
By NS Venkataraman*
During several months before the recent parliamentary elections, election campaign and in the subsequent weeks after the declaration of the results, opposition parties in India, who named themselves as INDIA alliance, have carried out well planned, relentless attacks to allegedly defame Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The opposition parties thought the only way they could defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was to weaken Modi by constantly criticising him in person. Several terms used freely against Modi included ”thief”, “merchant of death”, “dictator”, “arrogant” and so on. Modi, by and large, appeared to have ignored such kind of campaign to the extent possible, though at times, he would get annoyed.
With the number of parliamentary seats won by BJP during the recent elections is less than the seats won during the earlier elections, the opposition parties, particularly the Congress, seem convinced that their campaign against Modi has paid dividends. They have decided the campaign to further weaken Modi’s image and popularity must continue.
Several political researchers have been examining various factors to conclude as to what caused the poor performance of the BJP in the recent elections. They have concluded the opposition campaign against Modi in public meetings and in social media such as X platform, Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook and YouTube considerably helped them make a big sections of voters to turn against Modi.
Further, several political researchers seem to be of the view that accusations made against Modi such as the plan to destroy the Constitution, withdraw job reservation in government and reservation in educational institutions for those people described as “scheduled caste, scheduled tribe”, and so on, also undermined BJP performance.
The opposition parties are likely to use every opportunity to criticize Modi in person in the coming days and disrupt the parliamentary proceedings under one pretext or the other.
In India, media are largely owned by business houses with profit motive or political parties with vested interests. Media, whether print media or visual, have already begun giving publicity to what many think are mindless strong words used by the opposition against Modi, as they seem to be of the view that this would increase their readership/ viewership and help them to achieve their objective.