SUPRIYO CHATTERJEEAfter the Indian elections, Modi’s highway exits into a cul-de-sac

Supriyo Chatterjee, June 14,2024

The results of the recent Indian parliamentary elections have come like the blessings of a stingy, malevolent god: the Hindu nationalists will rule but only just; the dispirited Opposition can do battle again but they must plan smart; the cowering minorities have some relief but only for now and the institutions of state are agonising if they can stand tall this time or whether to keep crawling.

After a decade in power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a commanding presence but his Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, the BJP) lost its majority and a fifth of its seats this time, despite pouring money, seizing the funds of the main opposition Congress party and banishing it and other rivals from television and most of the print media. It will have to depend on its regional allies to keep ruling but they know Modi has a habit of using and destroying them. The BJP took major knocks in its strongholds of north and west India, which have some of the biggest and most populous states, losing even in Ayodhya, the town where a historic mosque was destroyed and a temple built on its ruins so as to develop the area as Hinduism’s Vatican. The ruling party gained in the east and south of the country, where it has an uncertain presence, but where it lost has been more dispiriting than where it won against regional parties.

The Congress and its opposition allies have doubled their seats although they had to fight on minimal resources, sometimes with crowdfunding, all the while being harassed or ignored by the mainstream media. The Hindu nationalists were boastful of their coming victory and most Indians were inclined to believe them. Mr Modi even declared he was of divine birth and while he could not dial god directly,  the almighty had surely chosen him to do what he does anyway. Confident that the gods were holding up a protective umbrella for him, he proclaimed victory in advance. Then as if straight out of Jose Saramago’s ‘Seeing’, the citizens decided without any organisation, planning or conspiracy to vote en masse, not blank as in the novel, but against the ruling party. It came late and silently like a lethal undercurrent in a searing summer, as unanticipated and inexplicable to the ruling party as the synchronised twisting and turning of a school of fish or a flock of birds without any apparent leader or command.

Pariplab Chakraborty, The Wire

Reality got the better of the spider’s web of illusion crafted by Modi for more than a decade now – that India was taking giant steps to becoming a superpower, that it was respected on the world stage and feared because of his muscular and decisive leadership, that the time for the Hindus had come, that the opposition was weak, effete because it was secular and incapable of ruling the country and that India was on way to reclaiming its lost glory as a Hindu empire. He personalised everything around him; he cast a long shadow in which everything whithered; he bent all the institutions to his will; he terrorised rivals in his own party and jailed many of his opponents outside; bought off those who were available for auctioning and blurred the distinction between the state and himself.

The BJP wanted a big majority to alter the secular Constitution and change India to a de jure Hindu country. The lower Hindu castes took fright at this, calculating they would lose even the few constitutional rights they nominally enjoy. His poorer admirers, once seduced by Hindu nationalism, were disenchanted by inflation, jobless growth and the neglect of government health, education and transport systems on which they depend. Rumours have always been a potent tool in Indian politics, right from the anti-colonial movement, and this time it found an eager host in people battered by economic hardships, that a victorious Modi would deprive them of constitutional and livelihood rights.

Pariplab Chakraborty

The field of godmen and women is a crowded one in India but Modi remains the Great Pretender of corporate-religious nationalism. This is a watershed moment but it is difficult to foresee which way the water will flow. Will he be weakened by all the compromises he must make, or will he choose undisguised autocracy? Can the opposition hold together and will Rahul Gandhi of the Nehru dynasty finally find popular acceptance as Modi’s alternative? Will political Hinduism be able to maintain its own unity? How does the government increase social spending without slowing down the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who finance the Hindu Right?

The future might be too uncertain even for the card-reading parrots of the street astrologers, but the general drift of opinion is that the fire of popular resistance will at least burn again after it came close to being extinguished.