As goes India, so goes . . .?

I awoke on Tuesday morning to that rare thing nowadays — a positive shock. India’s election results, in which Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party lost its majority, was predicted by no one. Neither the polls, nor the markets, nor the country’s best pundits anticipated that Modi’s Hindu nationalists would fall short of an absolute majority.

A few, including our own John Reed, who two weeks ago raised the question of whether the Modi wave had peaked, gave us an inkling. Well-earned kudos to John. But this was a genuine surprise. I take particular relish in commending this piece by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express, who has suffered continuous harassment over the past decade for having dared to question Modi’s illiberalism. “Modi is, for the moment, not the indomitable vehicle for History,” Pratap writes. “The mere prospect that power might change hands is an antidote to the servility that had set in India’s elites and institutions.” Do also read Brown University’s Ashutosh Varshney: “The Idea of India is reborn”. 

My focus in this note is whether what happens in India stays in India. From the point of view of US foreign policy, nothing will change. Modi is now forced to form a coalition with two secular parties that have no appetite for upholding the bigoted side of his agenda. But there is scant difference between any of the Indian parties over the China challenge. Whatever happens in New Delhi — even if the BJP cracks in the coming years — Joe Biden can count on India’s participation in the Quad.

A more interesting question is whether this India surprise portends anything for populists in other democracies. Turkey’s electorate recently clipped Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s wings when opposition parties won races for the country’s four largest cities, and beyond. The Brexiteers are about to receive a drubbing in Britain’s July 4 general election — as I wrote about last week. And Trump was just convicted of a criminal offence. Each of these, however, are discrete events.

If there are any Indian auguries for America’s November 5 election they might even be negative. Modi’s setback was driven by economic resentment, not by a sudden revulsion at his authoritarian agenda. One of the things that blinded Modi’s party, and India’s elites, to the electorate’s mood was that objectively speaking, especially in the big cities, India is booming. It is the fastest growing large economy in the world — now routinely outstripping China. The stock market has been humming. Similar observations could be made of the US economy. Yet America’s voters keep telling pollsters they feel disgruntled.

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Modi clearly sensed the mood was not as euphoric as he expected it to be and increasingly targeted the usual suspects, notably Muslims, as the campaign wore on. It did not work. If there is a lesson here for Biden, it would be to focus relentlessly on the economic consequences of Trump’s agenda.

But I fear the likes of Modi will be tempted to draw another conclusion from this setback. The term “electoral autocracy” was originally coined for India, though it applies well to countries such as Hungary and Russia. It means that the only aspect of the democratic facade that remains unmolested is the system of vote counting. This allows strongmen to retain the trappings of a democracy while suppressing the liberal checks and balances that make it a liberal democracy.

If India’s elections had been held with a noisy and balanced media, an independent judiciary and a thriving civil society, Modi would have lost. That he could not win a majority having rigged everything except the electronic voting machines could be interpreted by him in one of two ways. Either he will now display his skill as a politician in a more normal democratic situation in which bargains have to be struck. Or he will question whether the voting system is too free and fair. I fear the BJP will play even dirtier and more ruthlessly in future.

I also take pleasure in asking Rana Ayyub to respond to this note. Rana is one of the many Indian journalists who has been harassed and targeted by BJP-friendly tax authorities and by law enforcement. Her bank accounts have been frozen and various sham legal cases with prison terms are kept hanging over her. This has not blunted her reporting nor quelled her courage. Rana, my question to you is what happens now. Has the Hindutva project been slowed or it is arrested? As a prominent Indian Muslim, can you breathe a little easier now?

Recommended reading

• My column this week looks at what Hunter Biden tells us about America. “Hunter Biden may or may not merit jail time. Ditto Trump in his case. But these are sideshows. One of America’s potential presidents respects the rule of law. The other doesn’t. Everything else pales in comparison.”

• My colleagues Edward White, Michael Pooler, Anantha Lakshmi and Christine Murray have a fascinating Big Read on electric vehicles, and on how attempts from the US and probably Europe, to keep Chinese exports out might backfire in the global south: China’s plans to sell cheap EVs to the rest of the world.

• Finally do read this painfully honest piece by Rory Stewart on why he quit politics. The former Conservative minister (now award-winning podcaster), writes: “My knowledge of these portfolios was absurdly limited. And this was true of most of us.”

Rana Ayyub responds

Ed, ironically, a day before the election results were announced, I had a criminal defamation hearing in a Mumbai court for an article I wrote in 2009 about a radical Hindu nationalist organisation. Among other charges, I am accused of being a practising Muslim, hence prejudiced in my reportage. You heard that right . . . 

Since the results on June 4, I am being inundated with calls asking the same question. Will this arrest the persecution of the 200mn Muslim population in India? I have reported on Modi since the time he was the chief minister of Gujarat, when he was accused of presiding over the Gujarat pogrom of Muslims. But even then, his speeches were vitriolic but mostly dogwhistles. This election campaign, Modi called Muslim infiltrators and plunderers. All pretences dropped. He used the word Muslims at least 200 times at 145 election rallies. It was indication that he was losing grip over the voters; the cult of Modi had begun to disintegrate. He fought the election as a divine incarnate of Lord Ram, a leader who was invincible, he went on to claim he believed he was not a biological born.

I disagree with those analysts who believe that Modi’s vote base has somehow turned secular and is no longer impressed with his authoritarian streak. We saw the country revel in saffron during the inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya in January. Let us not forget that Modi was voted to power in 2014 not despite his role in the pogrom of Muslims, but because he showed Muslims their place.

But even the most ardent Modi fan needed food on his plate and employment for his child. This was Modi’s blunder, his hubris blinded him from seeing the resentment on the ground. In fact, such was the rural distress and anger that if the BJP had fielded any other candidate as prime minister, it would have been reduced to double digits. 

To answer your question, will a reduced majority curb Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics? As I write this, I am seated on the aircraft with a leader of the Shiv Sena (the original Hindu nationalist party). He was in Delhi for the INDIA alliance meeting. He tells me that both Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu, the key coalition partners in the newly formed Modi government have had unofficial conversations with the opposition leaders. The secularism of these leaders has mostly been driven by their ambitions. Naidu has batted for Muslim job reservation and Kumar has to cater to a strong Muslim base in Bihar. This compulsion might act as a check on Modi’s Hindu nationalist ambitions.

But we must not forget that both Modi and Amit Shah, the home minister, were almost written off in 2010 when Shah was arrested in relation to the extra judicial murder of Muslims. They survived that case and emerged as the most powerful leaders implementing the most draconian bills including the Citizenship Act.

For now, it is unlikely that with a reduced majority Modi would be able to amend the Indian constitution. It was widely expected that Modi’s gift to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP’s parent organisation, for its centenary celebrations would be a version of the Hindu nation as envisaged by the Hindu nationalist ideologues. The election results might have put the brakes on those ambitions. For now, Muslims in the country could get a breathing space. It might renew their desire to resist. It might give them the courage to step out of the dark quiet space to which they had restricted themselves. At least this is what I hope as a Muslim citizen of India — to reclaim my space. 

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And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “Trump’s conviction and the end of American exceptionalism”:

“We lurch — on both sides of the Atlantic — between hope and the intolerable. Confronted with the intolerable and stranded in the incomprehensible all we can resort to is hope.

There are grounds for hope. Right up to the point that all hope is lost. In 2016 those of us in the centre and on the reasonable left had our hopes dashed. Four years later our fears were fulfilled in the January 6 insurrection. Then four years of relative sanity prevailed in the US. But not in the UK where the lurching has prevailed: lurching from political chaos to political crisis and to and fro between the two. 

Now, in the UK, we have good reason to hope. Yet that hope is only mandated by greater division. The political right is driving ever rightward. It is doing so throughout the Western world. Hope resides on a precipice.” — Helen Holdsworth