Who had imagined such a mandate? Even the best of the pollsters and psephologists failed to calibrate the intensity of the Modi wave in the country. My social media continues to be filled with posts the self-proclaimed harbingers of free speech today finding it absolutely exacting to accept the reality. Doesn’t your social media page looks the same? It just might be! As much fun it is, my view is limited to metro and tier 1 cities of India that has the highest social media adoption rates in the country.
So, what explains this phenomenon? If so many people are ranting against Modi then why did the country chose to re-elect BJP with an even better mandate in 2014? Firstly, there aren’t a lot of people who disapprove of Prime Minister Modi let alone the number of people who loathe Modi. For the sake of simplicity, I like to call these people the “loud minority“. Who are these people? They’re the people who make noise with a higher degree objective to create a fictitious image that a large population in India disapprove of Modi. They usually start with priming the people; they would frequently use terms such as “saffronisation”, “Hindu terror”, and “saffron terror” in most of their social media posts.
Interestingly, a little deeper look at their social media posts show something really interesting; the very same posts also somewhere use their favourite word from the dictionary (or a close variant of it) – secularism. They shy away from sharing concrete facts because philosophy is what they like to ride on. If they ever share facts, it would either be based on flimsy reasoning or would be a misleading metric that would layer their philosophy. My point is that they are primarily guided by their agenda. They mislead the ordinary citizen by creating a puffed image of existing in large numbers to amplify their appeal; therefore, the “loud minority”. In the build-up to this elections, all the representative forces of the loud minority came together to stop the Modi & Shah juggernaut.
They claim that minorities in India face an imminent threat; so the people should vote for anyone but not Modi. How ridiculous that argument really is! A little fact check and incidents from the past really is what this loud minority needs the most. Shri Prakash Jaiswal, a coal minister in the UPA 2, set off on a joyride to a Dalit home for a sleepover. He was accompanied by music and movie equipment, a stock of mineral water bottle, and brand new mattress and bed sheets to sleep. After watching Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, his entourage left the home at 2 A.M at night. This account was narrated by Patrick French in his book – India: an intimate biography of 1.2 million people.
Let’s turn our attention to the other end, the “silent majority“. Simply, they’re the rest of the people; everyone but not the loud minority. They’re the honest hard working people of the country. Why one should be interested in them? They are toiling around in the overcrowded public transports of the country, they’re walking on the streets when someone spits Pan Masala on their feet (unintentionally, of course), they’re mostly living an ordinary life in which they have a stable employment opportunity, they’re the students studying in the most reputed universities of the country with a very anti-Nehruvian vision for the future of the Indian economy.
Let us be honest, some of them just might have lost their jobs as well. However, there is a unique thread that runs through them – “they’re all believers”. They’re continuously challenging themselves to make a better economic life for themselves and they demand a peaceful and stable environment to support their fledgling aspirations. They are the change agents that mark the inflexion of change of an outlook of the value, believes, and attitudes of the society. They don’t really make up the intelligentsia because they feel that they’re better as more participative than being argumentative. They feel irked to see a social media post by the loud minority of hate-mongering or a content-piece maligning the idea of the state. But they don’t have the time and willingness to respond to any of those essentially because they’re chasing their dreams (our go-getters). They’re gradually accepting that some people are ideologically coated. The emotions of these indoctrinated people override their own bounded rationality.
This subliminally primed “loud minority” have lost their ability to unlearn. They have grounded their feet too deep into theories of yesteryear with no intention to modify their reasoning of what is right and what is not. The “silent majority” loves democracy. They understand that their country needs them more on the day of voting than on the day when someone from the “loud minority” decided to vilify the state or their favourite leaders on social media.
This silent majority always, in every case, decided the fate of a nation.
Today, I can sleep comfortably knowing that our silent majority has ensured that our country is in the most progressive and safe hands. I want to congratulate every member of this silent majority and even the loud minority as “we” came together to elect the same person with an even better mandate.
