Wow! And How! Modi Wins Vote For A Strong India

The voters have shown patience in a leader who they believe can deliver. Modi’s challenge now will be to build an aspirational India and play the accommodative ruler

- R. Prasannan

The toast is no longer with tea. Five years ago, on a May morning when Lok Sabha election results were coming out, thousands had thronged the BJP’s decrepit offices on Ashoka Road in New Delhi. There they celebrated with pots, kettles and cups of syrupy tea, their champagne of victory over an old order that had been snootily keeping chaiwalas and the likes of them out of the elite world of Lutyens’ children.

Much water has flowed down the Yamuna and the Varanasi Ghats of the Ganga since then. The BJP head office is now located in a fivestorey, centrally-cooled chrome-glass-and-concrete structure on Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg. It has swanky cafeterias from where, on Victory Day this year, hundreds of party workers were seen picking up packaged drinks and foil-wrapped short eats. Hawk-eyed guards kept them off the grass in the central courtyard, and janitors kept the place neat and tidy even on a day of boisterous victory.

In five years, the BJP has changed, and so have India and India’s politics. The old and soiled politics of poverty and patronage, practised through promises of bijli, sadak, paani and primary schools, has given way to a new politics—the politics of aspirations, practised through promises of bullet trains, escalators, power bikes, big cars, cheap flights, IITs, smart cities and a matching national machismo.