SINGAPORE (May 27): After a long and arduous election, India’s 879 million voters have spoken. And, if not with one voice, then close to it. The Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been handed another historic mandate.
Modi’s 2014 victory was already record-setting — the first time a single party had attained a parliamentary majority in three decades. While every vote has not yet been counted, it seems that he might equal or even surpass that figure this year. To win once at that scale was astounding, a black swan event. To win twice means that Indian politics, and India itself, has changed beyond recognition.
For the first decades after independence, India was a democracy but nevertheless a one-party state. The Indian National Congress, the party that led the independence movement, dominated most states and had a stranglehold on power in New Delhi. It was voted out once in 1977, after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi turned towards authoritarianism and was punished by a united opposition. Still, not until the 1990s did the party enter a permanent decline.
Modi’s successive victories mark another era of Indian politics. No other political chieftains are holding the balance of power; only Modi matters. No politician since Gandhi has had as powerful a claim to be identified with India’s conception of itself as Modi now does.
How has he earned that claim? Multiple explanations for the BJP’s victory have already been trotted out: the organisational strength of the party, its vast advantages in money and resources, the covert and overt backing of supposedly independent institutions — all hallmarks of democratic strongmen globally. Others will point to the weakness of the opposition and its crisis of leadership, or to Modi’s repute for incorruptibility, his muscular foreign policy and the popularity of some of his welfare schemes.
All these, of course, are factors. But they did not determine this election. Neither did the economy. Regardless of the official figures for GDP growth, the economy is under-performing. It is rare anywhere in the world for incumbents to increase their political strength under such circumstances.
No, India has proved Bill Clinton wrong: It’s identity, stupid. This election was fought and won over identity — the identity of India and the identity of Indians.
Modi is the perfect representative for the young, aspirational, majoritarian, impatient Indians who have put him into office twice now. An overwhelming number of these 400 million voters see in him a self-made man, one who has every intention of asserting India’s centrality to world affairs. More, he appears strong and decisive, and wishes to impose a unity and uniformity on Indian politics.
The BJP’s electoral logic has long been incredibly simple: Over four-fifths of India is Hindu and the BJP is the party that best represents Hindu interests. If most Hindus vote for them out of religious solidarity rather than on economic, class or caste interests, then the BJP will win. Modi and the party’s triumph is not merely a product of political management; it is a rhetorical and ideological battle, a culture war, which they have won.
The West has long seen this country as a natural ally: one that has similar liberal institutions, is outward-looking and acts modestly on the global stage. But that is not the India wanted by the voters who have twice now demonstrated their loyalty to Modi so dramatically. Just as Indians are looking at themselves and their country anew, so too will the world have to recalibrate its assumptions about India.
