Two very senior journalists – the kind who spent the last decade telling us that Modi’s victories were accidents, that 2014 was a “wave”, 2019 was “hate”, and that Congress still held the moral high ground – finally decided to ask the question everyone else answered years ago:

Why does the opposition keep losing elections one after another, and why does Modi keep winning them one after another?

Forty minutes of discussion. Some hand-wringing. A slightly more defeated tone than we’re used to hearing from them.

And yet, in those entire forty minutes, ten of the most obvious, most voter-verified, most on-the-ground reasons for BJP’s dominance were never spoken. Not even in passing.

Here they are – the ten sentences these gentlemen still cannot bring themselves to say out loud.

  1. Not once did they say: “The BJP and the RSS have built the largest volunteer political force independent India has ever seen. Tens of thousands of full-time workers and lakhs of part-timers who are present in every crisis – floods, droughts, Covid, a death in the family, a stuck pension file. They reach villages before the district magistrate even wakes up. For millions of ordinary Indians, the local BJP or RSS worker is not a party cadre; he is the first person they call when something goes wrong. Congress has nothing even remotely comparable left on the ground.” The people who experienced this help vote, and they will keep voting. They don’t care what gets said on English news channels.
  2. Not once did they say: “Direct-benefit transfers actually work now. When the government says 5 kg free grain or ₹6,000 yearly farmer payment, the money and the grain reach the intended person. The old Congress system that Rajiv Gandhi himself described – ‘only 15 paise of every rupee reaches the ground’ – has been dismantled. The missing 85 paise no longer disappears into the pockets of middlemen, block officers, and ministers’ relatives. Voters are not stupid. They notice when the full rupee finally lands in their account.” Those beneficiaries vote, and they will keep voting – no matter how many primetime tears are shed.
  3. Not once did they say: “Internal law and order is better than it has been in fifty years. Naxalism, once officially the biggest internal security threat, is on the verge of extinction. The ‘Jungle Raj’ that ordinary people lived through in Bihar and eastern UP – daily kidnappings, caste massacres, no street lights, no police patrols – is gone. Private armies have been disarmed. Parents can send their daughters to coaching classes after dark again. People who lived through that hell have long memories.” They vote accordingly.
  4. Not once did they say: “Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism is at its lowest point in three decades. Surgical strikes, Balakot, and a publicly declared doctrine of proactive response have forced even a reckless neighbour to think twice. The graph of terror incidents in Jammu & Kashmir and the rest of India has nosedived. Ordinary citizens feel the difference when they switch on the news and no longer see body bags every week.” Those citizens vote.
  5. Not once did they say: “Article 370 and 35A – constitutional anomalies that bled the exchequer, funded separatists, and kept an entire state in limbo for seventy years – were removed in one parliamentary session. The region has recorded the highest tourist footfall ever, highest film shootings, highest G20 events, and highest voter turnout in decades. A running sore was cauterized.” The people who waited generations for that closure vote, and they will keep voting.
  6. Not once did they say: “Open, shameless minority appeasement at the expense of the majority has stopped. Government schemes are now genuinely religion-neutral and caste-neutral. Not giving special quotas or turning a blind eye to illegal encroachments is not ‘anti-minority’; it is equality before law. For the first time in decades, the majority feels the state belongs to them too – not just to politically favoured vote banks.” That feeling translates directly into votes.
  7. Not once did they say: “The physical infrastructure transformation is visible from 30,000 feet in the air. Every village electrified, 400 million new bank accounts, 150 million household toilets, highways being built at 37 km a day, tap water reaching 12 crore homes, 4G towers in the remotest corners. These are not PowerPoint slides; they are things people touch, use, and see every single day.” They vote with those same hands.
  8. Not once did they say: “Illegal immigration, especially in border states, is finally being treated as a serious national-security and demographic issue instead of an endless vote-bank resource. Citizens in Assam and North Bengal have been shouting about this for forty years. Someone finally started listening – CAA, deportations, border fencing, voter-list scrutiny. The message is clear: India is not an open shelter for anyone who crosses the border.”The original residents of those areas vote, and they vote decisively.
  9. Not once did they say: “Cultural nationalism and civilisational confidence actually move millions of voters. Reclaiming pride in India’s ancient past, renovating Kashi and Kedarnath corridors, settling the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute with dignity instead of kicking it down the road for another fifty years – these are not ‘divisive’; they are deeply felt corrections of historical shame. The same journalists mocked this for twenty years. Voters never mocked it.”
  10. Not once did they say: “All the people who directly benefited from points 1 to 9 will continue to vote for the BJP in election after election after election, no matter how many panels you do, how many slow-motion YouTube videos you upload, or how many times you cry ‘hate speech’ on television.”

Instead, what did we actually hear in those forty minutes?

Oh, the usual greatest hits:

  • “Rahul Gandhi is actually VERY intelligent and an extremely pleasant human being… you just don’t see it on TV because of editing.” (Translation: we’ve met him at Khan Market dinners and he’s perfectly charming, so the 140 crore people who keep rejecting him must be the idiots.)
  • “Elections are being systematically managed.” (Because nothing says “we respect the intelligence of the Indian voter” like declaring 100 million people too brainwashed or bought to know their own interest.)
  • “Modi never misses a single opportunity to beat minorities with a stick.” (Meanwhile the same minorities got free ration, free Covid vaccines, Ujjwala cylinders, tap water, and electricity for the first time – but sure, they’re voting out of fear, not gratitude.)
  • “The BJP has built an unprecedented election machinery.” There it is – the one half-truth! They finally spotted the ground workers, the panna pramukhs, the WhatsApp groups, the data analytics. But instead of saying “damn, they outworked us 24×7 for twenty years”, it instantly gets labelled dark, sinister, almost criminal. Anything but admit it’s just superior organisation and sweat.

And then – the cherry on top – finally they accepted..

“Yes… this whole nationalism, civilizational pride, and religious connect thing… turns out it actually works with the voters.”

The same thing they spent decades mocking as “saffron madness”, “majoritarian hysteria”, and “politics of hate” is now, eleven years, quietly re-branded as “ah yes, we should have seen that coming.”

Congratulations, gentlemen. Only took you three General annihilations and dozens State funerals to discover what every Chaiwala in Lucknow knew for ever.

Give them three more Lok Sabha debacles – 2029, 2034, 2039 – and maybe, just maybe, one day they’ll open their mouths and say the sentences printed above.

Until then, let them keep uploading those slow-motion, sepia-toned, air-conditioned YouTube autopsies titled “Why We Lost Again”.

The voter isn’t waiting.

Thanks for reading!

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