Narendra Modi has pulled off such an astonishing victory, he couldn’t hold back tears when his colleagues elected him leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party parliamentary party on Tuesday. But even as Modi was demonstrating that alpha males have feelings too, his supporters in the press and on the social media have been displaying a rather different emotion. They are bristling with outrage.
Here’s a sampling of what some of the sore winners have been saying.
In Mint, Siddharth Singh excoriated “Delhi’s opiated intellectuals” for failing to detect a Modi wave and for repeatedly suggesting that the BJP would “fall well short of a majority and then be forced to give up Modi in favour of a ‘secular’ candidate in case it wanted to stitch together a government”.
Prasanna Viswanathan, who runs a website called Centre Right India, had this hypothesis: “I am still serious about my prediction that section of sec-soc [secular-socialist] mob will seek UN intervention to overturn the democratic verdict in India.”
On the NitiCentral website, Amrit Hallan notes that “the country is going to have an absolute-majority Government” despite “the propaganda, misinformation campaigns, chest beating on national and international forums, twisting facts, fabrications and copious shedding of crocodile tears” of the “bleeding heart secularists” to whom the piece is addressed.
The indefatigable Subramanian Swamy warned, “Soon I have to organise my dossiers for prosecution”. Among his targets, he said, were “media anchors especially English” and “sundry”.
Of course, no one should really be surprised that Modi’s supporters continue to be burdened with a sense of grievance in their brightest hour. After all, the BJP’s rise to power over the last two decades has been predicated on its ability to persuade the majority of India’s citizens that they have been discriminated against.
But this pretence at victimhood has now run thin. The BJP is in the driver’s seat. It has finally acquired an overwhelming mandate to make the changes it wants.
It’s time for his supporters to acknowledge that their candidate has been given his five years in the spotlight – and to lighten up a little.
-
1
Mumbai principal sacked after being targeted by Hindutva website; says she is mulling legal action
-
2
‘What does it take / to let go?’: There’s a new anthology of English haikus written by Indian poets
-
3
‘We are living in perpetual fear’: Prajwal Revanna video leaks spark panic among women in Hassan
-
4
Congress moves Madras HC seeking Election Commission action against Modi for propagating hate speech
-
5
Start the week with a film: Why ‘Manjummel Boys’ was a blockbuster
-
6
PM Modi’s claim of dramatically enhancing India’s global standing a ‘mirage’, says report
-
7
Congress to decide Indian cricket team based on religion, claims PM Modi
-
8
What did Vinayak Damodar Savarkar think about Dalits praying in temples and eating with Brahmins?
-
9
Memoir: A journalist remembers the 1960s and how the Naxal movement was portrayed in books and films
-
10
Portraits of India’s people by a Flemmish artist who lived on the margins of 18th-century Calcutta