Hyderabad: After a long time, we are witnessing an election which is not feeling like one big election with a wave, but a sum of many disparate local and state-level polls, and though we have just completed three phases, (or around a little over half the total number of parliamentary seats), we can clearly see that the Narendra Modi-led BJP would not get a majority, said Congress leader Dr Shashi Tharoor on Saturday.
The parliamentarian from Thiruvananthapuram who is equally renowned for his diverse identities — author, speaker, intellectual, former diplomat, and India’s favourite human thesaurus, aka Tharoorosaurus — said that the two biggest undeniable trends of the elections that could be bet upon are the downward slide of the BJP across its strong areas in the northern states and the near-complete sweep of the I.N.D.I.A block led by the Congress in the south. Dr Tharoor is confident of retaining his seat yet again, after a face-off with BJP minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
“We are sure of winning all 60 seats as an alliance in Tamil Nadu (39), Kerala (20) and Puducherry (one). The Congress is extremely positive about big numbers in Karnataka and Telangana state,” Dr Tharoor said while speaking exclusively to Deccan Chronicle after a hectic day of road shows and campaigning a day prior.
The Congress and its allies have been able to successfully foil the attempts of the BJP to communalise and polarise the elections, he said, adding that the mainstay of the campaign had been around economic issues like jobs, price rice, and the difficulties of common people on the one hand, and the failure of the Modi government in delivering on most of its grandiose promises.
“The grandiloquence of Mr Modi is no longer fascinating to anyone. The saffron party is clearly having some pockets of strength but is losing in several of those north Indian states where it previously swept all seats, or nearly all the seats. These losses, further accentuated by their inability to make any solid gains elsewhere, or build a coalition, is clearly an indication that Mr Modi will not in most likelihood be the next Prime Minister of India,” he said.
Refusing to be drawn into predicting numbers or discussing possibilities that could emerge after the results, Dr Tharoor said, “It is never wise to predict either a cricket match or an election. All I can say is that once the BJP loses power, by definition, it comes richly loaded with possibilities. And good old politics is, after all, the art of the possible.”
And some would, what seemed not so long ago, as nearly impossible.
