India Steps Back From the Brink

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won a third successive term, becoming India’s only leader since its first, Jawaharlal Nehru, to accomplish such a feat. But no crescendo of acclamation greeted Modi’s swearing in on June 10. Instead, he enters his 11th year in office much weaker than before and with his authority badly dented. His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to secure a majority in elections held from April to June, winning only 240 seats in the 543-member lower house of Parliament. Unlike in his prior two terms, Modi now needs allies—principally two regional parties, the Janata Dal (United) from Bihar and the Telugu Desam Party from Andhra Pradesh—to stay in power.

Worse for Modi, he suffered a double personal blow in the elections. His party lost a majority of seats in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, once considered an impregnable fortress for his brand of Hindu nationalism and identity politics. It was only this January that Modi consecrated a temple in the state to the Hindu deity Ram, in a ceremony that both represented the fulfilment of decades of Hindu nationalist agitation and conjured a euphoric triumph for the prime minister. And for the first time, the party also did not do well in constituencies where Modi spent time campaigning. Voters seemed to be turned off by what was one of the most vicious and vitriolic BJP campaigns of recent years, replete with explicit hate speech directed at India’s minority Muslim community.

But while Modi and the BJP struggled, Indian democracy has triumphed against the odds. The election was fought against the backdrop of growing Hindu nationalism and deepening authoritarianism. The government routinely targeted political opponents and had presided over the degradation of the institutions of democracy—including the judiciary, the election commission, and the media—in a way that promised to make this year’s polls among the most unfair and one-sided the country had ever seen. Observers anticipated a sweeping victory for Modi that would have all but converted India into a one-leader, one-ideology, and one-party state.

But that did not happen. The principal opposition party, the Congress Party, won 99 seats. Its leader, Rahul Gandhi, has emerged from this election much more formidable and with his career revived after a decade of setbacks. But more important, the BJP’s humbling at the ballot box has saved Indian democracy. It has once again made India’s political landscape competitive. Revived competition will embolden both independent institutions and civil society. It will force Indian businesspeople who had unequivocally backed Modi’s agenda to hedge their political bets. It will give the opposition the parliamentary strength and moral authority to impose checks and balances on the government. At a time when India was becoming a watchword for democratic backsliding, the election will begin to repair the damage that has been done under Modi to the country’s global reputation.

NO LONGER LONELY AT THE TOP

For almost 25 years, whether as chief minister (the elected leader of a state) of Gujarat or as prime minister of India, Modi has enjoyed practically unchallenged authority. He now faces the prospect of having to negotiate with allies and those parts of the BJP that feel more emboldened to question him. That might be tricky for a leader who has personalized politics to a remarkable extent. Modi has seldom shared credit with his colleagues. He presents most government schemes as his personal guarantee, with his face adorning COVID-19 vaccination cards and bags of rice. And even a routine global meeting, such as the G-20 summit, which India hosted in 2023, is styled as a triumph of his singular leadership. That outsized personality could get in the way of running a coalition government. Nevertheless, Modi is capable of deft dealmaking and maneuvering. He had the savvy, after all, to engineer an alliance with two significant coalition partners ahead of elections.

But can his alliance partners trust him? Even if his personality does not prove an obstacle, the suspicions of his allies might. There are at least two potential stumbling blocks here. The first is that as the BJP consolidates its power, it typically gains an advantage over its alliance partners, by hook or by crook. Alliances allow the BJP to broaden its appeal and acceptability in the states home to its allies; eventually the party begins to make inroads into the base of those alliance partners. In this way, the BJP has in the past used its power to break up smaller parties, attracting legislators through the allure of its power and integrating them within the BJP. Neither of Modi’s principal allies, N. Chandrababu Naidu, the leader of the Telugu Desam Party, or Nitish Kumar, the head of the Janata Dal (United), will be unaware of these dangers. If they let the BJP get too successful, they put their own growth at risk.

Modi’s humbling at the ballot box has once again made Indian politics competitive.

The second potential obstacle is ideological. There is nothing in the track record of either of his main coalition partners to suggest that they have a principled opposition to authoritarianism. They will not forsake their place in the government over any commitment to civil liberties and institutional integrity and any discomfort with the BJP’s targeting of minorities and unfair treatment of opposition leaders. But they could clash over the BJP’s social agenda. With Kumar, this contradiction is obvious when it comes to the issue of caste, the system of social stratification that persists perniciously in India even though it is formally outlawed. One of Kumar’s principal demands has been the conducting of a nationwide caste census so that government benefits can be better apportioned to take into account the developmental and demographic characteristics of different castes. The BJP is not averse to using caste in politics. But the demand for a census has so far been anathema to the party’s ideological agenda.

The BJP seeks to consolidate Hindus and elide caste distinctions, thereby cementing a large block of voters. Fresh conflicts among castes over access to government benefits will undermine the BJP’s attempt to project Hindu unity. The more caste becomes a basis of distributive politics, the more it militates against Hindu consolidation. The opposition has backed a caste census, as has Kumar’s main opponent in Bihar, convinced that mobilization along caste lines enjoys popular legitimacy and carries the imprimatur of social justice. In principle, the BJP could simply compromise on this issue and solidify its social justice credentials. But compromising would weaken Modi’s authority within his own party’s base and dilute the BJP’s claims to a distinctive ideology. For Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), it will not be easy to face voters in Bihar if the party reneges on this issue. Caste will test the durability of this alliance in the coming years.

With the Telugu Desam Party, the contradiction is less obvious. Naidu’s technology-inspired high modernist development vision aligns with Modi’s. So long as Naidu can secure enough resources for his state, he ought to be happy to play along. But the BJP’s Hindu nationalism remains a potential source of tension. Naidu is not a principled opponent of the ideology—he has, after all, allied with the BJP with his eyes wide open. But political imperatives within his state, Andhra Pradesh, may make it harder for him to stomach the more glaring ideological excesses of the ruling party. In 2004, Naidu lost an election in part because he was not strong enough in distancing himself from the bloody riots in Gujarat in 2002. According to the most conservative estimates, that violence left around 1,000 people dead (mostly Muslims), and it occurred under the watch of Modi, who then headed the state.

THE TENACIOUS IDEOLOGY

Modi and his party have weathered storms before. The narrative winds may be blowing against the BJP, but the party remains a formidable force. Its vote share remained almost constant between the last election in 2019 and this year’s contest. Its electoral losses in northern India were softened by a clean sweep in the eastern state of Odisha. The party also increased its vote share in southern India, even though it was less successful in winning seats there. (It did, however, pick up its first ever seat in the southern state of Kerala, one of India’s most religiously diverse states long thought to be inhospitable to the BJP’s majoritarian agenda.) The BJP could interpret the outcome of the election as a mere tactical setback rather than as a repudiation of its core Hindu nationalist platform, which implicitly demands the political and cultural marginalization of India’s 200 million Muslims. Modi’s new cabinet, for instance, does not contain a single Muslim. But the tension between placating the core demands of the party’s base and overtly moderating the party’s stance to accommodate allies is not going to be easy for the BJP to overcome.

Optimists point to the rule of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s prime minister from 1998 to 2004, as evidence that a BJP premier can successfully moderate the party’s ideology in the service of building and maintaining a coalition. But it is often forgotten that that experiment ended in failure. Even Vajpayee, widely considered a relative moderate, failed to reprimand Modi over the Gujarat riots in 2002. In the process, he gave Hindu nationalism a longer leash. He legitimized the idea that there are no penalties for political violence, fomenting hate, or empowering vigilantism. The BJP has allowed this culture of reckless impunity to continue.

The elections have humbled Modi, but Hindu nationalism is not down and out. Its base in civil society remains strong. It has made prejudice against Muslims the new normal, especially in urban India. The nature of the BJP and the kind of committed Hindu nationalist politicians the BJP has empowered make it unlikely that these militant tendencies will wither away. In the abstract, the election has demonstrated that targeting and scapegoating minorities works less well in Indian politics than previously imagined. But Modi could find a way to activate latent Hindu nationalism with a fresh issue or a specific conflict, most notably over further demands to seize and dismantle the mosques adjacent to temples in sacred Hindu cities such as Mathura and Varanasi. There is no guarantee that the BJP will not try to capitalize on a successor set of issues, perhaps arising out of control of more temples, local outbreaks of Hindu-Muslim communal violence, or the continued threat of Islamist terrorism. After all, consolidating the Hindu vote is a priority for the BJP.

But with its hold over Parliament weakened, the BJP also needs to accommodate its allies. Where the sweet spot lies, whether it can manage both imperatives, is something the BJP will have to discover. The potential for political strain and conflict remains significant.

A FINE BALANCE

Although it was seismic in many ways, the election may not lead to much change in Indian policy. In principle, the results will encourage leaders to consider more seriously the structural weaknesses of the Indian economy. In his campaign, Modi trumpeted India’s high growth rate, his welfare schemes (including free food, gas connections, toilets, access to water, and cash transfers), vast infrastructure expansion, and relative macroeconomic stability. But voters were not convinced. They were rightly disquieted by other trends that have marked the Indian economy in recent years, including high unemployment, wage stagnation, flattening levels of consumption, and widening inequality.

If there is one overriding message from this election, it is that India needs more balanced growth. Modi cannot expect to stitch together a coalition just on welfare schemes. This is not just a lesson for the prime minister. Incumbent state governments of other parties that have done remarkably well by expanding welfare programs and direct cash transfers during the last decade—in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Odisha—lost heavily in the elections. Even the opposition Congress Party had a foretaste of this trend in 2023, when it lost state elections in Rajasthan, despite having presided over an extensive welfare agenda. It is almost as if it is impossible to placate the voters permanently. Rebalancing the economy requires more than welfare transfers.

The ruling coalition may well realize that the only sensible option is to double down on the reforms necessary for sustainable growth: changes to the education system to produce the kind of human capital the economy needs, greater investment in research, more clarity in taxation, less favoritism in granting special deals to particular businesses, clearer trade policy, less arbitrary law enforcement, more credible environmental regulation, and more thorough decentralization. There are no deep ideological differences within the coalition government over these issues. But accomplishing these tasks requires a reorientation in the style of governance: greater transparency, more attention to detail, a willingness to find consensus, and a more participatory administrative style—all habits that have proved anathema to Modi. This reorientation will not be easy to accomplish.

On foreign policy, India’s basic orientation will remain largely the same. The reputation of India’s democracy has been enhanced, and so the country should be able to act on the international stage with greater authority. But a more vigorous opposition also means that Modi’s ability to sign deals, whether in trade or security, may diminish. Those deals will be subject to a much greater domestic scrutiny than he, or his international partners, have been used to.

NOT TEN FEET TALL

As much as Modi’s critics are buoyed by his weakening, his third term may augur a period of tumult. A sense of relief now pervades Indian civil society, with many hoping that the government will allow more space for dissent. This hope will soon be tested, however. The Indian economy has enough momentum to sustain a high rate of growth that will continue to attract trade partners and foreign investors. But the growth will be uneven, resulting in significant pockets of disenchantment, especially among farmers and the educated unemployed. An emboldened opposition—and alliance partners driving a hard bargain—will prevent an inexorable concentration of power in the persona of Modi and in the office of the prime minister. But it will also make institutions more an object of contention. The ruling coalition will still try to use them to divide and weaken the opposition, either through the allure of office or the threat of punitive investigation. In turn, the opposition will be able to mobilize more street power in response. After a brief period of political calm, the fault lines around caste and religion will in all likelihood become deeper. The nature of the party system and the incentives for individual leaders make that almost inevitable.

Indian democracy has been rescued from the abyss. But a lot will depend on the choices Modi makes. In this election, he was, like many authoritarian figures, a victim of his own self-image. In the past decade, voters have applauded and welcomed his projection of power. For many voters, however, Modi’s cult of personality had crossed the line into delusional hubris. Modi misjudged them. They did not necessarily repudiate his building of the Ram temple or his welfare schemes, but they wanted concrete solutions to their current problems—not the relentless trumpeting of past achievements. Even with the media largely on his side, Modi crashed into a newly skeptical electorate. If he is to regain their confidence, his self-aggrandizement will have to give way to humility, openness, and less control. This could well be a tall order for a leader so used to thinking of himself as ten feet tall.