‘A sweet breeze amid a heatwave’: liberals feel hope again following Narendra Modi’s loss of his majority | India
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Iin the green surroundings of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a group of students sat under a banyan tree engaged in passionate evening conversation. As usual, it’s about politics – but this time the mood was different.
“For the first time in a decade, we have hope,” said Antariksh Sharma, who is pursuing a doctorate in arts. “It’s like a sweet cool breeze in the middle of a heat wave.”
Last week’s election results in India sent shock waves across the country after Narendra Modi, the strongman prime minister whose authoritarian, Hindu nationalist agenda began to look like India’s inevitable trajectory, lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 10 years.
His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will still return to power with Modi sworn in for a historic third term on Sunday night, but for the first time it will rely on coalition partners and will no longer enjoy the supermajority that drove its agenda from 2014
Among analysts, the spell of invincibility surrounding Modi was widely described as broken, and many believe the BJP will no longer be able to implement some of its more hard-line policies.
For Indian liberals, who have long warned of an erosion of the nation’s democracy and its secular foundations since Modi came to power, it marked a moment of great reprieve.
Few believed that India’s democracy was still resilient enough to stand up to Modi, who has been accused of centralizing power and bringing the state’s institutions and agencies entirely under his control, as well as using religious majoritarian rule to win votes in the Hindu majority country.
At JNU, in the heart of the capital, this choice was deeply personal for many students who saw the future of their university at stake.
Once seen as a bastion of radical leftist movements and protests in India, JNU has, since Modi came to power, become the focal point of sustained attacks from the right, who see it as a seething pit of “anti-India” activity.
The BJP has repeatedly accused the state university of being a stronghold of “urban naxals,” a pejorative term for left-wing activists that was repeatedly used by Modi during the campaign.
The BJP government, notoriously intolerant of dissent, has been accused of appointing stooges to top posts and influencing the curriculum to align with its political agenda, while professors who have criticized the government are said to have blocked their promotions.
Several JNU students who participated in the anti-government protests in 2020 were arbitrarily detained under draconian terrorism laws, and one former researcher, Umar Khalid, remains behind bars, considered by rights groups to be a political prisoner.
PhD student Sharma was among hundreds from JNU who took buses across the country to campaign for the opposition, spending 10 days in the eastern states of Bihar and Jharkhand in a bid to defend the country’s constitutional values.
Other students were out across Delhi distributing opposition leaflets, putting up posters and even performing street plays on the issues at hand.
“People in our campus were targeted by the BJP,” Sharma said. “But in recent days we feel that we can now speak more freely and discuss things. There is less fear of being attacked or labeled as anti-national, so we have already felt the impact.”
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Just before the elections, Bollywood – India’s huge Hindi film industry, which is growing become afraid of the government – released JNU: Jahangir National Universitya movie about a campus where “leftists wage love jihad,” a debunked the conspiracy theory against Muslims, and “urban naxals are trying to divide the country”. Few doubted who the film was aimed at.
Many JNU students have argued that over the past few years, right-wing student groups have increasingly been allowed to commit violence on campus with impunity, particularly against minorities and Dalits, India’s most marginalized caste.
Meanwhile, restrictions were placed on student protests on campus and when a group tried to broadcast A BBC documentary seen as critical of Modithe administration turned off the electricity.
“This campus has been under attack since the BJP government came to power,” said Kunal Kumar, 26, a PhD student from Bihar. “We were afraid to even identify ourselves outside as JNU students because of the kind of propaganda being spread against the university. We were labeled as anti-national.”
However, on Tuesday when the results came in, the mood was jubilant among many, Kumar said, and a celebratory march was held across campus on Thursday.
“There has been a change in the mood on campus since the results came out,” he said. “We’re rebuilding our campus.”
Tanu Yadav, a Hindi literature major who was heading out for a night of study at the library, said women in particular feel less safe on campus because of the presence of aggressive, all-male right-wing groups.
“This election time was not normal in JNU,” she said. “We discussed, day and night, the implications of these results. Everyone watched intently. We felt that this election would decide whether India would turn into a dictatorship.
Like many, Yadav said the mood on campus has felt lighter in the past two days and the future of academic freedom at JNU looks brighter.
“Indian politics has turned out to be much bigger than a man’s ego,” she said. “There is hope that things will improve soon.”
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