India’s Election is Eerily Quiet
India’s Election is Eerily Quiet
Democracy loses out when the winds of change refuse to blow.
Once upon a time, the “hawa” (wind) was a big factor in India’s vibrant, often chaotic elections. It was important to gauge how the “hawa” blew, even in races where the incumbent was high profile and a shoo-in. That’s what we learnt as young journalists traveling around India to cover its periodic tryst with the ballot box. In 1989, Rajiv Gandhi, then a sitting prime minister and scion of India’s foremost political dynasty, decisively won his constituency against his chief rival, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. But in the same election his government was voted out of power. The election coverage allowed for upsets and anti-incumbency swings. Corruption scandals had plagued the Rajiv government. The “hawa” mattered.
Today, the world’s largest exercise in electoral democracy, as it’s routinely described, seems strangely static and predictable, the main political actors seemingly immune to headwinds or tailwinds. This Indian election—which began on April 19 and will continue in seven phases until June 1—seems to discount the possibility of the “hawa” blowing in any direction other than towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won the past two elections by a landslide. The most recent pre-poll survey gave the BJP and its allied parties a 12 percentage point lead over the opposition. The “hawa,” such as it is, seems unlikely to offer any freak gusts that may displace Modi.
How did this happen? India is a vast country, with nearly a billion registered voters of different faiths. Nearly two dozen languages make for a cacophony of opinions. In meteorological terms, the wind still blows: Parts of the election coincide with the season of the “loo,” the summer wind that ceaselessly breathes heat and dust over the Indo-Gangetic plain until the monsoon rains arrive.
Politically, though, there is little point holding up a wet finger. In his decade in power, Modi has changed India. The BJP, which has its roots in the 99-year-old Hindu nationalist volunteer paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), projects strength and iron-clad certainty. First, that India’s Hindu majority is both custodian and arbiter of the country’s destiny by right, never mind the limp-wristed secular underpinnings of its Constitution. Second, that only a strong leader like Modi can achieve his stirring vision of “viksit Bharat”—a developed India—by 2047.
The results are evident, as the respected columnist Tavleen Singh recently reported from her travels through the hinterland:
…people have seen changes in their lives, and they believe that these changes have happened because of Modi. These are not remarkable changes. They are simple things like roads, drinking water, electricity, and internet services but because they were not there before, they seem remarkable … I met nobody in rural India who saw Modi as corrupt and autocratic.
Surveys show that joblessness and inflation are voters’ biggest concerns, and the rural poor have benefited from measures such as subsidies for cooking gas, food and fertilizers. In a canny move, even welfare measures that existed before Modi took office have been rebranded with his image.
Modi also appeals to the Hindu majority by affirming the BJP government’s vision of India as a muscular Hindu “rashtra” (nation state). Modi, who started his political life in the RSS before rising through the BJP’s ranks, has worked hard—and smart—as prime minister to ensure Hindu nationalists’ main action items are core tenets of his government’s agenda. These include the sudden revocation in 2019 of autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only significant Muslim-majority territory, and a campaign to “liberate” Hindu shrines allegedly defiled by “foreign” Muslim rulers over the centuries. In January, Modi inaugurated a new temple to Lord Ram, revered by Hindus, on the site of a 16th century mosque demolished by Hindu zealots more than 30 years ago.
Meanwhile, the government has pursued a sweeping plan to “cleanse” India of the pollution caused by Westernized ideas of liberalism, and has appointed to key positions scholars who emphasize the superiority of Hindu values. Within months of its last national election triumph in 2019, the BJP shepherded through parliament independent India’s first citizenship law explicitly based on religious faith. The Citizenship Amendment Act grants persecuted minorities in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan fast-track naturalization… so long as they aren’t Muslim.
These measures are seen by many to signify a new Hindu purpose and strength. But as historian Ramachandra Guha lays out in his magisterial tome India after Gandhi, the country has made a dispiriting journey from post-independence secular idealism to “muscular majoritarianism.” The Indian media is largely cowed, the lower courts (though not the Supreme Court of Chief Justice Dhananjaya Chandrachud) are mostly compliant. Inconvenient lines of academic inquiry in universities are suppressed. Just the other day, a friend who runs one of India’s leading media outlets told me it was best to just sit back and “enjoy the election. Who knows when we might have the next one.”
The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.), a group of more than two dozen opposition parties, has no time for such gallows humor. It is dead serious about complaints that federal agencies have been weaponized to intimidate Modi’s political rivals. Their own organizational apparatus is being hobbled: Three opposition politicians have been jailed and the bank accounts of the main opposition Congress Party have been frozen during the campaign period, when they are most needed.
International criticism of Indian democracy under Modi is growing louder. The Washington-based political advocacy organization Freedom House rated India as only “partly free” in its 2024 study of civil liberties worldwide. Sweden’s V-Dem Institute lists India among “electoral autocracies … such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, the Philippines, and Türkiye.” The BJP has dismissed such categorizations, saying they use “distorted metrics” and display “an inherent bias in favor of so-called liberal democracies in the West.” True believers angrily disseminate lists of overseas fulminations and point to Modi’s record as a strong leader.
And it is true that he has been decisive, assiduously building the country’s infrastructure along with his own personal brand. In the words of one analyst, he has turned this contest into “an election of the imagination,” one that the opposition seems unable to credibly challenge. The Congress party’s most prominent campaigner, Rahul Gandhi, is 20 years younger than 73-year-old Modi, but it is the latter who is seen to have energy and vision. It is a pitiable moment for India’s grand old party, which led the independence struggle and governed for nearly 50 years. Now, Congress seems out of sync with the new India, its national vote share having declined from a peak of 49% in 1984 to just 20% in 2019. Many of the party’s rising stars left politics after losing the election in 2014, while others defected to the BJP.
But any election—even for a school board—must have frisson if it is really and truly an election. It must carry that essential charge: uncertainty. In India today, that just doesn’t seem to be the case—which says a great deal about the state of the country today.
Rashmee Roshan Lall, former editor of the Sunday Times of India, contributed to the 2016 HarperCollins book Making Sense of Modi’s India.
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Hopefully the Westernized secular elites will once again be able to force their vision of the country on the majority of the population, thereby "restoring democracy."
"Meanwhile, the government has pursued a sweeping plan to “cleanse” India of the pollution caused by Westernized ideas of liberalism, and has appointed to key positions scholars who emphasize the superiority of Hindu values"
I think I would vote for that in this country, the USA... maybe though focused on Christian Judea values.