A new leader who manages to make history even while escaping it
By A.R. | DELHI
IN THE days since May 16th when Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stormed to victory in India’s general election much commentary has wrestled with the idea of history. Most commentators seem to agree that May 2014 marks an historic moment. One reason is the scale of Mr Modi’s landslide victory, which scooped up 282 seats for the BJP and thus an absolute majority in parliament. That is first time since 1984 that any party has won a majority for itself. It is also the first time ever that a party other than Congress has done so. Conversely, the defeat for Congress is far worse than anything in its long history of dominating Indian politics: it won fewer than a sixth the seats of its rival, getting just 44. In much of north India, the political heartland, Congress was wiped out. Some correctly ask if its eventual recovery (assuming that will happen one day) would require being rid of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has been at its heart for so long.
Yet the size of Mr Modi’s victory, and Congress’s defeat, tells only part of the dramatic story. The immense dissatisfaction with Congress was undeniable. Voters were unhappy with high inflation, slowing growth, weak leadership, corruption and much more. Such voter grumpiness, usually summed up as “anti-incumbency”, is all but inevitable for a party that had been in power for a decade. Yet more has happened here. Take, for example, the utter defeat of the Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati, the Dalit leader in Uttar Pradesh. She was not an incumbent and her party managed to collect some 20% of the votes cast in the state. Indeed, after the BJP and Congress, it got the most votes nationally of any party in the election. Yet it failed to win a single constituency. By contrast the BJP not only collected a huge tally of votes but also turned those efficiently into seats. With 31% of the national vote-share, they captured nearly 52% of the seats in parliament.
That suggests an important shift in Indian politics. The BJP did extraordinarily well because it approached the election in a far more professional, strategic and efficient way than its rivals. The methods it employed were modern, and the skill at which Mr Modi and his fellow leaders conducted their campaigns rivalled the sort of performances put in by American presidential contenders (and with similar quantities of money to spend). Rahul Gandhi of Congress, in the end, proved to be a hopeless amateur, poorly advised without even decent media-management skills or the ability to present a strong campaign message. Many regional figures proved similarly out of date in their campaigning. The BJP’s roadshows and rallies, the door-knocking by volunteers, the influence on India’s press and television channels, the ability to set the agenda of discussion, all went to making the election a remarkably one-sided affair. The chief minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar, tendered his resignation on May 17th, after his party was flattened by the BJP in the state. (Assam’s chief minister, from Congress, has also offered to quit.) That was not because of anti-incumbency—voters in Bihar are happy with the work Mr Kumar has been doing—but because the BJP’s campaign was vastly superior.
Mr Modi in his first speeches after his victory has sounded magnanimous and made the right noises about running the country for all, bringing everyone along. He also mentioned, only partly accurately, that the BJP’s success transcended caste politics and religious appeals. If that were entirely true, it would be another reason to call this election result historic. In fact the BJP did make some use of caste and religion, as when Mr Modi played up his “other backward classes” background while campaigning in Uttar Pradesh, or when he criticized Bangladeshi (read: Muslim) infiltrators in Assam and West Bengal. It is troubling, too, that the new parliament will have the fewest Muslim members of any since 1952, while the ruling BJP has not a single Muslim MP among its cohort of 282; Muslims are reckoned to comprise at least 14% of the Indian population.
But largely Mr Modi told the truth: the BJP’s manifesto and Mr Modi’s speeches emphasised economic and development matters. The victory he achieved is more the result of his talk of strong government and improvements to the material lives of voters than anything else. That is encouraging. It suggests that he will now seek to govern in a way that encourages economic growth, job creation and better infrastructure, along with further reductions in poverty and inflation. Mr Modi has been dropping strong hints that he hopes to remain in power not only for the current five-year term, but to win re-election and reshape India’s economy and political landscape. In other words, he is considering his long-term prospects by keeping in mind the rise of a powerful new constituency that will only gather more influence as the years pass: the young, urban, educated and impatient set of voters who aspire for material gains to their lives. We argued before that such voters, for whom there is only “one God, that is GDP”, will increasingly decide the outcome of Indian elections. Mr Modi and the BJP look set to corner their support.
What comes next? On May 20th the BJP will meet, apparently to elect Mr Modi formally as their leader. That, apparently, is a precursor to the formation of a government which is going to include the immediate allies of the party that make up the National Democratic Alliance. It could, too, be made from of a wider coalition, since the BJP—if it is to push through legislative changes quickly—will need additional help from other parties that control powerful states, and to win more support in the upper house of parliament.
Unease persists about the role of the Hindu-nationalist right, whose footsoldiers undoubtedly helped a great deal in getting BJP candidates elected. With Mr Modi having been an activist member in the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since he was a boy, some on the right have expectations that he will pursue an agenda of Hindutva (for example getting a temple erected in Ayodhya, or changing the constitutional status of Muslim-majority Kashmir). Others look for evidence that nationalism of a protectionist variety will have a strong influence on Mr Modi’s policies. For example over the weekend BJP spokesmen have been saying that the party still intends to reverse an existing policy that would allow foreign investors to open supermarkets in larger cities, and even then only under limited circumstances.
Mr Modi would be wiser to downplay the influence of both sorts of nationalists. To sustain confidence that he can get the economy growing faster will require pulling off some difficult feats, not least attracting more foreign capital into a host of industries which could include insurance, banking, defence and many parts of infrastructure. He needs to send a clear message, as he picks ministers and begins to offer policy, that India aspires to become strong on the back of economic growth, more international trade, deeper global engagement—and not by promoting nationalist tendencies at home. He has a decent record of reaching out to other countries, notably Japan, in his time as chief minister of Gujarat. Since his victory on May 16th he has fielded calls from Barack Obama, David Cameron and a host of other global well-wishers eager to engage India internationally. Mr Obama for example made clear that India’s prime minister would be welcome to visit the United States. The Americans in particular want a decisive break from an earlier period, when interaction with Mr Modi concerned his record in handling communal violence in his state in 2002. Mr Modi in other words, by winning so emphatically on May 16th, appears both to have made history and escaped it. That is no mean feat at all.
