How can we explain the decline of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) following the legislative elections in India, when all the polls showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party clearly winning? We spoke with Gilles Verniers, visiting assistant professor of political science at Amherst College and senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
1. The majority will escape Mr. Modi for the first time in 10 years. Does this surprise you?
Absolutely, especially since all the exit polls had predicted a fairly overwhelming victory. And there, Indian voters demonstrated, once again, that they retain the capacity to surprise and thwart the forecasts of experts, few of whom expected such a mixed result for the BJP.
THE BJP would obtain 240 seats, well below the 303 won in 2019 and the 272 needed to obtain a parliamentary majority. With the allies of his coalition, however, he would arrive at 290 seats.
It is true that Narendra Modi will obtain a third consecutive term, which is historic. This has not happened since Jawaharlal Nehru, in the first decades after independence. But he will have to do it at the head of a coalition with a real sharing of power, something which is completely new to him, since in 30 years of career, he has always exercised power alone.
The fact that the BJP is losing its simple majority is a very significant setback.
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2. How to explain this turnaround, when the BJP thought it would reach 370 seats?
Several factors come into play, but the first that must be mentioned is a certain fatigue with power. THE BJP and the government made the person of the Prime Minister the only argument of their campaign.
However, clearly, after 10 years, a certain fatigue has set in. Especially since the BJP and Narendra Modi completely ignored fundamental issues, the importance of which the campaign revealed to voters, notably the lack of economic prospects for the entire population, growth which is certainly strong, but which does not generate employment, a higher unemployment rate among qualified young people than among unskilled young people.
Putting all these questions aside in favor of a campaign focused solely on the person and individual qualities of the Prime Minister is an exercise that ended up showing its limits.
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“The country told Narendra Modi: ‘We don’t want you’,” said Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, re-elected with a lead of more than 364,000 votes in his constituency.
Photo: Getty Images / –
Furthermore, there was also an opposition which, after a bad start, nevertheless managed to organize itself during the campaign, hammered home on these major issues missing from Narendra Modi’s campaign and clearly succeeded in posing a challenge to BJP in many states.
The Congress party is on track to obtain 99 seats, almost double the last elections, in 2019, when it obtained 52.
But this defeat is above all caused by voter discontent rather than by an effect of the opposition campaign itself, which benefits, in a certain way, from the accumulation of discontent over several years.
India’s economy, and therefore its population, has suffered numerous shocks in recent years, since demonetization in 2016, the slowdown in growth and the crisis in the agrarian economy in 2017-2018, the impact not COVID figures and an economic recovery that has benefited only the wealthiest parts of the population. This is a lot for a population that remains largely poor and without any prospect of social mobility.
3. Mr. Modi was re-elected MP for the Varanasi constituency, but his lead has diminished compared to 2019. Is this proof of this fatigue?
Not only fatigue, but also a disavowal of an anti-Muslim, aggressive, nationalist policy, which really came to light during this campaign.
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Pilgrims flock in large numbers to visit the Ram temple, during the Ram Navami festival in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, India, on April 17, 2024.
Photo: Getty Images / Anindito Mukherjee
As much as the Prime Minister, in the past, was rather cautious in his public expression, in this campaign, he really dropped the mask and increased the invectives against minorities, against Muslims in particular, to the point where it ended up turning against him. Not only is his margin of victory in his constituency, which is an important religious town, significantly lower, but the BJP loses the seat in the Ayodhya constituency, where the temple he inaugurated just a few months ago is located. The fact that the BJP losing in this constituency is heavy with symbolism.
4. What to expect from a coalition government?
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has around a dozen parties. But there are really four that matter: the BJPobviously, the Telugu Dessam Party (16 seats), a regional party in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where the BJP has virtually no presence, the Janata Dal (United) (12 seats) and a splinter faction of a regional party in Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena (10 seats).
In the past, the BJP was part of coalition governments, which had the effect of moderating its nationalism and aggressive character. The whole question is whether this configuration can be reproduced. This seems quite unlikely to me, given that Narendra Modi absolutely does not have the temperament of a political leader ready for compromise and the shared exercise of power, which was less the case with his predecessors.
5. Will Mr. Modi take into account the voters’ message and moderate his nationalist and anti-Muslim comments?
This is one of two possible paths. The other path is for him to continue the authoritarian push that has been underway for 10 years now, in order to compensate for the loss of political ground that he has just suffered and to keep his partners in check. Given Mr. Modi’s temperament, this seems to be the preferred path.
The remarks have been edited and abbreviated for clarity.
With information from Agence France-Presse
