Trump’s Defeat and Modi’s Challenge

Trump had vowed to improve the livelihoods of American citizens, but the American masses saw him enrich himself and his clan with unabashed lust for lucre in any shape, colour or form, and indiscriminately in any sort of company, Pakistan included, which provided the crypto in billions.

Featured Picture: Thousands of protesters celebrated the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in New Delhi on 25 July. His departure after questions for a medical school exam were leaked was a rare concession by the Modi government. Photo credit: Adnan Abidi

Trump had vowed to end all wars, but American citizens saw him start fresh ones without the least justification, causing grave damage to the everyday requirements of ordinary Americans—from mortgage dues to groceries to gas at the pump to the cost of education.

Even Trump’s trusting MAGA base—certainly considerable sections within it—understood that his tariff toolkit was a means to enrich his friends, family and corporate cronies at the expense of the quotidian American, who came to confront inflation and higher costs for consumer goods of everyday use.

Even those sections of Americans who tend to be Pavlovian in their partiality to the state of Israel came to dislike Trump’s enslavement to Netanyahu and the hijacking of common American interests by murderous Zionist ones.

The global squeeze on common lives has thus caused a long-overdue efflorescence of street protests in country after country, city after city, in Europe, and an unprecedented bashing of the Trump ticket at the mid-term hustings in America.

Typically, having claimed while campaigning that he was on the ticket (he said so 47 times), Trump has disavowed it now that the scale of the electoral disaster has come to light.

(Are we not used to this pattern of leadership—owning the victories and disowning the disasters—here at home too?)

Further proof of the changing zeitgeist was to come from Serbia and Brazil.

In Serbia, a resurgent Gen Z movement translated into a political tsunami, forcing a brutal, ten-year-old dictatorship to lose state power.

And in Brazil, Trump’s proxy candidate, Bolsonaro, eventually lost to the democratic socialist Lula, even though he is 80—a highly significant rejection of an imperialist, neo-colonial agenda.

As to the defeat of that agenda in America itself, just two of the plethora of electoral calamities may suffice to indicate the scale and depth of the rejection of Trumpist fascism: in a ruby-red state like Kansas, the Senate race was won by a Democrat after 94 years, and in another ruby-red state, Texas, the Senate race was won by a Kennedyesque Democrat, Talarico, after 38 years.

Recall that it was in Texas that Kennedy was shot dead at the behest of a gang of southern rednecks in order to prevent him from signing off on the unconscionable and immoral butchery of the Vietnam invasion and from attempting a modus vivendi with the Soviet bloc.

Thus there are clear signs that the Spenglerian cartwheel of history may be returning to the leftward point yet again, as people’s protest movements gather scale and force in region after region on behalf of issues germane to the ideal of affordability across a whole spectrum of quotidian needs and desires.

Here at home, if you were at the mass rally of 1 November, you would have heard sentient explications of the need to assert street power from common Indians who had come from far and wide and were not affiliated with any one of the political constituents of the INDIA alliance.

In clear-eyed articulation, the hoi polloi seemed aware that more than the mere cost of living was at stake: it was democracy itself.

Asked by an “embedded” reporter whether the ouster of the mendacious Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, would ensure opposition victories, it was eye-opening to hear the rejoinder: the point is not who wins or loses, but whether the citizen will retain her most precious fundamental prerogative—to exercise her mandate without fear or favour and without discrimination—or be treacherously robbed of the right to franchise by an institution charged by the constitution with ensuring that not a single citizen is prevented from expressing her choice of government, an institution that is, alas, currently crony to the executive of the day.

Another protester could be heard asking whether the voter should choose a government, or the government should choose the voter.

Yet it would be foolhardy and politically short-sighted to imagine that the blue tsunami from the world’s oldest democracy will now naturally overtake the largest one, despite the parallel political-economic conditions.

If it has been the rule of Musk-Epstein-Trump there, we have our own triumvirate of Adani-Ambani-Modi and the regime-friendly godmen who reign, our situation being worse in that our state institutions and “mainstream” media breathed their last years ago, leaving official preferences as the only sources of information, analysis and “national consensus.”

Most of all, the state in India has now perfected a tool that is not easily countered by a reasoned, secular-democratic politics, namely a religiosity that permeates every moment of the totalised life of the polity—from household activity to commercial transactions to ubiquitous turns of phrase in social life, whatever the matter at hand.

Unlike Christianity, Hindutva has now turned Hinduism into a year-long immersion in religious tropes, keeping the Muslim “enemy” always lined up as a target, as the presumed source of all of India’s historical, cultural and political ills, and as the chief obstacle to her ascendance to world number one.

(Note: as of this day, California, at $4.5 trillion, has a larger GDP than India. India falls between 144 and 150 in per capita rankings among 193 countries.)

As staff recruitments, both academic and administrative, in India’s educational institutions, from high to low, have come to follow a ruthless ideological profile, and as the contents of curricula across the spectrum of subjects—the humanities being predictably the chief victims—have come to be anaesthetised, there are few sources of informed resistance left for the young Indian to draw upon in countering the oppressive official cultural-religious onslaught.

Only a selection of social media outlets seems left to thwart that onslaught.

The only library now seems to be the internet.

Despite all that, however, large sections of India’s youth are not being made fools to quite the extent that the state desires.

What remains to be seen is how effectively these youth movements may gel with the pushback from India’s parliamentary opposition (which, incidentally, represents 60 per cent of the populace) to forge a tsunami strong enough to disabuse the mass of Indians of the ruse to which they have thus far been subject.

Put another way, how long may it take to return religious concerns to the private sphere, where they sacrally belong, and to relieve India’s political life of its collapse into a profitable, everyday bigotry?

A heartening feature of the recent protests at home has been the resurfacing of the democratic Left across the party spectrum.

It is hoped that its exertions will mesh with those of the democratic socialists without an old and familiar fratricidal tussle for hegemony, and with an eye kept unwaveringly on the larger historical imperative.

The grapevine has it that a larger mobilisation of the Left’s street power, enabled by detailed and incisive critiques of state policies, is under way. That this new energy on the Left is inspired also by the massive demonstrations in European cities may be both true and welcome.

It will be interesting to see how far Trump’s friends worldwide may outlast a depleted and defeated Trump.

Certainly, the “Modi, Modi”-shouting diaspora seems to have largely deserted him this once.

What may this mean for his friend, Narendra Modi?