Elec­tions in gar­gan­tuan In­dia are fi­nally over. The re­sults will start com­ing from the morn­ing of 23 May. Which way will In­dia go -down­hill to one coun­try, one lan­guage, one cul­ture, one re­li­gion and hate for all oth­ers or will some sem­blance of in­clu­sive­ness re­turn? This is the key ques­tion con­fronting the teem­ing bil­lions of  In­dia.

The sev­enth and last phase of elec­tions com­pleted to­day and with it, the elec­tions to 542 of the 543 con­stituen­cies across In­dia are over.

With­out sup­port from exit polls, the World Sikh News pre­dicted at the out­set that In­dia is likely to see a hung par­lia­ment and all exit polls pour­ing out on TV screens to­day, ir­re­spec­tive of which party or al­liance they show as win­ning, they all pre­dict a hung par­lia­ment.

While Mod­i’s In­dia was sup­posed to go cash­less in all its deal­ings af­ter de­mon­eti­sa­tion, the Elec­tion Com­mis­sion of In­dia seized a huge cache of cash dur­ing the elec­tions pur­port­edly meant for “cash for vote” by dif­fer­ent po­lit­i­cal par­ties. The amount col­lected is the high­est so far in any elec­tion.

With the Elec­toral Bonds sold by the coun­try from un­ac­counted sources soar­ing, the writ­ing is on the wall that un­scrupu­lous po­lit­i­cal lead­ers will be us­ing the money for horse trad­ing and cross-vot­ing to form a coali­tion gov­ern­ment.

The Bharatiya Janta Party has been up­front by say­ing that “every­one is wel­come.” The Con­gress and the other Op­po­si­tion are “al­ready in talks.”

The por­tents are omi­nous. With the fas­cist BJP in power, Naren­dra Modi will be the Prime Min­is­ter, ush­er­ing in an era which even the far-sighted George Or­well -who wrote the novel “1984” would not have thought of and would shud­der to think. Lies, hate, pro­pa­ganda, street bar­barism will rule the day and the BJP will not be able to stop the Franken­stein mon­ster they have them­selves let loose on the peo­ple of the coun­try.

Should the “khichdi” gov­ern­ment of Con­gress and its al­lies come to power, they will face an up­hill task in ful­fill­ing their pop­ulist promises and a bel­liger­ent Bharatiya Janta Party will not al­low the In­dian Par­lia­ment to func­tion in ex­actly the same way that they made life dif­fi­cult for Dr Man­mo­han Singh.

This has per­haps been In­di­a’s most vis­i­ble and vi­cious elec­tion ever. Vis­i­ble be­cause of the reach of satel­lite tele­vi­sion and so­cial me­dia and vi­cious be­cause of the hate-mon­ger­ing of the BJP lead­er­ship.

Whichever party wins to elect the sev­en­teen Par­lia­ment of In­dia, dur­ing the process in the last eight weeks, the Elec­tion Com­mis­sion of In­dia lost cred­i­bil­ity and the In­dian me­dia lost trust. Will the peo­ple of In­dia win?