India is witnessing a silent rage. The key to unseating Modi lies in a unified Opposition
Seven years ago, the world was swept by a wave of public protests.
It was a season of movements that harnessed popular frustration. Joined by tech-savvy middle-classes, millions of activists took to the streets of New York, London, Tel Aviv and New Delhi in what was a global outpouring of contempt for systemic issues - inequality, greed, corruption, dictators and fanaticism.
Emergence of new autocrats
Let's take a look at what they achieved or didn't after they faded.
Authoritarian leaders such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia fell in the wake of the Arab uprisings but many Middle Eastern countries beset by regionalised wars in the years that followed cracked down on freedom of speech and restored autocracies.
Since its launch in September, 2011, the New York-based Occupy Wall Street movement against corporate malfeasance fizzled out within months, leaving critics to wonder what it really accomplished.
Back home in India, veteran activist Anna Hazare held a series of hunger strikes around the same time. He drew tens of millions of people in what became a glaring reflection of the country's growing intolerance of corruption, arrogance and unresponsive leadership.
Public anger eventually translated into votes against the national government and for what was then perceived to be a dynamic, pro-development and a grassroots politician, Narendra Modi.
Movement lacked vision
Both the Arab Spring and Hazare's protests shared some common features, if not all.
Both called for greater transparency, social justice and economic opportunities. Both sought to change existing governance structures. But both failed to deliver a roadmap for protecting, building and restoring faith in democratic institutions once the change is realised.
Little wonder, the results have been bitter.
Upper-caste hegemony, expansionism advertised as 'saffron surge'
Political expansionism spurred largely by casteist and anti-minority acts has become the hallmark of the BJP rule since 2014.
Party leaders could be heard almost every day on TV bragging about what's now called "saffron surge" under Modi in a tone that smacks of the RSS' ultimate goal of a theocratic Hindu Rashtra.
If it's democracy, why major elections have to be preceded by low-scale riots or public lynching of Muslim cattle traders or heavily-loaded sectarian rhetoric promoting aggressive upper-caste hegemony disguised as Hindutva?
Ours indeed is a democracy defined by a Constitution that separates legislative, executive and judicial powers. The federal structure ideally requires greater empowerment of local and regional institutions of governance.
Orchestrated turmoil weakening federalism
But why has it then become ceremonial to plunge communities into a state of turmoil before almost every key election? Forget communities, even the economy - the lifeline of a 1.25-billion-strong population - was pushed into a dangerous chaos.
A prime minister, who owed his ascension largely to the Anna Hazare mobilisation, emerges on night-time TV to announce an abrupt withdrawal of India's highest-denomination currency in a cash-driven system.
How many elected leaders across the world have ever celebrated taxation? Ours did when he rolled out an ill-conceived GST in Parliament. Some critics call it a move to weaken federalism further, economically.
The Hazare upheaval eventually produced a monarchical style of central leadership. Over the past four years, power has increasingly been concentrated into one man or a handful of them at the most.
Secularism has been strategically downgraded as a vote-appeasement tactic and human and civil rights advocates undermined as terror sympathisers. In top gear are attempts to enforce the fundamental version of high-caste predominance packaged as Hindu nationalism.
But the primary question is whether a country as vast as India prepared to embrace a parochial, inward-looking regime for good. A close analysis of the BJP's overly advertised successes in Northeast suggests the victory was primarily an outcome of shrewd mergers and acquisitions of locally-elected satraps.
In the Hindi heartland, where the saffron noise is the loudest, the Hazare outcome has begun to disentangle. Recent by-elections in three states, Uttar Pradesh included, are more than an indication that India, crushed by the lopsided economic and federal policies of the Modi government, is rejecting monarchical brand of politics.
Let alone minorities, dominant caste groups in states and the Dalits within the Hindu fold have called the BJP's Hindutva bluff.
Street protests are out, smart alliances in
The Hazare protests probably still weigh heavily on the Indian psyche. Many of us believe regimes can only be toppled through mass agitations.
The belief is erroneous in the second decade of the 21st century. Public movements of the scale of the Arab Spring are a passé globally.
India is witnessing a silent rage. The key to unseating Modi lies in a unified Opposition.
This grand alliance has to be region-based, by which I mean each of its member should allow a field wide-open to partners to take opponents head on in elections. So, if the RJD, for example, were to become part of this grouping in Bihar, it should not venture into UP to play spoilsport with the SP, the BSP and the Congress fighting Modi's BJP together in that state.
A third, fourth or fifth front, likewise, will only end up dividing Opposition votes.
PM candidacy a secondary issue
Speculations that an Opposition alliance, as mooted by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, would not materialise over who would be its candidate for the top job in 2019 are not convincing.
Remember, Gandhi ruled herself out of the prime ministerial race and instead named Dr Manmohan Singh as head of the UPA government in 2004 when the BJP objected to her Italian origin.
Her son, now the Congress president, appears contented. He might lack Modi's energy, but Rahul Gandhi seems to be gifted with a sense of fulfilment. It's hard to imagine he would stick stubbornly to the PM candidacy if allies disagree.
The Modi wave has reached its saturation point for some profound reasons. Silence on Indian streets, the terrible pre-poll violence aside, isn't a barometer of the prime minister's popularity. On the contrary, it conceals a swelling undercurrent of disenchantment.
Populism is over. Pragmatism in. And that's an opportunity for the Opposition to capitalise on, collectively.