When the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, took the stage on Tuesday night to proclaim himself the winner in the largest elections on the planet, and announce the formation of his third consecutive Government, there was not a word of self-criticism in his speech. Along the way, however, he had left his aura as a strong, magnetic and unbeatable leader at the polls. The shock has been considerable, a direct message from the citizens who have always, since his time as chief minister of Gujarat (2001-2014), governed without the need for pacts.
For the first time in his political career, Modi, 73, will have to lead a Government with his party in the minority in the Lok Sabha (the lower House, which will be in charge of investing him); The support of his coalition partners, who have assured this Wednesday that they will be at his side, will be necessary, and could make him falter at any moment; He will also have a growing and recovering opposition on his heels and marking the man. “Today’s victory is the victory of the largest democracy in the world,” Modi said in the speech. Perhaps self-criticism was implicit in those words.
The “Modi 3.0” Government, as he has baptized it in the campaign, will be, on the one hand, historic, because it will make him, when he is sworn in – this Saturday, according to the Indian press – the first leader to be elected for the third consecutive time. at the head of the country since the times of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first head of Government after independence. On the other hand, the mandate is expected to be very different from that of the last decade, characterized by the growing polarization of the country and the growing harassment of the opposition, civil society, and the media, in addition to the partisan use of state agencies, according to international organizations.
In the next five years of this new Modi with clipped wings, a veteran politician who has tasted for the first time the aftertaste of mortality at the polls, will have to face the challenge that the sectors that have been silenced will give him; and that includes critical voices within his own party, and the foreseeable turbulence with his government partners.
The setback for Modi is the reflection of numerous dynamics that the Indian press and analysts and academics are trying to unravel in this day of unexpected hangover. These range from the unity effort of the entire opposition with a coalition of more than 20 parties, and its electoral strategy, to a vote of punishment for high unemployment, rampant inequality, the lack of prospects for youth, and the use of a divisive religious discourse.
His party, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People’s Party), has been the most voted (36.5% of the ballots) and will occupy the most seats (240) in the House, but has left more than 60 seats along the way, and it is far from adding half plus one of the 543 seats at stake. Their victory rate for each seat for which a candidate has presented – one of the indicators highlighted by the newspaper Hindustan Times— has suffered a debacle, going from almost 70% in 2019 to 54% in 2024.
Join Morning Express to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
Together with his government partners from the National Democratic Alliance, whose fickle record does not predict absolute loyalty to the Executive, exit polls attributed him up to nearly 400 seats. This was the goal that Modi had also set for himself. The reality has been much more stubborn.
“He will be prime minister, but from a coalition with parties with veto power,” says Sushant Singh, a professor at Yale and a researcher at the Center for Policy Research, an institute based in Delhi. He will be a “lazy and diminished” political leader, he adds. With his authority drastically reduced, he predicts a five-year period with “more questions, more tensions, more pressures and a greater pulse” on the part of all the actors: his party, his coalition partners, the opposition of the Indian alliance, which leads the Congress Party, and the country’s own institutions.
Singh sees two main factors for punishment at the polls. On the one hand, there are the economic policies that Modi has opted for, of which the big tycoons have mainly taken advantage, but without the benefits reaching the most disadvantaged classes, devastated by unemployment (among young people it exceeds 45 %, according to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, a think tank) and rising prices (rice, a basic product, has risen more than 14% in the last year, according to official data). “India is a country as unequal as South Africa,” this analyst emphasizes.
The other factor, closely linked, has to do with one of the electoral strategies that the opposition has exploited. The visible head of the Congress Party, Rahul Gandhi, has spent the campaign accompanied by a book of the Indian Constitution that he showed at every rally. He has accused Modi of wanting to alter, among other things, the constitutional reservations established to positively discriminate against the most disadvantaged social strata. These two issues – the economy, the Constitution – combined are behind the end of an era, according to Singh, who identifies much of Modi’s fugitive vote with poor, agricultural and rural people, many from religious minorities, especially the Muslim, and of the lowest castes.
It is very likely that neither Modi’s past nor the harsh language he used in the campaign helped in the fall. Many in India still remember the 2002 Gujarat riots: when he was chief minister of this state, an outbreak of violence between Muslims and Hindus left more than a thousand people dead, most of them of the Islamic faith; Criticism of his inaction has dogged him ever since (in 2023, a BBC documentary on the matter was banned in India).
His vision of a Hindu nation, in line with the postulates of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an extremist organization linked to the BJP, have also clashed with the secular idea of the country, enshrined in the Constitution. In this campaign, Modi himself has come to affirm that his existence has a divine meaning: “I am convinced that God has sent me with a purpose, and when that purpose is over, my work will be finished.” He has also intensified his divisive language against Muslims: he called them “infiltrators”; he claimed that the Congress party would try to confiscate gold and jewelery from Hindu women; and that the opposition would distribute the country’s wealth among Muslims. Several voters, interviewed over the last week, have expressed their rejection of “biased speeches” towards a certain religious community.
The great setback for Modi’s party has taken place in the three most populous states of India, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal: in them, the BJP has only won 57 seats of the 170 in dispute, almost half of what in 2019 ; The opposition coalition, on the other hand, has more than doubled its numbers, going from 42 to 100. In Uttar Pradesh, a vast rural and mainly agricultural territory, with more than 240 million people, the party with the most votes has been the Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party), one of the strong formations of the opposition alliance. Its leader has focused on expanding the electoral base among lower castes and religious minorities, and has centered the campaign on youth unemployment and constitutional changes.
In Uttar Pradesh is located what is perhaps one of the symbols of Modi’s defeat: the Ram temple. This Hindu sanctuary, built in the city of Ayodhya, on an old mosque demolished by religious fundamentalists in the nineties, was inaugurated by the prime minister in January. The event functioned almost as the opening of the electoral campaign, and elevated the leader’s status among his most fervent followers. For others it was another step on the path to division. On Tuesday it was confirmed that the BJP candidate lost his seat in this constituency against the socialist candidate of the opposition coalition: Awadhesh Prasad, a politician from the lowest rung of the castes.
Follow all the international information onFacebook andxor inour weekly newsletter.
.
.
_
