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General Election 24

Politics

18 June 2024

5 min read

The tale of two Hindu Prime Ministers

June 4th told a brief but bold story of Modi’s India. July 4th will reveal the mind of the UK.

Rahil Patel

Rahil is a former Hindu monk, and author of Found By Love. He is a Tutor and Speaker at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

official surround an open case containing an electronic voting terminal and cables.

Indian election officials unpack a voting machine.

@BruceDGilley on X.

After 44 days of voting across India, 640 million people entered 5.5 million election booths to choose who would be their next Prime Minister.

Finally, on June 4th the result was announced, and India had chosen the devout Hindu incumbent PM Narendra Modi.

But wait for the twist! Mr Modi announced way ahead of the elections that his ruling BJP party would win a significant majority of 400 seats out of the 543 in the Lower House. Many of the pollsters felt this was possible, among them Axis My India, the country’s most prominent polling company. Data-driven pollsters and an action-filled mass-media told the world that Mr Modi would have his thumping majority for a third consecutive term. Bafflingly not…

When the results were counted on June 4th it turned out that Mr Modi’s BJP managed a disappointing 292 seats, dropping it short of the majority needed to continue the status quo of Indian governance.

Pradeep Gupta, Founder and CEO of Axis My India, wept in front of media cameras, revealing to the hundreds of millions of voters that even after accurately predicting so many national and state elections, he can also get things terribly wrong.

The world media was largely shocked but couldn’t hide its glee. The Economist told readers on its front cover that Modi’s ethno-nationalist shortfall was a “triumph for democracy.” The Financial Times told its readers that Modi was “weakened”, and other headlines across the globe revealed that even the “most popular world leader” can be humbled.

Even though it was startling to most of those who kept an eye on this mammoth undertaking of democracy I was strikingly surprised to notice that no one claimed that the election was “rigged” or that there was “Russian interference” (or Chinese in the case of India)! It was simply accepted…alliances were struck and, within a day, 1.4 billion people in India moved ahead with Mr. Modi still as its PM, now heading the National Democratic Alliance parliamentary grouping. The smoothness of the political system after such a seismic surprise is quite astonishing to a “westerner” like me. In our “sophisticated” part of the world we seem to be confused as to who has won an election or even a referendum for that matter.

“Democracy” to many millions in India simply means, “elections” and in some towns and cities people queued for six hours to vote.

Mr Modi lost in the city of Ayodhya! This is where he consecrated the controversial Hindu temple on top of the ruins of a sixteenth century mosque that Hindu nationalists demolished in 1990. A disapproval by the people of the Hindu hub of Ayodhya is like saying that the Taliban have now decided to wave the rainbow flag… or that the state of Texas is now officially going full on vegan.

It’s interesting that no politician or media outlet echoed the chants and mantras of western elections or referendums in recent years and roared, “the people don’t know what they’ve voted for…so let’s do the vote again!” Quite strange for a nation whose GDP per capita is only $2,300…

350 million people in India live below the poverty line and I would go as far as to argue that 450 million of its inhabitants do not even know what the United Nations is let alone what it stands for. “Democracy” to many millions in India simply means, “elections” and in some towns and cities people queued for six hours to vote. Human Rights, Freedom of Expression or Religion are alien ideas when all you need is a meal.

It is humbling not just for Narendra Modi as the mass media have said in the west but even for keen observers here such as myself. That’s the first lesson.

The second lesson from this stunning outcome is to never ignore the people you think you can easily ignore…

It was the poor (even Hindus) whose homes were blatantly demolished to build the Hindu Temple in Ayodhya that went against Mr Modi. It was the farmers who protested for months for their financial security that decided that their leader is not really a man of the commoner but of the corporates. At least that’s the image Mr Modi gave them. About 55 per cent of India’s population receives an income related to the agriculture industry.

Finally, the Dalit (lowest caste) community didn’t vote the way the BJP expected. Even though their PM is from the lower Ghanchi caste they didn’t see in him any action suggesting that he is one of them.

At the beginning of his decade of rule Mr Modi cunningly utilised the fact that he is from a low caste background, a simple tea-selling family and not educated at Oxford or Stanford. And it worked.

But now the very people he cast a net over are beginning to peer through his fickle facade. “The axe convinced the trees in the forest that because its handle was made of wood it was one of them” is a Turkish proverb that comes to mind. Eventually, the trees catch on. When you fool people time and again, eventually they get the antibodies.

UK Prime Minister Sunak is also a devout Hindu who often uses the Hindu term dharma when he talks about ‘duty to his nation.’ And yet he is quite the opposite on many other accounts. Sunak is from a very educated and wealthy background. He went to Winchester School and then on to Oxford and ran a hedge fund before entering politics. He is liked by many world leaders and admired by HM Treasury, the government department he used to run. A ‘technocrat’ in every sense of the word and yet he is facing the same doubts and demands from the electorate – about integrity. I do not wish to isolate PM Sunak on the integrity chart but leaders and those with tall responsibilities attract a higher demand. Wisdom in the Christian Bible says, “to whom much is given, much will be required.”

June 4th told a brief and bold story of PM Narendra Modi’s India. July 4th will reveal the mind of the United Kingdom. How will we treat the people or politicians we disagree with? Dutch theologian and professor Benno Van Den Toren once told me that the minute you laugh at an idea you disagree with, is the exact moment you lose access to understanding what the individual or idea is trying to say. Will we seek to understand? Or simply win? The ruling class in India won for a decade whilst ignoring their opponents and as a result eventually lost their majority. As important as the result on July 4th in the UK is what happens after, how we steer our hearts and treat those who didn't vote as we did.

That is the humbling lesson to learn from the 640 million voters of India.

Article

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Sport

20 August 2024

5 min read

What’s Simone Biles doing today?

How to live with winning and losing.

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

Simone's gold medal moment.

@simonebiles

I wonder about what Simone Biles is doing today. She is one of the many athletes whose Paris 2024 was about more than gold; it was about redemption. Now the Games are over, what happens to their restoration story?

The narrative about redemption seemed to dominate the headlines and linger in post-event interviews. Some Olympians came to the Games seeking it. Gymnast Rhys McClenaghan was tipped for gold in Tokyo 2020 but stumbled on the pommel horse, finishing in seventh place. In France, he climbed to the top of the podium.

Others completed a fall and rise within the two weeks themselves. Sprinter Jeremiah Azu had a faltering beginning to the Games, disqualified for a false start in the individual 100m heat. Just six days later he was clutching a bronze medal for the relay.

Then there are those like taekwondo athlete, Jade Jones, who also laboured for years and gave their all – but didn’t get the payoff that they sought. What does the story mean when it is unfulfilled? And when the Games are over, how do people live with winning and losing?

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up.

After years of professional procrastination, a few months ago I finally took the plunge and joined LinkedIn. An impressive feat, I know. It was driven by practicality; I was finishing a job as a climate policy advocate and making the leap into consultancy. But I’ve been fascinated to discover how people in my community, and millions of others, are sharing tender and vulnerable ideas and thoughts in this social workspace. They are coming with questions – what does success look like? How are you navigating your purpose in the day to day? What world do you want your children to inherit? – and gentle ideas about their answers.

People are asking about and reflecting on how to navigate winning, and losing, and living in the murky space in between.

This feels striking because one of the other prevalent stories many of us believe, maybe unconsciously, is that life will generally be good and any setbacks are the exception. Growing up in the Nineties the message seemed to be: the world is your oyster if you work for it. Put in the effort, and the losses will be few and the trajectory will be up.

But the last few years in particular – economic volatility, growing exposure of deep inequalities, the worsening climate crisis – hammer home that this is not reliably the case. No matter how much effort you put in, we rarely live through one type of season at a time. Joy and suffering co-exist. And amongst the highs and the lows, there is a whole lot of everyday living. Show up at the desk, the school gate, the supermarket.

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up.

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story.

But part of the problem with many of the redemption tales we share is that they rely on the person themselves to deliver their own restoration. They’ve had (and are perhaps blamed for) a fall from grace, and now it’s up to them to find it within themselves – their physical, mental and emotional capacity – to achieve restoration. That’s a heavy weight to put on anyone’s shoulders (however broad they may be).

And any redemption gained is fleeting. Medal winners talk about ‘gold medal syndrome’: the post-competition feeling of depression, loneliness and emptiness. For those athletes who’ve now headed home after fulfilling a salvation arc, is the emotional dip going to be even steeper, harder?

Most of us won’t be Olympians, despite how expertly we discuss the diving scores every four years, but that sense of deflation after achieving a long-sought goal can be resonant. We’ve strived and risked ourselves for something, only to find the aftertaste is a bit flat. That new job is good but flawed. Winning that award doesn’t stop a rejection landing in the inbox the next day. The house renovations are already showing cracks. Winning and losing are both transient. A redemption made ourselves rarely satisfies or lasts.

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story. One that goes further than a single person or moment – a birth, a podium, a bonus. Such a story can speak beyond our own lives to the core challenges we face in the world: fairness into a broken economic system; peace instead of violence in our communities; flourishing, not escalating environmental crises.

During my years of climate advocacy, I have sometimes envied colleagues working on more tightly defined topics with the possibility (only fulfilled through huge amounts of wisdom and graft, of course) of winning. Change a law, solve a problem. As the climate gets warmer and more unpredictable, it’s easy to have a sense that, at best, you are just making things a little less bad. The wins are in the context of a lot of disappointments, and a whole lot more grey space in between.

But by being able to root my day to day in a bigger story, I can move forward with hope. Understanding our lives as part of an even greater narrative – the story of this world that God loves and sustains and restores – saves us from the pressure and heartache of trying to redeem our own lives. Instead, we can live them – the wins, the losses, and all the mundane moments in between – in light of that bigger story.

Looking at the world through the lens of God’s redemption story helps us to stay clear-sighted: celebrating the successes and not make them our whole world; naming the problems and still acting with hope and grit.

A redemption arc is a beautiful one. I want to hold onto that longing, but find it in a story that’s deeper, longer and richer than I can see. A story that lasts.