Narendra Modi will be sworn in for a third term as the Prime Minister of India on Sunday After winning the post again in India’s crucial 2024 elections. But this week’s election dealt a stunning blow to Modi’s dominance and will likely curb his autocratic tendencies.
There was no serious doubt that Modi would be at the top; He faced no credible opposition in the last two elections. And he heads into this year’s six-week standoff election extensively expected To further consolidate his hold on Indian politics.
But surprisingly, he didn’t: not only did Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lose a large number of parliamentary seats to a resurgent opposition coalition, but it also lost big in states where it enjoyed huge popularity, including India’s Uttar Pradesh. populous state Modi campaigned on the promise of winning more than 400 seats, which would give his coalition more than enough power to amend the constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority, or 362 seats. Although he won this year’s contest, he has for now failed in his ambition to further consolidate power.
And that has real consequences: He will likely face new constraints on his increasingly authoritarian leadership thanks to an anti-renewal coalition — and perhaps even from within his own coalition.
Modi is still a popular politician, but the BJP has failed to deliver on the economic front for many Indians, from farmers to young university graduates. “It’s clear that one thing the opposition has done very well is focus on things like unemployment and inflation,” Rohini Pandey, director of Yale University’s Center for Economic Growth, told Vox.
Modi “has been in power for 10 years,” Milan Vaishnab, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox. “He made some very lofty promises. And running into personality culture after 10 years is harder than it was the first time or the second time … there’s no dominant kind of emotional issue in the ether. People are asking, ‘Well, what have you done for me lately?’
Such messaging — about people’s material concerns rather than the Hindu nationalism and culture of personality that characterized the campaigns of Modi and the BJP — helped the once-dominant Congress party led by political scion Rahul Gandhi and its coalition partners to a surprise victory. in Parliament and across the country.
It is too early to say whether these elections will move the country away from Hindutva, or the Hindu supremacist ideology championed by the BJP; The opposition alliance is untested and can be brittle and fragile. And, again, Modi still wins, as evidenced by his impending inauguration on Sunday. But the bigger picture is that, at least for now, the Indian electorate is pushing back against its authoritarian and populist policies and reasserting the democratic principles, including secularism, on which its constitution is based.
Look at Uttar Pradesh to understand how big a deal this is
The BJP’s strongholds are traditionally in the poor northern states, such as Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (UP for short), which are India’s most populous states and The Lok Sabha has the largest number of seats, equivalent to the US House of Representatives. It was the BJP’s massive defeat in UP that produced perhaps the biggest surprise of the election. Going into the contest, many experts believed that Modi and his party could not lose the state where it had pursued an existentialist Hindu nationalist goal, building a temple to Lord Rama on the remains of the Babri Masjid. A one-storied mosque destroyed by rioters in 1992. That riot, expressly approved by the local authority, raised the BJP’s profile and led to a decades-long court battle over whether the Ram Mandir could be built. In the face of protests, Modi consecrated the temple earlier this year.
The BJP also lost seats in Maharashtra, the coastal state of Mumbai – one of India’s most politically and economically important cities – as well as the agricultural states of Haryana, Rajasthan and Punjab. All three states have been rocked by massive farmers’ protests that have severely dented Modi’s credibility there.
But the party’s defeat in UP is most symbolic and politically significant; In terms of American politics, it would be similar to former President Donald Trump losing Texas or Florida in this year’s upcoming elections.
“U.P.’s loss means that he has fallen below the number of parliamentary seats in the Lok Sabha, the majority,” Ashutosh Varshani, director of Brown University’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, told Vox. “UP was critical to that.”
Paul Kenny, professor of political science at the Australian Catholic University, told Vox that inflation and lack of employment were primarily the cause of the BJP’s losses.
“So like Trump, in a way, he really got hit with Covid,” he said. “Inflation has really kind of gone through the roof, and employment – particularly urban unemployment and youth unemployment – also [been a] Because so when you see inflation of about 6 percent, and food inflation is even higher, maybe 8 percent, it really affects the poor. And inflation in particular, especially in developing countries, is a really strong indicator of incumbent re-election success.”
But there were other issues, including Muslim and marginalized caste people’s concerns about their constitutional protections under Modi. BJP strategy Silence the critics through arrested And the threat may be starting to wear on people, though it’s unclear how much it has affected their choices at the polls.
“It qualifies as an environment of fear,” Varshni said. “But the atmosphere of fear is not such that it will prevent them from going to the polls. No, they will go and vote. It’s blocking the conversation before what it’s doing.” That climate of fear may have contributed to surprising results — politicians and pollsters couldn’t predict that people would vote against the BJP because they weren’t saying it as loudly.
Gandhi’s campaign filtered voters’ concerns — about the economy, their rights, and widespread inequality — through the lens of the Constitution. The opposition had argued that if the BJP won a majority in Parliament, it would make adverse constitutional amendments, Varshni said. “At every rally – every rally – Rahul Gandhi had a copy of the Constitution in hand.”
This concern may have alienated many voters from marginalized castes from the BJP as they have few rights and protections under the Constitution. like a group Dalits, OBCs (Other Backward Castes)And Scheduled Tribes — generally, though not always, still the Hindu majority in India — were socially oppressed and suffered from lack of educational and employment opportunities as well as lack of political representation. India’s democratic constitution guarantees certain rights and opportunities for these groups, including representation quotas in politics. Although the BJP has previously managed to unite Hindus as a political bloc across castes with its Hindutva policies, anti-caste politics could have a significant impact in UP.
After 10 years, Modi will face some obstacles in his rule
All in all BJP In the Lok Sabha it lost 63 of the seats it previously held. That means, although the BJP still has more seats than any other party in the lower house of parliament, it does not have a majority. Together with its alliance partners, the BJP still has a 293-seat majority, but not enough to make the constitutional amendments unchallenged. Modi and the BJP will now face more friction – both from the opposition and from potential alliances that were formed as an insurance policy during his campaign.
The BJP campaigned in alliance with two regional secular parties, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Janata Dal (United), or JDU, to form the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). How they will govern together under Modi remains to be seen.
The leadership of TDP and JDU parties do not see eye to eye with Modi on some important issues. JDU’s Nitish Kumar wants a caste census across the country (which the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has also supported) that would give the government a better idea of how to allocate resources, programs and political representation, especially for marginalized castes. But that turn to caste politics threatens Modi’s message of caste-Hindu solidarity against other groups. TDP The leadership also promised protection and rights for Muslims In the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh – something Modi had previously promised to scrap.
This could make the NDA coalition fragile, and Modi’s desire to stay in power gives the JDU and TDP enough leverage to extract their states’ demands from the central government.
“Modi now has to rely on many regional partners and state parties,” Kenny said. “And the BJP, even at the height of Modi’s power to win votes with charisma, was still dependent on buying the support of small coalitions — so able to deliver products, provide patronage, effectively buy votes through distribution. Whether it’s a thing [like] Rations and fuel subsidies, and all those kinds of things that go on in the day-to-day politics of India. It’s just back to front.”
Moreover, since there is now a full opposition party, “Parliament will once again become a place of vigorous debate and contestation,” Varshni said. BJP cannot push through legislation They did with the recent criminal code reforms Without controversy.
But the opposition coalition is untested, and may split over time, Vaishnav said. “These are parties that are at each other’s throats and are very competitive with each other in the states where they have a real presence. And they have managed to let bygones be bygones, in order to fight this election. But once the election spotlight is off, can they continue this mode of collaboration and cooperation? [having] Have short-term goals been achieved?
Vaishnav said, though this election is important, it is far from the end of BJP or Modi. “[Modi] He is an incredibly shrewd marketer and politician with an incredible amount of charisma and goodwill among the public.”
Kenny said populist and personality-driven politics are on the rise around the world, partly because of the decline of traditional political parties and the institutions that support them. Modi is part of that wave. But this year’s election showed that in a democratic society, anyway—there are limits to the tendency toward populism and authoritarianism.
