Election 2024: Listening to the grumbling, anger and scorn

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For a decade now, a propaganda machine primed to ruthlessness by the ruling regime and a mainstream media devoted to drumming up the invincibility of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has held large parts of the country in their grip.

But somewhere during a long, gruelling Lok Sabha election, between triumph and defeat, between media owners calling the polls “mehez ek formality”, merely a formality, and fact-checking YouTubers, a space opened up.

While the prime minister’s high-decibel bigoted rhetoric droned on, as reporters hit the ground, many of us began to hear grumbling, anger – even scorn.

The voices of ordinary voters complaining about joblessness and the grind of poverty, expressing their anxiety about unchecked, god-like power began to travel wider – and were often bolder than most critiques we have heard in the last 10 years.

Here’s just a sample of what surfaced in ground reports that I read. “They will turn our country into Saudi Arabia, where we will have no portal to complain or protest,” a voter in...

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