Modi’s narrow win suggests Indian voters saw through religious rhetoric, opting instead to curtail his political power
UNB
Publish: 07 Jun 2024, 05:18 PM
WASHINGTON,
Jun 7 (AP/UNB)-Narendra Modi, India's two-time prime minister, was elected on
June 5, 2024, as the leader of the National Democratic Alliance, a coalition of
political parties that won with a slim majority in the recently concluded
parliamentary election. Modi is expected to be sworn in for his third term as
prime minister on June 8.
The BJP had hoped for a
landslide victory in the country's six-week general election - the largest
display of democracy, by far, in a year of voting around the world. But the
party scored only 240 parliamentary seats in the final tally and needs
coalition partners to secure a majority of 272.
The Conversation U.S.
spoke with Sumit Ganguly, distinguished professor of political science and the
Tagore chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, to
understand more about the election results and what they mean for Indian democracy.
The BJP had talked about
an overwhelming victory, but it seems it will not get a majority. How do you
explain these results?
Part of the answer lies
in the Modi government's failure to realize that while economic benefits had
been substantial, their distribution has been uneven. India has seen a growth
in inequality and persistent unemployment both in rural and urban areas. Unemployment
of those aged 20 to 24 years is at a high of 44.49%. And that is the overall
national number; that data does not tell us that it may be much worse in
certain regions.
The other explanation is
that Modi's exploitation of historic Hindu-Muslim tensions seems to have run
its natural course. You can beat the religious drum - and Modi did with
rhetoric including calling Muslims "infiltrators" - but then the
day-to-day issues of jobs, housing and other such necessities take over, and
these are the things people care about the most.
BJP made a
miscalculation, in my analysis. It failed to realize that in a country where
only 11.3% of children get adequate nutrition, Hindu pride cannot be eaten -
ultimately, it's the price of potatoes and other essentials that matter.
Let's talk about Uttar
Pradesh, the northern Indian state with 80 parliamentary seats. It plays a
crucial role in any national election, and Modi and his alliance are set to
lose the state. What happened?
It's another example of
the same miscalculation we are seeing nationally by the BJP. The chief minister
of the state,Yogi Adityanath, saw himself as a firebrand Hindu nationalist
leader and likely a successor of Modi.
But he, too, failed to
take into account how his policies were playing out in the poorer segments of
the state's population, who are mainly Muslims and those at the bottom of
India's caste hierarchy.
He pursued grand
infrastructure projects such as new highways and airports, and those might well
have appealed to the middle class - but not to the poor.
Additionally, years of
presiding over a state government that has used police power to suppress
dissent, often those of the poor and marginalized, have taken their toll on
Adityanath's support.
What explains BJP's
inroads into the southern state of Kerala, where it is on course to make
history by winning a parliamentary seat for the first time?
The gains in the south
are perplexing and will require more data on voting patterns for a more
accurate analysis.
Historically, the BJP
has not been able to make inroads into the southern states for a number of
reasons. These include linguistic subnationalism owing to the hostility toward
Hindi.
The other issue in the
south is that the practice of Hinduism is quite different, including festivals
and other regional traditions. The BJP's vision of Hinduism is based on the
"great tradition" of northern India, which believes in the trinity of
Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva as the creator, the sustainer and the destroyer gods.
The southern states are
also engines of economic growth and end up subsidizing the poorer states of the
north. As a consequence, there is resentment against the BJP, which has long
had its political base in northern India.
In July 2023, 26
opposition parties formed a coalition called INDIA - the Indian National
Developmental and Inclusive Alliance - to challenge the BJP in the election.
Were they given a fair chance?
No, the playing field
was far from level. The mass media has been mostly co-opted by the ruling BJP
to advance its agenda. Apart from one or two regional newspapers, all the
national dailies scrupulously avoid any criticism of the BJP, and the major
television channels mostly act as cheerleaders of the government's policies.
A number of intelligence
agencies are alleged to have been used for blatantly partisan purposes against
the opposition parties. Political leaders have been jailed on charges that may
prove to be dubious. For example, Arvind Kejriwal, the highly popular chief
minister of New Delhi, was charged with alleged improprieties in the allocation
of liquor licenses and jailed just days after election dates were announced.
Despite the electoral
losses, Modi is expected to return as prime minister for a third term. Given
that the BJP got just two seats in the 1984 elections, what factors led to the
party's meteoric rise?
The BJP has built a
solid organizational base across the country, unlike the Indian National
Congress, the principal opposition party. And the Congress party has done
little to revitalize its political foundations, which had eroded in the 1970s
after then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a state of emergency and a
non-Congress government came into power for the first time.
The BJP has also
appealed to the sentiments of the majority Hindu population through slogans
that paint India's principal minority, Muslims, as the source of myriad
societal problems. Hate crimes against Muslims and other minorities surged
across India over the past few years.
Finally, the BJP also
benefited from economic reforms that the earlier Congress government had set in
motion from the 1990s, including a national goods and services tax and the
privatization of the loss-making, state-owned airline, Air India, thereby contributing
to substantial economic growth in India.
In December 1992, Hindu
nationalists destroyed the 16th-century Babri Mosque. How crucial was that to
BJP's rise to power? And what should we read into BJP losing its seat in
Ayodhya?
The destruction of the
Babri Mosque certainly galvanized an important segment of the Hindu electorate
and led to a growth in support for the BJP. In 1999 - just seven years after
the event - the BJP first came to power in a coalition government in which it
had 182 out of 543 seats in the Indian Parliament. Two national elections
later, in 2014, Modi assumed office as the prime minister with a clear-cut
majority of 282 seats.
In January 2024, just a
few months before the election, Modi inaugurated a newly constructed temple in
Ayodhya, the site of the Babri Mosque. It was a carefully stage-managed event
with an eye on votes.
However, BJP lost its
seat in Ayodhya. It's possible that all the fanfare around the new temple
appealed to people outside of Ayodhya - but not to the city's residents who
continued to deal with waste mismanagement and other issues.
What's next for Modi?
And what do the results tell us about Indian democracy?
It's certainly possible
that Modi will form the government with coalition partners. I believe that
Modi, as an astute politician, will most likely learn from this setback and
adapt his tactics to new realities.
The results might also
be a useful corrective - the Indian voter has once again demonstrated that he
or she might be willing to put up with some things but not others.
Indian voters have
demonstrated in the past that when they see democracy being threatened, they
tend to punish leaders with autocratic tendencies. We saw this when the late
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suffered a crushing defeat in the elections in
1977. The elections followed a state of emergency that Gandhi had imposed on
the country, suspending all civil liberties. Back then, it was India's poor who
voted her out of power.
This time around, we
might need to wait on additional electoral data about how particular caste and
income groups voted.
This article was updated
on June 5, 2024, with the final election results and other developments.
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