The April 8, 2014, Delhi edition of Indian Express pretty much said it all. Below the newspaper’s masthead ran a BJP ad strip across eight columns, black on saffron, with Narendra Modi’s mugshot and the catchline: Time for Change, Time for Modi. Below the ad was an eight-column headline: ‘BJP’s Manifesto is for, by and of Modi’.
This juxtaposition, entirely inadvertent, deliciously captures the drift, spirit and thrust of the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha campaign, a most personalised sales pitch, a brilliantly audacious strategy to presidentialise a parliamentary national election. Perhaps only once before, in 1971, was the country subjected to such a spectacle of one political leader and her personality overshadowing conventional calculations and considerations, reducing the whole exercise to a referendum on Indira Gandhi and her presumed (un)suitability to continue as the prime minister of India. The consequences of that vote turned out to be injurious to the health of democratic...
