This year is election year in most of the democratic world, and the largest single contest concluded earlier this month in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in office since 2014, won reelection to another five-year term, but his Bharatiya Janata Party no longer holds a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament. The BJP will now have to work with its coalition partners in government, something it did not have to do in Modi’s first two terms as PM.
The idea that the BJP had hacked Indian democracy has proven incorrect. India is not a tyranny of the Hindu majority. You can read my take on the election results from last week here.
Indian politics can be confusing, and it is extremely complicated. Here’s a roundup of some commentary that I found helpful in understanding the election results.
Pradheep Shanker also wrote about the elections for NR. Read his full piece here. He notes one factor that can be expected to sway elections anywhere in the free world, the economy:
The economy is at the root of BJP’s failure this election cycle. Although it is growing briskly and the stock market is surging, many average Indians feel left behind. Despite India’s impressive economic growth of more than 8 percent annually, distress among rural populations has increased as incomes have fallen amid rising food prices. Despite India’s massive recent modernization, more than 900 million people in the country still live in rural areas, and they vote at very high rates.
The unemployment rate in India rose to 8.1 percent in April from 7.4 percent in March, compared with around 6 percent before the Covid-19 pandemic. Modi first came to power in 2014 on the promise of creating 20 million jobs a year but has fallen far short of that. Even more damaging to the BJP is the fact that government estimates for the latest January–March quarter show that the urban unemployment rate in the 15–29 age group increased to 17 percent, from 16.5 percent in the prior quarter. Young voters came out heavily against the BJP this cycle.
The BJP’s struggles in rural areas were significant. The economic-development message played well in urban areas, but the BJP struggled with farmers. About 40 percent of Indians work in agriculture. That proportion is much too high, and it holds back India’s economic development, which led the BJP to try reforming the agriculture sector in 2020. But the reforms proved very unpopular with farmers, who organized protests against the government. Now they have made their voices heard at the ballot box as well.
The Times of India used the constituency of Amritsar, in the state of Punjab, as a case study. The constituency has rural and urban areas. The BJP candidate did well in the urban areas, but he got walloped in rural areas and lost the election. The BJP lost around 40 seats in agricultural areas, and the BJP agriculture minister, Arjun Munda, lost his seat.
One of the BJP’s populist economic interventions in the lead-up to the elections was a ban on onion exports. “The onion belt farmers of Maharashtra had felt cheated,” the Times of India article said. “A glut caused prices to crash and farmers suffered, but the government chose to ignore their plight.” The BJP lost twelve of the 13 seats in Maharashtra’s onion belt.
While the success of non-BJP parties in rural areas demonstrates that Indian democracy remains highly competitive, it is likely not a good sign for India’s economic development going forward. India needs to increase its agricultural productivity if it wants to become a developed country, a goal that Modi says he wants India to accomplish by 2047, the 100th anniversary of independence from Britain. That’s a symbolic and aspirational goal, but it would nonetheless be a good thing for India to develop faster, as it would lift the living standards of hundreds of millions of people. It can’t hit that goal if 40 percent of people, or 20 percent of people, are still working on farms.
The non-BJP parties, led by Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress, embraced socialism during this campaign. “An opposition victory could turn the world’s fifth-largest economy into Venezuela on the Ganges,” Sadanand Dhume warned in the Wall Street Journal before the election results came out. He continues:
The party’s platform cites the leftist French economist Thomas Piketty and claims that India under Mr. Modi “is more unequal than even under the British Raj.” Congress promises, among other things, to double the amount of free grain the federal government provides poor families, immediately hire three million new government workers, and end a program that shortens military service terms to reduce the burden of pensions on the army.
The party filters all this through a DEI-style identity politics that pits roughly the 70% of the population made up of so-called lower castes against the 30% composed of upper castes. On the campaign trail, Mr. Gandhi promises that his revolution will begin with a caste census to determine the country’s precise social composition. He also proposes a wealth survey to “find out how much injustice has been done.” He regularly rails against big businesses and promises to dole out cash to tens of millions of people.
The fact that that agenda proved appealing to rural voters is not encouraging. Dhume notes that the BJP isn’t great on economics (a point Alex Little made in this article for NR), but at least it isn’t outright anti-business, and BJP budgets have been more fiscally responsible than past Indian governments’.
There were also uniquely Indian factors at play in the election. One of the biggest was the construction of Ram Mandir, a Hindu temple in the city of Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state, and its chief minister is Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest who is seen as possible successor to Modi as leader of the BJP. His brand of politics is even more Hindu-nationalist than Modi’s, and the construction of Ram Mandir was a major part of the BJP’s platform nationally.
The BJP had won 62 of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats in the Lok Sabha last election. This time it won 33. Most stunningly, it lost the constituency that contains Ayodhya. What was supposed to be a Hindu power play in a Hindu area backfired tremendously.
Two-term incumbent MP Lallu Singh of the BJP was defeated by Awadhesh Prasad of the Samajwadi Party, an Uttar Pradesh-based socialist party. “The BJP left no stone unturned to seek votes in the name of Ram temple. During polls, the party made sure all the prominent leaders associated with it, governors from BJP-ruled states and other dignitaries kept visiting Ram temple, for their political gains. But the local people realised they were being misled,” Prasad said after his victory.
The Statesman, an Indian newspaper, reported on these sentiments among voters in Ayodhya:
A shopkeeper Jeeshan Ahmed says that Lallu Singh never listened to the voice of the public. “Whenever the public went to him when their shops and houses were being demolished during the construction of Ram Path and for compensation as people go to their representatives for such issues, he ignored them saying that this is a matter of the government,” he said.
Businessman Ajay Nishad said that Ram temple was built in Ayodhya, development also took place, all this is fine but during the construction of Ram Path, the shops of poor shopkeepers were demolished and they were not given proper compensation.
Street vendors were chased away with sticks. All this indicates why the poor class did not vote for Lallu Singh. The biggest weapon that the poor have is his vote and that is what the public did.
The failure of the BJP’s religious politics also showed up in the resurgence of the Muslim vote in this election. India is roughly 80 percent Hindu. There are many divisions among India’s Hindus, along the lines of caste, region, and language, so they vote for many different parties. But if one party can unite enough of the Hindu vote, it doesn’t even need to worry about the Muslim vote, despite there being almost 200 million Indian Muslims. That has been the BJP’s gambit: Get enough Hindus to vote for you that the Muslims don’t matter.
That strategy seemed to work well enough in 2014 and 2019, the two previous elections, leading to fears that Muslims would be effectively shut out of Indian politics. But they have kept voting and this time weakened the BJP significantly.
They mostly don’t do so by electing Muslims to the Lok Sabha (although 26 seats will be held by Muslims). Rather, “they have always looked for Hindu leaders they could trust,” writes Shekhar Gupta for the Print. From independence until the elections in 1989, Muslims were part of the voting coalition that kept the Indian National Congress in power. In state and local elections, different coalitions with various slices of the Hindu population formed.
This election saw a return to that style of politics for non-BJP parties. They did so very subtly, Gupta argues. Most of them did not nominate many Muslim candidates. “The effort was to play down or mask their dependence on Muslims. The Muslim clergy, radical voices, all stayed quiet. The BJP was denied the space to play with polarisation.”
“In my book, this is a good example of the shift in the Muslim mind to the old normal,” Gupta writes. “A return to parties capable of collecting a sufficient number of Hindu votes to build genuinely secular coalitions and vote banks.”
And voting really is important in India. The results matter, and they are seen as trustworthy. Modi, despite having expected a sole majority for the BJP and still having personal approval ratings over 70 percent, immediately accepted the results and formed his coalition government. This is truly impressive for a country of India’s level of development. In a different article, Gupta noted:
The Indian election system is a global, public common good. Never knock it. For perspective, the Mexican elections, held at the same time as India’s, saw 37 candidates assassinated. Not one was harmed here. Mexico’s per capita income is nearly four times that of India.
The BJP was hoping for 400 seats, and many opinion polls before the election projected it would win over 300 (272 are needed for a majority). It only won 240. One reason for the surprise for the BJP is likely its lack of tolerance for critical press. Modi has never held a press conference as prime minister, and any print or TV interviews are controlled. “When dissent is curbed and too many media outlets become fawning courtiers, the ruling party is denied information about what is going wrong and where dissatisfaction is spreading,” wrote S. A. Aiyar for the Cato Institute. “Fear of retribution prompts bogus praise and oaths of support for the leader, while dissenters prefer to keep silent. The truth only comes out in a secret ballot.”