General Election 2024 was marked by several extraordinary twists and turns and ups and downs. But surely the sweetest outcome is cutting to size Prime Minister Modi who had begun to believe that he had been divinely commissioned to rule the republic. For the first time since 2014 he has to depend upon hitherto neglected allied parties to remain in power. A second sweet outcome was the right royal defeat of Union minister of women and child development Smriti Irani, in Amethi where last time round (2019) she ousted Rahul Gandhi from his family’s pocket borough. And a third was the defeat of incumbent BJP MP from the Faizabad constituency in which the Ram Mandir was inaugurated with great fanfare on January 22.

The calculus of the BJP top brass was that building the grand Ram Mandir on the ruins of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya would prove to be a trump card in General Election 2024. However a low-caste Dalit candidate of the Samajwadi Party who is unlikely to be granted entry into the grand new Ram Mandir by its powerful Brahmin priests who famously declined to permit President Murmu to participate in the inauguration ceremony starring PM Modi, trounced the two-term BJP candidate.

Not that this is entirely good news. Nehruvian socialism which ruined the high-potential Indian economy for over half a century after independence, may bloom again. According to Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, wealth and job creators and highest tax papyers (Ambani and Adani) are enemies of the people. Taxes and national savings should be canalized into white elephant public sector enterprises to be squandered by business -illiterate babus. If this resurrected star of the Nehru-Indira dynasty throws a spanner in the works, India will be back to square one. Therefore your editor’s schadenfreude about the mighty being cut to size is tempered by déjà vu fear.

Also read: General election 2024: Why BJP lost ground