The landslide mandate of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls shows that the idea of Narendra Modi is now bigger than the man himself. That is the key to, and the most important achievement of, this emphatic win. In outgrowing a vulnerable political creature and shattering some assumptions in the process, the idea of Modi powered the win and ensured that Modi—the one under attack by the Opposition—emerged unhurt.

That’s precisely where the Congress-led Opposition was clueless. Towards the last days of polling in the seven-phase elections, Congress president Rahul Gandhi claimed to have “dismantled the idea of Narendra Modi”. That’s the delusion that comes with four-digit retweets and the applause of the party’s core voters in campaign rallies. What Mr Gandhi had actually done was: he had inflicted a bit of anti-incumbency dent on the Prime Minister. The idea of Modi was always intact. It didn’t dim, nor did it find any rival in an equally appealing idea among a large section of the electorate.

The other problem for the Opposition was that the anti-idea to Modi was Modi himself. A decisive section of voters, close to 40 per cent in India—far more in some states and far less in some—is convinced that even for correcting the flaws and failures of his government, Prime Minister Modi would be the more effective choice and not the Opposition. It effectively meant that a large section of the electorate preferred a second term for Modi, to a fresh term for a rudderless Opposition which was showing signs of a ragtag formation. In the process of being seen as the idea as well as the anti-idea of himself, Modi succeeded in clearly beating anti-incumbency.

In the whole of Hindi heartland and western India, as well as parts of east, north and south India, the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party offered something to different sections of the electorate looking for different reasons to give the party, and by extension the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, a second run in office. As usual, the first among these reasons was the immediate, often high in the order of electoral preferences: national security.

On national security, the BJP had a headstart even before a Pakistan-based terror outfit attacked a convoy of paramilitary forces in Pulwama. Given the popular perceptions about infirmities and wavering response to such threats by the last two Congress-led governments at the Centre, Modi-led BJP was seen as more firmly equipped to respond. This perception had grown over the years because of the nationalistic pitch to which the Modi government had directed its policy outlook.

The cultural appeal of the nation as an imagined community—to use political scientist Benedict Anderson’s phrase—would work as the electoral constituency for the incumbent and his challengers.

Armed confrontation with a hostile neighbour country which uses terror as an instrument of state policy is inevitably a rallying point in competitive claims on national security. In times of conflict, this can be true for any age or country. However, it becomes even more important in times when the nation-state is believed to have regained its centrality.

This comeback of the nation-state—having its moorings in the nature of international order that emerged in the 19th century—has belied many predictions of its disappearance in the last few decades of the 20th century. Such premature obituaries of nationalism, as seen in writings of scholars like Francis Fukuyama (“defanged” is what he calls it in his famous 1989 essay “End of History”), had only to wait for a few years to eat their words. Someone had already foreseen that such predictions were quite naive. In an essay for the bimonthly journal Foreign Affairs, which earlier this month had a special issue on New Nationalism, historian Jill Lepore remembers what Stanford historian Carl Degler had said in 1986. Degler was critical of his colleagues for abandoning the study of the nation. “We can write history that implicitly denies or ignores the nation-state, but it would be a history that flew in the face of what people who live in a nation-state require and demand,” Degler said.

For long, mainstream political forces in India, except the BJP, haven’t been alive to a call of that national imagination and nor have they responded with that pitch.

The BJP hadn’t forgotten that constituency. The subsequent airstrikes on terror camps in Balakot, and its articulation in various ways on different platforms, enhanced its appeal as the safest option on the question of national security.

Second, besides its claims on national security finding takers across sections of different caste groups, the NDA government also created a labharthi (beneficiary) constituency across caste groups through delivery mechanisms of schemes like Ujjwala (LPG), rural housing (Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana), health care (Ayushman Bharat), electrification, etc. Amidst all critique of public welfare programmes and infrastructural development, the fact remains that a significant number of beneficiaries of these initiatives have seen a presence of the government in their everyday living conditions. That’s a constituency that brings its own numbers, though only a part of the beneficiaries can be converted into voters.

Third, the across caste group consolidation didn’t make it look away from the need for striking broad social coalitions for polls. In Hindi heartland states, it worked on social arithmetic meticulously—it reaped dividends by blunting the social calculus of rival formations. For instance, the BJP successfully supplemented its upper caste and non-Yadav Other Backward Class social base in Uttar Pradesh by working on non-Jatav Dalit groups and enlisting support from most backward of OBC social groups. In the process, the party blunted the challenge of the combined social base of the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal in the state. Similarly, in Bihar, by accommodating Janata Dal (United) to the extent of giving equal number of seats (17), and even foregoing five seats that the BJP won in last LS elections, it reached out to a broader social base. That was augmented by retaining Lok Janshakti Party as an ally with six seats. With non-OBC Yadav, as well as sections of the Yadav vote, sections of Mahadalit and Dalit vote supplementing the BJP’s core voter base, it stitched together a formidable caste social alliance.

The alacrity to form a proactive social alliance was only matched by a readiness to accommodate even unsure allies like Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. In the coalition making skills, the party’s organisational skills trumped the Opposition significantly, even though in hindsight it needed fewer partners.

Fourth, the capacity of identity mobilisation, one of the valid functions of the political process in a democratic society, on issues of unattended Hindu interests, was offered to sections looking for a political catharsis of repressed religiosity or selective targeting of its belief systems. In a country used to a different type of religious consolidation by the Opposition—what many perceive as minority appeasement politics—the political space for accommodating and making Hindu identity comfortable in the polity was seen.

Fifth, revisiting the overarching factor, the Opposition’s campaign targeting Modi’s integrity was counterproductive. It didn’t find many takers—an overwhelming number of voters don’t doubt the Prime Minister’s personal integrity. Instead, the chowkidar chor hai campaign played into Mr Modi’s hands as it turned the elections into a referendum on the Prime Minister—something the BJP gleefully grabbed as a comfortable turf to win.

Almost 52 years ago, in a party meeting at Calicut, Deendayal Upadhyay, leader of the BJP’s predecessor Jana Sangh, talked about the political untouchability practised against the party. In the next five decades, the party not only became a key player in the country’s politics but this decade has witnessed it becoming the pivot of power arrangements in large parts of the country.

Post-Independence—given the pre-Independence roots of the Congress—the BJP is the only national party to emerge. This is no mean feat given the alienation it had to wade through in the initial decades in its earlier avatar as Jana Sangh.

No elections are seminal, reading too much into the massive mandate might be a victim of overanalysis, as much as it is an occupational hazard of commentary. Yet it is important to say that Modi’s win can primarily be understood in its basics: a very decisive number of voters in the country think that he is the most valuable political resource to be used in running the country. Anything else isn’t electoral verdict of the polls that we witnessed. Modi is by far the most successful Indian politician of our times, only exceeded by the success of the idea of Modi—something that won him the 2019 polls.