12 years of Modi Govt: Meaningful philosophy or manufactured phenomenon; Bharat’s tryst with democracy

In 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party won two Lok Sabha seats. Two. Congress, riding the grief of a nation that had just watched Indira Gandhi assassinated by her own bodyguards, won 404 seats. If you had looked at those numbers that December and tried to guess which formation would be governing India forty years later — and which one would be at 99 seats and calling that a recovery — you’d have been wrong. Almost everyone was. That gap between 1984 and now is where the real argument lives. And it isn’t really about elections.

Here is something political commentary doesn’t say nearly often enough, probably because it complicates the neat ideological arguments everyone prefers: sentiment works. Indian voters vote with their hearts — they always have, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The 1984 sympathy wave wasn’t irrational. It was a nation in genuine grief, expressing that grief the only way a democracy allows. The wave that carried Mamata Banerjee to power in Bengal in 2011 — ending thirty-four years of Left Front rule — was real anger at real injustice. AAP’s 67-of-70 Delhi mandate in 2015 was a moral contract freely given by people who had simply had enough. Syriza in Greece rose from 4.6 per cent of the vote to 36.5 per cent in the 2010 debt crisis because ordinary people were watching their livelihoods get dismantled by austerity policies they never voted for. None of this was manufactured outrage. None of it was wrong.

But here’s the problem — and this is where forty years of Indian electoral history becomes instructive rather than just depressing. Sentiment opens mandates. That’s all it really does. It doesn’t sustain them. Look at what Congress did with its 404-seat mandate and you start to understand the pattern.

Dynastic Party’s Long Descent

Congress won 404 seats in December 1984. By 1989, that had collapsed to 197. Then Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated during the 1991 campaign — another tragedy, another sympathy wave — and the party climbed back to 244. Then the long descent resumed: 114 in 1999, 145 in 2004, a genuine policy-driven recovery to 206 in 2009, then 44 in 2014, 52 in 2019. And 99 in 2024 — which some commentators described as a comeback. That number sits among the weakest Congress performances since Independence. What the full trajectory actually shows isn’t just decline. It shows a party being repeatedly resuscitated by emotional events — assassinations, anti-incumbency anger, coalition arithmetic — because somewhere along the way, ideology had been replaced by dynasty. When the family that substituted for the philosophy also became the liability, there were no more rescues available.

BJP: Two Seats to Majority

To understand why two seats in 1984 became a governing majority forty years later, you have to understand something that gets mischaracterised constantly in Indian political commentary. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is not a political party. It has never contested an election and it doesn’t intend to. What it has been, since 1925, is the civilisational mentor and ideological parent of the broader Sangh Parivar — the entity that holds the philosophical thread across electoral cycles, leadership changes, and long spells in opposition. When Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya articulated Integral Humanism in 1965, he wasn’t writing a campaign document. He was establishing a governing compass drawn from Bharatavarsha’s own civilisational inheritance — not borrowed from Western frameworks of the Left or Right, not grafted from ideologies that arrived with colonialism, but rooted in something older and more durable than any of that. That philosophy became Jana Sangh’s foundation. When Jana Sangh merged into the Janata coalition in 1977 and re-emerged as the BJP in 1980, the philosophy came along — intact, uncompromised. The RSS remained separate, non-electoral, philosophically consistent, while the BJP became the political expression of what the RSS had been building for decades.

Think about what that structure actually means in practice. The philosophy was never stored in any single person’s mind or reputation. It was distributed — practiced in thousands of daily, unremarkable gatherings by people who came not because a personality called them but because they understood why they were there. That’s what civilisational consciousness — Chetana — looks like when it becomes political infrastructure. It is the one resource in public life that compounds without depleting. A formation genuinely rooted in it doesn’t lose its identity when it loses power, because that identity was never borrowed from power to begin with.

The numbers tell the rest plainly enough. Two seats in 1984. Then 85 in 1989, 120 in 1991, 161 in 1996, 182 in 1998. Power lost in 2004, lost again in 2009. Then 282 in 2014 and 303 in 2019. Every defeat was a setback — some of them quite serious at the time. But none became the existential crisis that finishes a party. A formation that knows what it stands for when it’s losing doesn’t collapse. It rebuilds.

Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress ended thirty-four years of Left rule in Bengal in 2011 on the strength of genuine popular anger — anger that was completely warranted, let’s be clear about that. The Left Front had exhausted its mandate badly. But anger, it turns out, is a starting point, not a governing philosophy. The same apparatus of patronage, political violence, and protective silence around criminal conduct that had defined Left governance gradually, then not so gradually, replicated itself under TMC. Her nephew Abhishek Banerjee became the de facto political heir, facing Enforcement Directorate investigations in coal and cattle smuggling cases. The RG Kar rape and murder case in 2024 became something much larger than a criminal case — it became a civilisational reckoning. Three weeks ago, the BJP won 207 of 294 Bengal assembly seats. Fifteen years of Mamata’s rule, finished. The anger that brought her in, carried her out. By the end she had become — and this is just what happened, not rhetorical flourish — exactly what she once stood against.

AAP is the sharpest case study because the arc is so compressed and because the original moral claim was so explicit. It was born from Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption movement in 2012. Sixty-seven of seventy Delhi seats in 2015 — built on a single clear promise about clean governance. By 2025, BJP had swept forty-eight of seventy seats. Kejriwal, Sisodia, and Jain all lost their own constituencies. The anti-corruption party stood formally accused of a liquor policy scam and multiple financial irregularities.

The Tamil Test

Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam won 108 of 234 Assembly seats in its first election — outpolling both the DMK and the AIADMK. That’s a serious mandate from an electorate that had real choices on the ballot.

What the result actually shows is that even a first-time formation can earn genuine electoral trust when the groundwork is serious. Vijay spent two years converting 85,000 fan clubs into structured cadres. He refused alliances that would have made the arithmetic easier and contested all 234 seats independently. The manifesto drew from the Thirukkural’s egalitarianism and placed itself within a recognisable civilisational tradition. That is not the posture of a pure personality exercise. It’s the early architecture of something that wants to outlast its founder.

What Vacuum Looks When It Goes Viral

Seventy-five years of Indian democratic history produce a pattern that is genuinely hard to argue with. Formations built on sentiment alone decompose when the emotion fades. Formations built on caste arithmetic eventually hit the ceiling of their own formula — demography isn’t static and caste coalitions fracture. Formations built around one leader’s moral authority collapse when that authority is gone, whether through corruption, death, or just the passage of time. Formations built on family names enter a managed decline that occasionally looks like recovery but never actually is.

None of this is an argument against sentiment — sentiment is democracy’s heartbeat and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t been paying attention to how elections actually work. People vote with what they feel. That’s the system working as designed. Forty years of data is sitting right there. The BJP went from two seats in 1984 to forming the Government. Congress went from 404 seats to 99 and is calling it a comeback. AAP took a historic mandate and spent it inside a decade. Mamata ended thirty-four years of Left rule and then replicated most of what made that rule unpopular. Honestly, the pattern isn’t that hard to read — it just requires looking at the numbers without having already decided what they should say. And then it requires asking what all of this actually demands of every party without exception, including the ones we’d prefer not to examine too closely. That’s probably the more uncomfortable question.