In the biggest democratic election in human history, the BJP has won a majority, exceeding its own expectations. It has settled down to form a government without even needing an alliance. Now that no effective opposition exists, what can we look forward to from a party that has a long history of Muslim and minority baiting, Hindu majoritarian victimology, and a commitment to a neoliberal economic agenda untrammelled by concerns for social injustice and unrest? Despite developing tensions within the Sangh Parivar as a result of the Modi victory, the BJP hasn’t yet relinquished its intimate filial relationship with the RSS and VHP – both associated with the assassination of Gandhi.

Why does the BJP Manifesto – admirable for its artful and Orwellian wordsmithery – not assure me of the party’s “people-friendly” intentions? Because this country – like many other democracies – has suffered from broken political pomises to such an extent, that it is probably more prudent to look very carefully at the evidence of performance rather than take at face value promises made in the heat of the electoral battle. This of course applies equally to all parties and politicians, not to the BJP alone.

The BJP needed to use the services of Madison Media, McCann Worldgroup and APCO, global public relations firms, to create its campaigns. If their record itself was evidence of their capacity to live up to their manifesto promises, why would “perception management” through propaganda be necessary? In fact, from the perspective of the HDR, the so-called Gujarat Model is not what it is cracked up to be. The genius of the PR campaign has been to convince enough of the Indian electorate of the hype behind it – manufacturing consent at its most magical.

Apart from pervasive evidence of corruption and misgovernance under Congress, the PR campaign has managed to induce public amnesia about BJP corruption. Who remembers why Yeddiyurappa and Kalyan Singh were welcomed back into the fold to help fight the elections? Who is asking why ministers with criminal records are being appointed to the cabinet in this government devoted to good governance?

Now there are those who will accuse me of an elitist contempt for the democratic “good sense” of the Indian people. I will be accused of a reluctance to concede that the Indian masses are perfectly capable of making up their own minds on the evidence of massive corruption. I will also be accused of deeming them to be gullible enough to fall for the mendacity and hyperbole of the BJP’s political marketing.

So let’s face the reality: none of this need have happened. In 1984, the Congress had an even greater majority than the BJP has now. Yet it managed to squander this advantage through its own lack of vision, probity and gumption. There is therefore probably also a large degree “lesser-evilism” (the presumptive choice being between the BJP on the one hand, and the Congress/UPA option or even an untested, unknown third front option) in the BJP victory. We must get used to arguments that go: “But the Congress was worse!”. There is no evidence that the Congress – or indeed what passes for the parliamentary Left in India – has any clue why they have been ground into the dust. This is evident from the behaviour of their leaders after the defeat.

The fact is that the utter failure of the Congress and the left in this country has opened a vast vacuum that is now being filled up by an impatient nationalism of aspirations to upward mobility that wants to give “development and good governance” a chance, rather than Hindutva. Hindu Pride was given a run earlier and found to be wanting, because after all, what could modern India’s Hindu citizens be proud of at the time? Tearing down a 16th century mosque? Acquiring a nuclear bomb? But Hindutva is waiting in the wings for a consolidation of the gains from the economic agenda. Once the appetite for a better life has been sated for a plurality of the urban population, the cultural agenda may be re-instated. Once our towns and cities begin to resemble China’s or Singapore’s or even Malaysia’s, once we can garner the praise of westerners for “efficiency”, cleanliness, stability and a reduction of corruption, it may be time to restore the Hindutva narrative.

Here are some of my fears about how India will be “Modified”. If events prove me wrong – and I sincerely hope they do – no one would be more relieved than I. Nothing here should be taken as an endorsement of the Congress, which thoroughly deserves its ignominious defeat. Nor am I raising these fears now only because the BJP has won. They are grounded in trends in Indian politics that have been in evidence since the nineteen seventies. The remarkable victory of the Hindutva right has only crystallised them more urgently for me.

1. Economically, their policies will be not very different from those of the Congress-led government that has just met its worst defeat in its 129 year history. However, the cronyism and corporate welfarism characteristic of Indian capitalism will be continue to be strengthened. Neoliberalism and Thatcherism will receive a fresh lease of life in India precisely when it is beginning to be questioned everywhere else, not because these pernicious ideologies have anything to commend them, but because the right alliance (pun intended) of class interests has re-appeared in India to breath life into them.  The theft of public and common property resources by private interests has become an established mode of state-sponsored primary accumulation in India, both under the Congress and under the Left Front in West Bengal. With the BJP committing itself to a neoliberal agenda of liberalisation of prices and wages, de-regulation of industries, and privatisation of state and community owned assets, the scope for corruption will only be vastly enhanced, and the social protections that remain for the lower middle and working classes, and for vulnerable sections such as tribals and dalits, will vanish. But because all this will be accomplished in the name of “good governance” and “development” the middle classes won’t complain.

2. The innate authoritarianism of the educated Indian middle classes will find a fresh impetus, because it now has the democratic support of a parliamentary majority. Modi’s media advisors have openly advocated “authoritarian democracy” in televised debates. The present electoral victory will be a test of how much substantive democracy there is in India. The ruling BJP has a majority in the lower house of Parliament. A pliant majority in the upper house can be “managed”. But majoritarian rule doesn’t amount to a democracy, especially under the FPTP system that we have. It is a system that will be dependent on a so-called “presidential” style of governance (translation: rule by executive fiat), a style that is conducive to authoritarianism unchallenged by public participation, accountability, transparency and responsiveness or responsibility. Both those who voted this party into power, as well as those who did not, will now be expected to play their designated role of going to sleep for the next five years while the government goes about its business of recasting this country into a technocrat’s dream where the most vulnerable will have been silenced.

3. As a consequence, laws will be passed in the name of national security and development – both highly contestable but entirely uncontested notions – that will render the state even more powerful and unaccountable, and the individual citizen even more powerless to resist the state. Modi’s corporate managers have now furnished him with a mandate to rule by “presidential” decree. Moreover, lawmakers will approve such decrees because they are now empowered by a “democratic” election to do so.

4. Encounter killings will become the new norm. Like the Congress and other minor parties, we now have a party leading the centre that has already resorted to extrajudicial killing and organised mass murder. With its Parliamentary majority, the BJP government can now be expected to write new laws to replace the ones that guaranteed rights of privacy and dignity of individual citizens.

5. The contempt for law that can be expected among those who rule in India can be gauged from the fact that 34% of the elected politicans in the Indian Parliament have criminal charges against them. The fact that 82% of India’s MP’s in the lower house are crorepatis (having assets of over $167,000) tells its own stories about exactly whose interests they represent. This contempt for law is not confined to the BJP alone, of course, but widely shared among the political operators in India, with support from most intellectuals and opinion makers, who think nothing of extrajudicial killings, for example, as long as its victims can be tainted with an epithet that substitutes for thought, such as “criminal”, or “terrorist” or “anti-national”. The Congress party’s role in the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 was a handy precedent to quote for the BJP when it came to their own massacres in 2002. The result is a consensus across the political spectrum that sectarian killings are an acceptable way of dealing with public disorder, and a means of engineering electoral victory, as demonstrated by Amit Shah’s role in the Muzaffarnagar riots last year.

6. The tone of public discourse will continue to become harsher and less civilised, to continue the trend of Foxification of the Indian media. Dissent will be curbed with increasingly vitriolic public censure or ridicule from journalists, TV personalities, commentators, and other arbiters of the “lakshman rekha” for acceptable public opinion. If those do not work, then violence will. National security, or the national interest, or national unity will be invoked.  At precisely the moment when the BJP needs a serious opposition to resist the onset of a hubristic arrogance, there will be none, because any dissent will be silenced. This practically guarantees that the fascistic potential deeply embedded in the national right-wing will be left to flourish unchallenged.

7. Politics will continue to be replaced by marketing campaigns. The triumph of the BJP is itself the result of a political campaign for Modi run by the global public relations firms.The logic of effectiveness and impact analysis does make sense to evaluate the means, provided the ends have been justified on the basis of moral or political principles based on an enlightened, humane and civilised view of human beings. Marketing campaigns work, in the sense that they do succeed in changing perceptions of customers to result in a buying decision and brand loyalty, and therefore increased market share. That’s why companies are willing to invest billions in advertising and other promotional campaigns.

But should political campaigns be run like marketing campaigns, when voters are actually being asked to decide, not about what kind of beverage they would like to drink, or car they would like to buy, or internet service they would like to use, but about what kind of a society they and their children want to live in in the future? Electoral marketing campaigns seriously impair citizens’ capacity for judgment on this far from trivial issue, by replacing evidence and reason with the cognitive distortions of propagandistic perception management that was evident on all sides in the elections. If we condemn the use of steroids and other artificial performance enhancers in sports, why do we permit electoral marketing campaigns in politics?

8. Muslims and other minorities may lend their support in increasing numbers to Modi, sometimes out of hope of eliciting compassion (a concept that doesn’t exist in the Hindu right wing mindset); sometimes out of fear (which is exactly what the Sangh Parivar would love to see); and sometimes out of opportunism (of which India will be seeing a tsunami in politics and public life now).  As a result, casual contempt for Muslims may soon become more common, exactly like the anti-semitism that prevailed in Europe before World War II.

9. The BJP has always boasted of its ties to two other great so-called “democracies”, the US and Israel – ties that have grown under the Congress as well – because they see themselves as being, like these two other governments, as leaders in the Great War on (Islamic) Terror. The governments of these two countries now feel no shame in trumpeting their contempt for legal or due process in the name of fighting an enemy they themselves have created and managed. My fear is that India too may be turned into a national security state. The easy acceptance of authoritarianism among its educated middle class may allow a vast expansion of surveillance in the name of security. Curbs on the kind of free association and expression required to sustain a democratic society may proliferate, with none of the debate that the Snowden revelations have now forced onto a so far apathetic public in the US.

In my more optimistic moments, I sometimes feel that wiser counsel just may prevail among the hotheads, allowing room for debate about the precise content of “development” and “good governance”, and restrain the tendencies that I have come to fear. But I fear that the corporate interests that have paid for this election are not exactly eager for such a debate, nor in the restraints of substantive democracy.  They are more interested – to use the words of Swapan Dasgupta – in “audacity, not consensus”.

Meanwhile, I, along with the majority of Indians who did not vote for Modi (86% of Indians, 69% of the electorate) – yes, why we chose the FPTP system is apparently hidden in the constitutional debates of the 1940’s – would love to be proved wrong.

Excuse me for not holding my breath.