for the most diverse reasons of dissent. Not to mention the recent and sensational arrests of the most prominent political opponents: from Arvind Kejriwal, governor of New Delhi since 2015 and leader of Aam Aadmi Party of progressive orientation, to Hemant Soren, governor of Jharkhand, a state in central India with a tribal predominance and (coincidentally) very rich in mineral resources that are just waiting to be ‘assigned’ to the highest bidder.
And so it won’t just be a party. They will be crucial elections for the future of India and for what India now represents on a global level: with an economy that this year too has recorded growth rates of over 7%, however accentuating even more the gap between rich increasingly richer and poorer, increasingly poorer, especially in the countryside, for that immense sector of annadata (food producers) to whom Modi had promised a doubling of the standard of living during the last elections and instead found themselves forced to defend themselves against the multinational agribusiness with the oceanic protests that we have repeatedly reported on this site.
And in fact, to disturb the triumphalist pro-Modi campaign of recent days, there has been no shortage of episodes of rallies that were loudly ‘disturbed’ by protests from farmers’ unions, especially in Punjab.
And then there is youth unemployment, which has never been so serious and a cause of discontent. And above all strident, in the context of such evidently selective economic growth, the plague of poverty remains, certified by the hundreds of millions of bags of grain regularly distributed throughout India with Modi’s good-natured face printed on it.
In short, it is an open game on several fronts, which we will not fail to follow in the coming weeks.
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Tags: victory Narendra Modi concerns
