Every time a strongman stumbles somewhere, the familiar ‘lesson for Modi’ tune plays here. There’s jubilation. Nothing will change here because Americans voted blue. It will happen only on the day Indians decide it’s time. – Kamlesh Singh
If you want to understand India, travel by train and bus, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told fellow parliamentarians in May 2023. He was, of course, paraphrasing Mahatma Gandhi. I haven’t travelled by train in a long time but what I remember vividly is the boundary wall along the railway line as the train approached a major city. Naked brick and mortar walls, painted white and featuring India’s three most pressing issues in large black letters: Mardana Kamzori, 10vin fail 12vin karein, and Sheeghra Patan, in that order.
Of course, no election discourse features any of these, as elections in India never take up issues that unite us. All parties focus on issues that divide: caste, religion, north, south and so on. In such divisive times, Wednesday morning arrived with the fresh air of something else that unites us: premature joculation or, as the local saying goes: Begani Shaadi mein Abdullah Diwana. Please don’t say it was Omar Abdullah’s own wedding. May God bless the couple. But that was the weekend. We are discussing Wednesday morning.
On Wednesday morning, the Democratic Party was back, and how, flipping states and painting them blue. Donald Trump’s tariffs, tantrums and the Iran war had produced a Republican rout, the GOP losing both the House and the Senate. All as expected.
What nobody expected was the weather in Delhi. The air, already heady after a string of opposition wins on the street, carried a fragrance stronger than that refreshing smell of the burning parali. Almost oud. The morning oud this Wednesday was hard. Results from a country that votes on the price of diesel were being extrapolated to one that votes on the price of ethanol. The strongmen are waning, the Left is rising, and India’s favourite Leftist thinkers had found, yet again, a lesson for Modi.
The party began before America finished counting. Men who cannot find their own polling booth without a slip from the party worker stayed up till 4 am refreshing Maricopa County. A Noida society WhatsApp group that never goes beyond its own RWA election forwarded a red-and-blue map of Pennsylvania with “UP 2027” scrawled across it. A ring-lit YouTuber yodelled that Ohio had spoken and Ooty must listen. A Patna uncle rang his NRI son in Houston to ask whether petrol in Patna would now be cheaper. Somewhere in Kerala, a branch secretary distributed laddoos for a party that still uses socialism as a swear word. In a Golf Links drawing room, a Napa Valley red was uncorked to toast a Speaker who won’t be elected till January. The American embassy makes Indians wait months for a visa interview. The joy needed no immigration formalities.
The inimitable Ashutosh opened with characteristic neatness: “lesson of US Mid Term election is HATE can’t win election. … Billionaire can’t win election with big money. Old politics is dying, new emerging. … Loss of Trump is a lesson for Modi.” What, then, did 2024 prove? That HATE can win elections? Did hate learn to win for one election and forget the skill in two years? Or was it always about eggs, inflation and the peculiar American habit of punishing whoever is in power at half-time? The arithmetic is simpler than the sermon. Trump won when voters wanted him and lost when they wanted to check him. Hate was neither the engine nor the brake. It was the FM radio repeating the irritating song for the nth time.
Priya Purohit kept it shorter: “Netanyahu gone. Trump gone. Modi ji, You are the next. Regime change in India … loading.” Shamsi supplied the international playlist—Trump fallen, Bolsonaro’s camp stumbling, Netanyahu slipping—then: “Next stop: India. Chaiwala, your turn is coming.” Congress accounts chorused, “India will soon follow.” Jairam Ramesh hailed a stunning verdict on accountability, then drafted it into his war on One Nation One Election. An entire American electorate, conscripted to argue a bill in our Parliament.
Noida’s water and America’s woke share high levels of TDS. As in every first-past-the-post democracy, most Indians did not vote for the government in power, and Narendra Modi occupies a special place in their hearts or oesophagus. MDS, not clinically recognised as an affliction, has wide prevalence in the country, especially on X (the artist formerly known as Twitter). Near the TDS level in America.
The pattern is old. Every time a strongman somewhere stumbles, we break into bhangra. Brazil, France, Serbia, Bangladesh, Israel, now America. The tune never changes: lesson for Modi. Melodious. Hummable. Imported. Those leaders came and went. Modi has not lost an election he contested since his first, in 2002. Not that he can’t or won’t. His party can’t win some prized states in spite of repeated claims of a rise. The born leader, meanwhile, waits to inherit all these imported lessons, presumably with interest. This is one outsourcing contract India doesn’t sign up for.
Real voters here still decide on jobs, prices, freebies, caste arithmetic and whether the local candidate looks after the drain in their lane. Hate for Modi or for Rahul Gandhi does not decide their fortunes. Policy does. And the government in Delhi has been floundering on policy of late, wading into avoidable controversies that have made some dirt stick to the Teflon armour the BJP built around him. That’s where the chink is, not where the kink is.
Not to say that Modi will remain in power till cows come home, as the BJP would like you to believe. The history of democracy is strewn with leaves of strong men falling off the branches; heck, there are branches fallen off the tree for everyone to see. But that won’t happen because Americans voted blue. It will happen the day Indians decide the time is up.
MDS has no known remedy, but premature joculation has. Wake up and smell the chai. Because the chaiwallah is also watching the results, here, there, everywhere. He is known to learn from defeats, not only of his own. Watch him as you have fun with the American election results. India has its own eccentricities and arithmetic. Actually too many for comfort.
So choose discomfort and counter the policies of the government instead of outsourcing your joy to a faraway land that has flipped on the idea of outsourcing itself. Also, please visit the Gupta Davakhana, Bus Stand ke peeche, Hapur, for the pressing issues. – India Today, 4 November 2026
› Kamlesh Singh is a India Today columnist and satirist.
Filed under: india, USA | Tagged: defeated official, donald trump, narendra modi, premature jubilation, US elections |
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