Indians began voting yesterday in various constituencies in the country, in a legislative election that will last until June 1, in seven phases. In yesterday’s, which is the most intense, 102 of the 543 seats in the Lower House are at stake. Most Indians agree that the Indian People’s Party (BJP) will win again, opening the door to a third term for populist Narendra Modi.
The political instrumentalization of Hinduism will win again and India will lose again, double game. Not surprisingly, the coalition that brings together two dozen opposition parties has the imaginative name of INDIA (English acronym for Inclusive Alliance for Indian National Development).
That India – in addition to INDIA – must come out losing the onslaught is not the dominant opinion on the street and much less in the media, but it is among many of the most lucid minds in the country. “The masks have fallen. A potential tyranny is staring us in the eyes”, wrote the eminent political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta. His diagnosis has worsened due to serious arbitrariness during the pre-campaign. The last straw was the arrest of the anti-corruption leader Arvind Kejriwal, head of the AAP (People’s Party) and eventually chief minister of Delhi (federal district). He is serving as “mayor” of one of the world’s largest metropolises on a whim, for dubious but undoubtedly timely positions. The case fits with allegations of partisan use by the Attorney General’s Office and other State bodies, to the point that more than 90% of corruption investigations, with numerous imprisonments, affect opposition politicians. Charges are often overturned when they switch sides and join Modi’s BJP.
As if that wasn’t enough, the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress (INC), saw a judge order the freezing of its bank accounts a couple of months ago, pending another investigation, paralyzing d ‘this way his electoral campaign. In India the political class has such a serious credibility problem that it has to buy votes with cash.
What does not have a liquidity problem is the BJP, which before the previous elections removed the maximum amount for anonymous donations to political forces. Although the Supreme Court has just overturned this amendment, which mainly favors the BJP, the repeal will not take effect until after this election.
It is no secret that Mukesh Ambani, India’s first fortune and tenth in the world, gets along with the BJP as well as he used to with the Congress Party, just as his father, the founder of the Reliance holding, did. The novelty is that an entrepreneur of Gujarati origin, Gautam Adani, has become fifteenth fortune in the world, under the protection of Narendra Modi, whom he decided to support enthusiastically at his lowest moment, after the anti-Muslim pogrom of Modi was then the head of government of that state, with the police at his command.
It must be remembered that Modi came to power in 2014 on the star promise of repatriating billions of dollars in black money. None of this has happened. Nor have their plans, within the Make in India program, to create one hundred million industrial jobs in eight years, been fulfilled. Quite the contrary, fifteen million jobs of this kind have been destroyed. Those that have been created, in the services, are generally of low quality and pay, a far cry from the high expectations of the Manmohan Singh era, when advertising showed daughters gifting new cars to their parents with the fruits of their first wages In fact, the Modi decade has also been characterized by an erosion of the presence of women in the world of work.
