Ranjona Banerji: The miserable lot of the right wing

BJPu00e2u0080u0088chief Amit Shah and PM Modi flank UPu00e2u0080u0088CM Yogi Adityanath in Lucknow. File pic

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the Lok Sabha in 2014 with a tremendous majority. After that, it also won Maharashtra, where the BJP trumped the Shiv Sena and became the 'senior partner' for the first time since the two allied. Things may not have gone the BJP way in Bihar and New Delhi, but it is part of the ruling alliance in Andhra Pradesh.

And yet, winning Uttar Pradesh in the recently-concluded Assembly elections has suddenly seemed to trump all previous victories if you consider the excitement in the media circles and from BJP supporters.

Among other things, it once again underlines how, for India's political classes, UP is the main prize without which you cannot claim to rule India. It used to be accepted for years that all prime ministers came from Uttar Pradesh. This attitude completely skews our attitude to India as a nation, as a country, as an entity.

India is not and must not be limited to a few states in north India or in any one geographical area. That is one problem. The other is that all the political craving and wrangling for Uttar Pradesh has done very little for the people of Uttar Pradesh. Incremental changes here and there apart, it still lags behind many other Indian states on vital parameters. What price political avarice versus importance then?

However, underneath all this joy at the BJP winning UP, remains the strange sort of inferiority complex - I do not know what else to call it - which emerges from the right wing. Even their earned or hard-fought triumphalism is tinged with whining - why don't the liberals love us, the secularists are horrible and JNU won't sing hymns, sorry, I mean bhajans, to us?

Mr Modi has been the best Prime Minister of India since 200 BC, but the fact is that Uttar Pradesh trumps all that springs from that same spring of pain.

Speaking of which, the same rightwing misery is evident in the White supremacists who voted for Donald Trump as President of the United States. Trump downwards, they are still whining and moaning about everyone else who doesn't love them.

Pop psychologists might tell us that is the crux of the problem: a desperate desire to be loved by your detractors. But that really does not explain why. The moaning and whining should have ended by now, almost three years after May 2014. The BJP is in charge at the Centre and across India. It is in charge even in states where other parties did better than it did. So why not just bask in the joy of victory? What does it matter if a few students in Delhi colleges don't like you or that Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of India? How do any of those take away from your current happiness?

But sadly, it does. I took a look at a rightwing website which specialises in "exposing" journalists who are not pro-BJP. What a sad mess it is of moaning and feeling sorry for yourself and trying to convert everyone into a right wing fan. I use the word 'convert' deliberately because the rightwing, by nature, across the world is terrified of all religions to which it does not belong. Even religions that depend on conversion are scared of conversion. Islam makes you an apostate, Christianity is frightened of Islam and so on. And here in India, followers of India's majority religion are filled with rage against followers of other religions.

You can see them on TV: all Indians are Hindus, all Muslims should accept they are Hindus, all Muslims and Christians are involved in some devious plot to reduce the Hindu population of India. And thus we reach the main problem: why is India not a majoritarian state even when one party and one thought process has won so many elections. That is the joy of being on the right of the political spectrum: The Other becomes an abomination and the existence of the Others weakens your sense of self and sense of self-importance.

Therefore, no matter how many elections the rightwing wins, no matter how many followers it gets, no matter how many Chief Ministers and Prime Ministers it manages, it remains unhappy and miserable.

There is a very real fear for the rest of us. If victory cannot soften the hatred for the Other, then every "other" remains in danger.

Too judgmental? Look around you.

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist. You can follow her on Twitter @ranjona. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com