The Persistence of an Idea Called Modi

IF THE VOTING process in India is painfully prolonged and extends for over a month, the declaration of results moves at hurricane speed. By lunchtime on June 4, the country will know if the voters have blessed Narendra Modi with a third term as prime minister. The likelihood of Modi equalling the record of Jawaharlal Nehru and leading his party to a third consecutive victory in a General Election is very high. Like in 2014 and 2019, the 2024 General Election has centred exclusively on Modi. It was both support and opposition to him that set the agenda. In theory, India has a parliamentary system where constituencies elect individual MPs; in practice, Modi has transformed the polls into a presidential election, with only one candidate on the ballot.

Modi’s amazing ability to dominate national politics for the past decade has, quite predictably, attracted both admiration and strong criticism. While his admirers—many of whom swear by him since he was cata­pulted into the post of chief minister of Gujarat in 2001—laud him for transforming the culture of governance and unleashing the suppressed potential of India, his detractors have read very different (and sinister) meanings into India’s transformation.

Writing this essay from Kolkata, a city where the dominant intellectual discourse sees little virtue in Modi, I have before me an article in The Telegraph, a newspaper that has been a trenchant critic of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Modi for as long as anyone can remember. In an article ‘The two poles’, with a telling subtitle ‘Indian democracy’s future will be decided in 10 days’, one Asim Ali wrote: “What we are seeing… is the steady ‘fascistization’ of the regime… Fascistization means the adoption of fascist techniques of governance: violent suppression of democratic movements, persecution of ethnic or religious minorities, sacralis­ing the polity with a ‘politicised religion’, and so on.” Developing his thesis further, Ali saw “a growing appetite for fascistization of the regime among the BJP’s corporate and upper-class backers who have also been spooked by an Opposition politics geared towards social justice and egalitarianism.” He was, in effect, echoing the unending insistence of Modi’s intellectual opponents that he was out to cripple the democratic Constitution of India.

Writing six years ago in a similar vein, the academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta described the Modi era as ‘The Age of Cretinism’. “There is no doubt that India is in a full-blown reactionary moment. It is hard to grasp the nature of this reaction because it wears the garb of deep democratic legitimacy; it is an admission of despair described as the politics of hope. All the attributes of a reactionary politics are now gathered in one coherent form.” Since Mehta’s analysis predated the Citizenship Amendment Act and the abrogation of Article 370, not to mention the construction and consecration of a Ram temple at the once-disputed site in Ayodhya, his visceral fulminations would surely have acquired additional momentum in six years.

The assault on the Modi regime has been further fuelled by attacks launched by the Western media. As the country ap­proached the General Election, it was suggested that there was no level playing field for the opposition parties and that even the credibility of the Election Commission as a neutral umpire in the democratic process was suspect. According to a lengthy WhatsApp message circulated by a concerned dissident (who shall remain nameless) on the day Delhi was voting, the mood in the polling booths was grim: “There was tension in the air. It is not that everyone present was anti-Modi—I did not ask! But everyone’s voice was a little anxious a little raised. Knots of people formed telling each other what they had heard should be done to make sure your vote was duly registered…” Why, she asked, is this happening? “Because today in India we have absolutely no faith that the election will be conducted honour­ably by the Modi regime.”

The writer’s understanding of the mood in the polling sta­tions was certainly not shared by others in other middle-class localities of Delhi. It seems he was echoing what a section of the Western media—External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar described them as the “international Khan Market gang”— had been suggesting: that Modi’s victory on June 4 must not become the pretext for the normalisation of the regime. The Modi government, they felt, must be kept on permanent probation to stall any ‘democratic backsliding’.

THERE ARE TWO contradictory trends that emerge from the sharp attacks on the Indian prime minister. The election campaign began with a demoralised and fractured opposition sensing that Modi’s popularity was over­whelming, and his poll lead unbridgeable. The findings of a series of opinion polls were seen as confirmation that he had somehow mesmerised the Hindu majority into genuflecting at the altar of national pride and Hindutva. This was unlike 2019 when Modi’s detractors felt that he was vulnerable to charges of crony capitalism—the ‘chowkidar chor hai’ taunt of Rahul Gandhi. Even earlier, in 2014, Modi was seen to be a ‘polarising’ figure, a darling of the upper crust and middle classes, but unacceptable to the disadvan­taged sections of the population and southern India. While the strong anti-incumbency against the Manmohan Singh government was recognised, the chatter in Lutyens’ Delhi centred on the possibility that BJP would have to jettison Modi to attract coalition partners for a major­ity. The results came as a rude shock to the old political Establishment because it suggested that the depth of social support for Modi went far deeper than had been initially suspected.

In this election, the initial opposition despondency over the inevitability of a Modi third term soon gave way to a belief that BJP was electorally vulnerable. The anti-Modi impulses on the ground were over-read by the Congress and Left ecosys­tems into believing that BJP was heading for a loss of majority support in Lok Sabha. The chatter of another repeat of the 2004 verdict acquired sufficient momentum to cause momen­tary jitters on the stock markets, no doubt complemented by the genuine political confusion in Maharashtra. However, at the time of writing (with just one phase of the election left), the cheerleaders of the opposition seem convinced that counting day will not lead to a Modi landslide and may indeed spring many surprises. In other words, the opposition belief in robust political competition on the ground runs counter to its parallel claim that Modi has made it impossible for his detractors to find a way into Parliament. In short, India’s democracy is alive and kicking, and it is the opposition parties that have problems that they must necessarily resolve.

The biggest challenge the opposition has faced since 2014 is the undeniable popularity of Prime Minister Modi. Despite a belief that Modi’s popularity is an illusion and based on sustained media manipulation, there is a grudging admission that in the past 10 years the prime minister’s popular accept­ability has increased.

Some of this was inevitable. In 2014, Modi was in many ways a distant legend that was becoming a creeping hope. He was the great hope of the BJP rank and file and assorted Hindu nationalists across India. However, in large parts of India, par­ticularly eastern and southern India, Modi’s image was hazy. He won convincingly in 2014 for a combination of factors: the ferocity of anger against the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime, the untir­ing efforts of BJP karyakartas on the ground, and the image of Modi as both a vikas purush and a Hindu hridaysam­rat. It was a determined mandate for decisive change in all directions.

In 2019, Modi was both known and tested. His five-year record was patchy, but the direction of change ap­pealed to voters. Moreover, after a long spell of indecisiveness at the Centre, India had experienced both stability and decisive leadership. The Balakot air strike against terror camps in Pakistan was certainly an immediate factor. However, it merely confirmed the strong-man image that was taking shape in the popular imagination since 2014.

The Modi that has been presented to Indian voters in 2024 is more than just a very tall leader. Today’s Modi is a cult, with a personal appeal that stretches across India. In normal circumstances, 10 years generate an anti-incumbency that becomes hard to control in a politically competitive environ­ment. It is not that there is no dissatisfaction with the 10 years of Modi’s rule—although this is sometimes twinned with issues confronting BJP-controlled state governments—but that this has been subsumed by an overriding faith in the leadership of the prime minister.

Modi’s approach to governance has contributed substan­tially to his popularity. Modi is not the first prime minister to bolster people’s earnings with welfare handouts. Where he has doubled his brownie points is in the targeted delivery, using Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) and Aadhaar. This is not to imply that leakages have disappeared from the system. The furore over Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guar­antee Act (MGNREGA) payments in West Bengal is proof that unscrupu­lous political leaders often find a way to game the system. It is just that un­der Modi the delivery mechanisms of the welfare programmes have become far more efficient. There was a political will that determined this transformation and, in popular perception, it was Modi that made all the difference.

Secondly, the scale and transfor­mative nature of the government interventions were a feature of the Modi government. There were some schemes that were at best income boosters and doles, but the distribution of gas cylinders to be­low poverty line (BPL) families, the construction of household toilets, and the supply of piped drinking water to households have had a revolutionary impact. The lives of rural women have changed for the better. These shifts in turn have unleashed suppressed productive forces. The provision of free rations to more than 80 crore citizens and the health insurance under the Ayushman Bharat scheme to 34 crore citizens have been factors in lifting some 25 crore Indians above the poverty line.

Thirdly, under Modi, the landscape of India has undergone a revolutionary change. A decade ago, at the tail end of the UPA 2 government, the lament was over the shortcomings in infrastructural development that were dragging India down. To this was added policy paralysis that had reduced develop­ment initiatives to a snail’s pace. Under Modi, the government has undertaken the upgrade of national highways, airports, seaports and railways at a fanatical pace. This is recognised by Modi’s detractors who, however, insist that India’s develop­ment would have been at a galloping pace regardless of which government was in power. That, ideally, should have been the case. The experience of the past 10 years, however, suggests that determined leadership and monitoring from the top have made all the difference. What has been noted and well appreciated has been the transformation in the culture and operations of India’s public sector units (PSUs), including banks. Once decried as white elephants, their stocks are now regarded as prized possessions.

Finally, it is possible to list concrete achievements of the Modi government that has transformed the lives of millions of Indians. But a dhobi list of achieve­ments, while important talking points during elections, cannot fully capture the mood change of India. A country which had been in the throes of permanent underachievement was now galvanised by the belief that it was on the cusp becoming the third-largest economy of the world. The Chandrayaan mission was dismissed in some quarters as a vanity project of the prime minister. However, apart from showcasing India’s indigenous capacity in science and technology, it resulted in an explosion of national pride. Today, both the Made in India and the Make in India initiatives have acquired a new meaning.

In 10 years, Modi has doubled and trebled the pride in being Indian. This pride has been compounded by a recognition that the greatness of India isn’t merely born of embracing modernity; it also comes from bolster­ing facets of the national inheritance. The building and inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayod­hya—a project that many like me had never believed would be possible in our lifetime—has resulted in a stupendous national awakening. There was no show of triumphalism at the formal prana pratishtha ceremony in Ayodhya. Instead, throughout India, there was a quiet celebration of Hindu joy at the restoration of national honour. Modi has conferred on India a steely determination that was also evident in the way the full integration of Jammu and Kashmir by the abrogation of Article 370 was handled.

After 10 years at the helm, Modi has been elevated into an idea. This is why Indians are likely to repose faith in him for a third time, disregarding the claims of those who failed to gauge the mood change of Bharat.

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