BIHAR is India`s rare Hindi-speaking state where the BJP has not won a majority on its own.

The land is where Buddha attained Enlightenment and preached the message of harmony in 600 BC. That may not be the reason behind the Hindu right`s frustrations in the populous Hindi-speaking state. But it does indicate a higher intellectual grasp by its people of the challenges they confront in life and politics.

The BJP`s desperation to win the state elections could be gleaned from the several highprofile visits Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made to the state. The recent one was also dramatic. When the Pahalgam terror attack happened on April 22, Modi was visiting a Gulf state. He shortened the trip but didn`t say a word about Pahalgam in Delhi. He flew instead to Bihar the next day where he announced in a vitriolic speech the decision to `hunt down the terrorists and punish their backers`. He usually speaks to his foreign interlocutors in Hindi, but to a Hindi-speaking audience in Bihar Modi spoke in English.

`Today from the soil of Bihar I say to the whole world. India will identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backers. We will pursue them to the ends of the earth.` Operation Sindoor ensued, and according to Modi, isn`t over yet.

However, so far, neither of the two promises he made have been redeemed. The terrorists are said to be roaming free, and have neither been identified or named. As for Pakistan, their implied alleged backers, its army chief was feted by Donald Trump over a lunch at the White House. Modi`s captive media has declared India victorious but the evidence suggests an embarrassing Indian miscalculation about Pakistan`s ability to respond to its attack.

The desperation to win Bihar may now have to rely on the capable hands of Modi`s hand-picked election commission. There is fear among opposition parties and potential voters that the SIR (special intensive review) of the voters` list underway in Bihar is aimed at ensuring the ruling party`s victory by weeding out hundreds and thousands of opposition voters from the electoral rolls. The exclusion of officially trusted Aadhaar and voter ID cards from the list of valid documents for SIR is said to expose large sections ofthe Muslim, backward and Dalit communities to the risk of being disenfranchised. These communities by and large vote for non-BJP parties, and use Aadhaar and voter ID cards as their basic identity documents. Few would possess birth certificates or land ownership or government identity papers that are on the list of 11 documents that the election commission is asking for.

In his widely quoted poem, The Solution, Bertolt Brecht, the celebrated playwright, acidly describes the disenchantment setting in among the people with their increasingly autocratic democracy. The secretary of the Writers Union suggests that they could be won back with redoubled efforts, but the government offers a counter solution: `Would it not be easier/In that case for the government/To dissolve the people/And elect another?` By most accounts, India`s election commission seems to be doing just that.The Modi government has evidently missed the mocking tone of Brecht`s poem and appears, instead, to have taken it to heart as an exciting prospect. Why Bihar? The state stands as a major obstacle to Project Hindu Rashtra. The BJP lacks a vital endorsement from a majority of Hindus in the state and across the country. A mandate needs to be conjured but heavy odds are stacked against the quest. At the height of Modi`s popularity in the 2019 elections, there were around 960 million Indian voters registered for the right to vote. In the elections that year, however, the BJP and its allies got just about 221m votes, which delivered them an emphatic victory.

Most of the votes came from the majority com-munity of Hindus. It`s estimated that out of the 37.36 per cent voters who voted for BJP in 2019, almost 90pc came from Hindus, or approximately 210m. That`s pretty much the support Hindutva may have in a currently estimated population of around 1.46 billion Indians, including 80pc Hindus.

A remedy that has worked elsewhere for closet autocrats is to suspend democracy. It has also happened in India although for a relatively brief duration of 21 months when Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency in June 1975. Mrs Gandhi used the Emergency to fortify the constitution by adding two crucial words that described Indian democracy as envisioned by the founding fathers, but which were missing in the preamble secular, and socialist. Supporters of Hindu Rashtra have openly canvassed to dispense with the words. The fly in the ointment is that the BJP lost its majority in 2024 and runs a minority government with supporters who are wary of a Hindu Rashtra.

Thus, a slow creeping hollowing out of democracy`s main pillars parliament, judiciary and the media, seems to be doing the trick for now.

But delivering a theocratic revamping of the constitution would need at least a pretence of popular support. Tweaking the people`s mandate looks closer to Brecht`s faux prescription.

Changing the voters` list, banning parties, or their leaders, has occurred in almost every South Asian democracy, replicating the Brechtian nightmare.

Finally, West Bengal too is in Modi`s crosshairs. The sudden rise in the tracking and deportation of alleged Bangladeshi Muslims in BJPruled states is said to signal disenfranchising of a substantial chunk of West Bengal`s Muslim voters in elections next year. The Bangladeshi gambit could recoil on the BJP in West Bengal. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has turned the issue into one of Bengali honour. Braving monsoon rains on Kolkata`s streets, she roared: `I have decided to speak louder in Bengali, arrest me if you can.` Electing `a new people` is no cakewalk.

Or so it seems. • The writer is Dawn`s correspondent in Delhi.

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