Indians began voting this Friday in several constituencies in the country, in a legislative election that will last until June 1, over seven phases. In today’s election, which is the most intense, 102 of the 543 seats in the Lower House are at stake. The majority of Indians agree that the Indian People’s Party (BJP) will win again on the streets, opening the door to a third term in office for the populist Narendra Modi.
The political instrumentalization of Hinduism will win again and India will lose again, twice. Not in vain, the coalition that brings together two dozen opposition parties bears the imaginative name of INDIA (acronym in English for Inclusive Alliance for Indian National Development).
That India – in addition to INDIA – will come out the loser of 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 budding tyranny is staring us in the face,” has written eminent political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta. His diagnosis has worsened due to serious irregularities observed during the pre-campaign. The last straw was the arrest of anti-corruption leader Arvind Kejriwal, one of the visible faces of the opposition, head of the AAP (Ordinary People’s Party) and ultimately head of the government of Delhi (federal district).
He is serving as “mayor” of one of the largest metropolises in the world behind bars, for dubious but undoubtedly timely charges. The case fits with the complaints of partisan use of 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. The charges are often quashed when they switch sides and join Modi’s BJP.
As if that were not enough, the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress (INC), saw a couple of months ago how a judge ordered the freezing of its bank accounts, due to another investigation, thus paralyzing its electoral campaign. In India, the political class – with its particular clothing with Nehruvian traces, different from that of any other professional union – has such a serious credibility problem that it must buy votes in cash.
The one who does not have any liquidity problem is the BJP, which before the previous elections eliminated any limit on anonymous donations to political forces. Although the Supreme Court has just struck down that amendment, which mainly favors the BJP, the repeal will not take effect until after these elections.
It is no secret that Mukesh Ambani, the first fortune in India and the tenth in the world, gets along as well with the BJP as before with the Congress Party, just as his father, founder of the Reliance holding company, did. The novelty is that a businessman of equally Gujarati origin, Gautam Adani, has become the fifteenth fortune in the world, alongside Narendra Modi, whom he decided to enthusiastically support at his lowest moment, after the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. Modi was then the head of government of that state, with the police under his command. Today Adani is the fifteenth richest man in the world, after briefly being the richest man in Asia.
It should be remembered that Modi came to power in 2014 with the star promise of repatriating billions of dollars in black money. Nothing of that has happened. Nor have his 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 type have been destroyed. Those that have been created, in the services, are generally of low quality and remuneration, far from the great expectations of the time of Manmohan Singh, when advertising showed daughters giving a new car to their father with the fruit 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. In the cities, in many cases, it was foreign NGOs that promoted this type of employment, with social benefits in the medium and long term (as is also the case of industrial workers in Bangladesh). But one of Modi’s first measures was the closure of thousands of NGOs that depended on foreign financing. A pernicious influence, in his opinion, for the Indian value system and its secular caste system (the latter point never made explicit).
Narendra Modi owes his popular pull – like Recep Tayyip Erdogan – to the fact that he comes from popular sectors that have rarely had a voice in Indian politics. In his case, he as the son of a tea seller. However, Modi owes everything to the RSS, a Hindu supremacist organization, guardian of Brahmanical essences and dominated by the self-proclaimed upper castes, but which has managed, since its beginnings inspired by Italian fascism, to become one of the largest movements. of masses of the world. In democracy, without winning over the “middle” and “low” castes, Hindutva or political Hinduism, the numbers simply would not work out.
Meanwhile, the Congress Party, which speaks more confidently in English than Hindi, has a difficult time shedding the elitist label. Although he has not even formally chosen a candidate for prime minister, the visible face of him is again Rahul Gandhi, son, grandson and great-grandson of prime ministers. Although the “promising young woman”, now 53 years old, has been positively surprised by her combativeness during a tour throughout India, her change of tone comes late.
Another missed opportunity, as Modi’s BJP has little to show. But it has managed to take over all the television stations (NDTV, the last critical news channel, was bought by Adani a couple of years ago to align them with the BJP). The erosion of press freedom has been marked during these ten years – although the problems go back a long way – and Reporters Without Borders places India almost at the bottom, in 161st place out of 180 countries analyzed.
However, not everything has been worse under Modi. In line with digitalization, his government has achieved greater efficiency in the distribution of subsidies and public aid. Although Modi suppressed, for better or worse, the Soviet-oriented five-year plans, he soon backed away from many of the economic liberalization messages of his beginnings.
Three quarters of a century after independence, 800 million Indians still depend on ration cards. Modi not only continues to provide several kilos of rice, flour, lentils, etc. in addition to oil, but its quality has improved substantially, in the opinion of those interested. Also its distribution or the supply of funds for its acquisition has become more transparent – due to digitalization – avoiding fraud and corruption by intermediaries. The BJP was not born to defend political abstractions, but to win elections. This is done in cash – everyone does it – in rural and not so rural India, where the Electoral Commission has seized in six weeks the equivalent of 523 million euros in cash or gifts to buy votes.
Modi has also not met, for the first time in the history of the Indian Union, the deadline for conducting the census, which must be carried out every ten years. In India, censuses are carried out by the devil, since issues of religious affiliation or caste – like race in the United States – quickly become political arguments, if not the only argument.
But where the BJP has fulfilled is in the most divisive and identity-based of its promises, which seemed unrealizable thirty years ago. Modi has raised the Ayodhya temple, in time for these elections. Before, in 1992, his co-religionists in Hindu supremacism had razed the mosque of Babur, the first Mughal emperor, from the 16th century. An event that spread across India like wildfire, with hundreds of deaths, forever breaking coexistence in neighborhoods that had been mixed in cities like Bombay.
Many Indians will vote for him today just for this. However, this undisguised Islamophobia is part of the other missed opportunity of Modi’s India. The capable Foreign Minister of India, S. Jaishankar, to the astonishment of his counterparts in northern Europe, asks that he not be criticized for having several cards up his sleeve, but rather that he be admired for it. There is no better definition of India.
In this logic, New Delhi has lost the opportunity to play an ethical role, or at least mediation, after the invasion of Ukraine, which it did not condemn. On the contrary. If Russia was already India’s first arms supplier, it is now also its first oil supplier. This is refined in the largest refinery in the world, in Gujarat, owned by Ambani, or the one Adani has set up with Russian partners, also in Gujarat. The crude oil is then re-exported at a large premium to Europe and other markets, champions of ethical trade. All of this has contributed to the Central Bank of India breaking its foreign exchange reserve record last month.
Even more recently, Modi’s India has even more flagrantly squandered the opportunity to offer a third way – now as the world’s most populous country – in the Palestine conflict. It is worth remembering that, for many decades, India recognized only Palestine. Although in the time of A.B. Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh’s relationship with Israel was already very close, it has acquired a personal character with Narendra Modi and Beniamin Netanyahu.
To the astonishment of dozens of nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, India preferred not to take sides, while the dead under the rubble began to number in the thousands and then in the tens of thousands. In the antipodes of the India of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru or Indira Gandhi, many militants of Modi’s party see in the Zionist right a natural ally, with a common enemy.
To this we must add the lurch in favor of Quads, a “Defense forum” with the US, Australia and Japan, to mark China. Compensated, on the other hand, with membership in the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, along with Russia and China.
In any case, in its media projection, India has definitively lost the non-aligned, third-way aura that it maintained for decades, precisely at the moment when it surpasses China in population and, in the words of the UN Secretary General, António Guterres , “the unipolar moment has passed into history.”
Another India could have been there to lead a Global South perplexed by the warmongering of some and others. Not Modi’s. That was the real soft counterweight to China – and Russia – that India could play on the board. On the other hand, the hard, economic and military counterweight, dreamed of by distant strategists, has no way.
Because the other opportunity missed by Modi’s India is economic, rather than political. After the collapse of production chains during the covid pandemic and at a time when the US fears losing hegemony – or having already lost it – and having to share a table with China, India is simply not in a position to substantially take advantage of risk diversification in Asia.
Or put another way, India cannot attract the factories that move from China. In reality, large multinationals such as Ford or General Motors have left India – not China – in recent years, due to the challenges of manufacturing in such a complicated environment. They will read an inverse example related to an iPhone plant – which compensates for the historical horror of Nokia in its day – and little else.
In any case, Modi gains muscle from the list of airports he has completed or started (many of them awarded to Adani, who had no experience in the sector). But only 4% of Indians ever travel by plane. About the same percentage of Indians own a car. The “greater Indian middle class” is much smaller than that of the People’s Republic of China. This is, in the best of cases, the group of around 60 million individuals who earn more than 9,400 euros per year.
An interesting market, almost comparable to that of a large European country, but atomized in a huge territory and equipped with very poor infrastructure. This last factor has weighed heavily on one of the two great opportunities lost by India, under Narendra Modi.
Throughout this Friday, 166 million voters are called to the polls, distributed among 21 territories and states. In two of them, Sikkim and Arunachal, voting will also take place for their respective state parliaments. It is considered a success in participation when two out of every three Indians exercise their right to vote. Unlike what happened five years ago, in the heat of a timely retaliatory bombing and without victims on Pakistani territory, this time there is – yet – no last-minute event capable of mobilizing the pro-Modi vote in the same way.
China, moreover, has since projected itself as a much more serious threat than Pakistan to what India considers its territorial integrity. In the absence of a border skirmish in the Himalayas, which could again prove fatal, this week has seen one of the largest anti-Maoist operations in Chattisgarh, in the heart of India, resulting in 29 guerrillas killed.
The verdict of the polls will be known on the same day that they all open, next June 4. Wise men, like the historian Ramachandra Guha, have their own opinion: “India, which was 50% democratic, is 40% democratic under Modi, on its way to 30% after Kashmir.” In reference to the suppression of Article 370 of the Constitution that recognized Kashmiri specificity and guaranteed its autonomy, now suppressed along with its parliament.
What happened there is observed with concern in northeastern India, where several tribal states are recognized in Article 371A and others. Their fear is that a new absolute majority of the BJP will encourage them to repeat the uniformizing experiment, with fatal consequences.
One of these states, Manipur, suffered last year a possibly irreparable breakdown of coexistence between two of the three great Mongoloid peoples that populate it, the Meitheis (Hindus) and the Kukis (Christians) with hundreds of burning churches and more. of 250 dead, the vast majority Kukis, due to the passivity of the police and the government of Manipur, under Hindu control.
