I t might have seemed like the Bharatiya Janata Party, the party of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, had broken Indian democracy. But the results of India’s general election, announced on Tuesday and Wednesday, show that the BJP isn’t invincible and the Indian opposition remains a viable force to keep elections competitive.
For the first few decades after independence, India didn’t really have competitive elections between political parties. The Indian National Congress, the party that led the independence movement, had a lock on the majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, from the first election in 1951 through the election in 1984, failing to win an outright majority of seats only in the 1977 election.
This was not only a party lineage but a dynasty. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, served until 1964. His father, Motilal, had also been president of the Congress party before independence. Jawaharlal’s daughter, Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma), served as prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. Indira’s son, Rajiv Gandhi, succeeded her as prime minister, holding the office until his assassination in 1989.
Rajiv’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, was president of the Congress party long after his death. Their son, Rahul Gandhi, is the current face of the party despite not being its formal leader. Rahul’s sister, Priyanka Gandhi, is general secretary.
Indian voters gave the party led by the Nehru-Gandhi family majorities for a long time, but that changed in 1989, when coalition governments became the norm. This was seen as a step toward democratic maturity, with real inter-party competition for the first time. No party won an outright majority in the Lok Sabha from then until 2014, when the BJP accomplished that feat and Modi became prime minister.
He did so while absolutely stomping the Congress party, which won only 44 seats that year. Never before in Indian history had the voters so solidly rejected the Congress, and the BJP would not need to work with any other parties to form a government. The BJP further expanded its solo majority in the 2019 elections. One of its slogans during this year’s election was Abki Baar 400 Paar, “This time surpassing 400,” which would be an incredible majority in the 543-seat chamber.
The BJP under Modi has governed as a Hindu-nationalist party, downplaying the secular character of the Indian state that Nehru had sought to cultivate. In a country where roughly four out of five people are Hindu, this strategy has proven successful. Modi is one of the most popular leaders in the world, with approval ratings regularly above 70 percent.
Tyranny of the majority is hardly an unfamiliar concept, and India has shown signs of that during Modi’s tenure. There has been persecution of religious minorities, especially Muslims, whom Modi called “infiltrators” on the campaign trail. Freedom of the press has been restricted, with government attempting to silence Modi critics. Rahul Gandhi was briefly removed from the Lok Sabha over criminal charges lodged against him for a campaign speech. Arvind Kejriwal, another opposition leader and chief minister of Delhi, was arrested for allegedly accepting bribes from liquor contractors.
The Supreme Court of India stayed Gandhi’s conviction while he appeals it, allowing him to return to parliament and contest the election. The Congress formed a new alliance of parties to oppose the BJP. And it seems that Indian voters thought the BJP had overstepped.
Despite pre-election polls indicating another large majority for the BJP, it was reduced to a plurality, with the party winning 240 seats where 272 are needed for a majority. The Congress nearly broke triple digits, winning 99 seats and regaining its status as official opposition. The anti-BJP alliance led by the Congress won 234 seats, far surpassing expectations.
Modi will remain prime minister, as his coalition partners give him a majority. He is still the dominant figure in Indian politics, and, considering his popularity, he deserves to be. But this election showed that his party is not invincible and has not hacked Indian democracy through Hindu nationalism.
The BJP’s underperformance was perhaps most striking in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. Its BJP chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, is a Hindu priest who has been floated as a possible Modi successor. The BJP won 62 of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats in the Lok Sabha last election. This time, the BJP won only 33.
India’s second-most populous state, Maharashtra, also saw the BJP losing big. Modi’s party went from 23 seats there to only nine. The Congress went from holding only one of the state’s 48 Lok Sabha seats to holding 13.
Outside observers shouldn’t necessarily be cheering for the Congress party. Its previous decades in power were mostly characterized by socialism, poverty, and effectively pro-Soviet “nonaligned” foreign policy. Rahul Gandhi, rather than learning from market-reform-minded prime ministers from his party, such as P. V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, doubled down on socialism during the campaign. He wanted a census to sort Indians by identity and redistribute wealth along caste lines.
From the U.S. perspective, the Modi government has been bad on Russia, uneven on economics, and good on China. Modi even accepted congratulations on his election win from Lai Ching-te, the president of Taiwan, and said, “I look forward to closer ties” — anathematic words to Beijing’s ears. Rather than indulge typical Third World rhetoric painting the U.S. as a colonial oppressor, India under Modi has viewed the U.S. as an “indispensable partner” and sought closer cooperation.
The U.S. should welcome that relationship with the world’s most populous country, and it should feel more confident now about the status of democracy in it. There are still countless problems with Indian democracy, and there will be for years to come, but the fact remains that more than 600 million people voted in an election with universal adult suffrage and surprised an overconfident ruling party, with results that are accepted and considered trustworthy by Indians and international observers alike.
International spectators to Indian politics have fretted about the death of Indian democracy before. It was far from inevitable that parliamentary democracy would succeed after the communal chaos and bloodshed following Partition. The two-year “Emergency” saw Indira Gandhi rule by decree starting in 1975, but she was thrown out by voters in the 1977 election. India, unlike neighboring Pakistan and many other Third World countries, has never had a military government, despite outsiders’ predictions of this fate after democracy collapsed. And the possibility of a Hindu-nationalist wipeout did not come to pass because the voters decided to chastise Modi while still keeping him as prime minister. Indian democracy, troubled yet strong, continues to plod along.