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South Africa, too, emerging like India from crucial national elections, faces major questions, as do other lands. However, let me stay with India in this piece, and along with millions of fellow Indians let me celebrate an unexpected if incomplete victory over darkness and madness.

For the sake of those who haven’t had a direct experience, I will spell out the darkness and the madness which the Indian people have had to face. Before doing so, however, I may be allowed to recall three short sentences from a little book of mine called India After 1947, which was published two years ago, when despair about India was considerable.

“The ball is thus in the court of the Indian people, a frequently underestimated force. The people will act or react at times of their choosing, when events throw up opportunities. At times elections may provide opportunities, and moments may arrive when our people openly or quietly press the change button.”

India was darkened during the last ten years by clouds of hate and fear. These clouds were sent forth from prominent platforms. They were intensified via WhatsApp. They were strengthened by the incarceration of intellectuals, critics, and political opponents. By organized trolling. By the fear of vigilantes. By arbitrary raids by tax and other agencies. And buttressed by lies uttered brazenly and seamlessly by Modi himself.

Young Dhruv Rathee, an Indian YouTuber with millions of viewers, has made a crisp short video of Modi’s lies. Exceptionally gifted as Rathee is, I should add that he is only one of a large and expanding number of Indians who are dedicated to liberty, equality, and mutual friendship in their land, and whose exertions are influencing India’s journey.

In one interview during the campaign, Modi matter-of-factly announced that he was not born like other humans, that he had arrived on earth through a divine arrangement.

Again, it was not rational that earlier this year the Prime Minister of a country facing multiple challenges took time off from his duties and acted as chief priest for the opening of a grand new temple, a ceremony that was telecast live on every TV channel.

In a world which is interconnected 24 x 7, it is insane to think that in your own land you can practice supremacy over lesser mortals of a faith community different from yours, and yet demand equal rights for your faith community in other lands, and expect never to be called out.

After India’s long voting season ended on June 1, about a dozen polling agencies all announced that Modi would win in a landslide -- that he would win anything from 350 to more than 400 seats. “We’re crossing 400!” was after all Modi’s campaign slogan. (There was however one polling agency, linked to the Hindi newspaper Dainik Bhaskar, which said that the BJP-led NDA would fall short of 300.)

As Sankarshan Thakur would point out in Kolkata’s Telegraph, “The night the laughably off-the-mark exit polls were broadcast, Modi claimed from his off-shore retreat in Kanyakumari: ‘I can say with confidence that the people of India have voted in record numbers to elect the NDA government.’”

In the end, as we all know, not only did the BJP fall well short of the half-way mark (272), it was soundly defeated in the three states in India that send the most MPs to New Delhi: UP, Maharashtra, and West Bengal.

Made miserable by joblessness, offended by blatant falsehoods, and tired of Modi’s incessant self-praise, millions of Indians decided, in the safe spaces of their minds, to push the button for change. It wasn’t necessary for them to reveal their decision to pollsters.

When counted, their votes dispelled India’s clouds of hate and fear.

Nowhere did sanity and light shine more brightly than in UP’s Ayodhya, where, with the eye firmly fixed on the elections that were due, the Grand Ram Temple was inaugurated on January 22 (even though the structure was visibly incomplete). The world should know that the parliamentary constituency to which the city of Ayodhya and the temple of Ram belong has elected Awadhesh Prasad, eminent Dalit and member of the Samajwadi Party, part of the INDIA bloc.

It appears that the Grand Temple made no difference to the voting anywhere in India. Like everyone else, India’s Hindus too seem to want jobs. And the right to speak freely.

A total or comprehensive triumph for the vigorous INDIA bloc was impossible. (The playing field was about as level as a slide in a park for children.) Modi will be PM once more, but at every turn he will need the approval of his partners in the NDA coalition.

Be it noted that Modi’s three key partners (without whom he will lack a majority) -- the Telugu Desam Party of Andhra, the Janata Dal United of Bihar, and the Lok Janshakti Party, also of Bihar -- are all firmly and publicly committed to an India where Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are equal to the Hindus in the eyes of the state.

This when in the campaign that just ended Modi strove to humiliate India’s minorities in words worse than before.

India did not unseat Modi on June 4. But it sent out a powerful voice against hate, against inequality, and for the Constitution of India that assures all Indians of their equal rights.

And it reminded millions of Indians who are weary of supremacy, and who wish to return to a saner democracy, that across India there are more comrades and champions than they thought, including many energetic and creative ones.