Modi’s Setback

On​ 22 January, shortly after midday, Narendra Modi entered the half-built Ram Temple in the city of Ayodhya. Watched by millions on television and online, he slowly crossed the five halls, cradling a small silver umbrella (a symbol of spiritual power), and consecrated the new temple. The ceremony, he said, marked ‘the beginning of a new era’. TV presenters hailed the spectacle as an illustration of the ancient Hindu precept Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, ‘the world is one family.’ Never mind that in December 1992 a mob of 150,000 Hindu thugs, led by key figures from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had demolished the Babri Masjid, the 16th-century mosque that previously stood on the site. For decades, Hindu right-wing groups – chief among them the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the paramilitary parent organisation of the BJP – had claimed that Ayodhya was the birthplace of Ram, the Hindu god and protagonist of the Ramayana, and that the Mughal emperor Babur had destroyed a pre-existing Ram temple to build his mosque. It didn’t matter that leading historians and archaeologists dismissed these claims. In the riots following the destruction of the mosque, thousands were killed across the country, the majority of them Muslim.

Four years later, the BJP formed a government for the first time. Since then it has concocted a blend of Hindu nationalism and extreme capitalism to make itself the new hegemon of Indian politics. It is testament to the party’s hold over state institutions that in November 2019 the Supreme Court of India voted unanimously to hand over the land for the construction of the Ram temple. With Modi’s return to Ayodhya this year, the BJP – having won majorities in 2014 and 2019 – was gearing up for an electoral hat trick, a feat previously achieved only by Nehru’s Congress party in 1962. In advance of the ceremony, millions of saffron flags featuring the watchword ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (hail Ram), which doubles as a greeting and a war cry for the Hindu right, appeared across New Delhi. Models of the temple went on display at shopping malls; ornate banners of Modi and Ram hung from footbridges. It was hard to believe that such a transformation had been wrought by the inauguration of a temple four hundred miles away. Instead, something more fundamental appeared to be happening: the fulfilment of the ultimate right-wing fantasy, the Hindu nation.

The parliamentary opposition, led by the Congress, claimed that the BJP had rushed to inaugurate the temple before it was finished to ensure that the upcoming elections would be polarised along religious lines. But with the BJP directly or indirectly controlling most of the national media, there were few outlets for such arguments. The opposition was being silenced in other ways too. In December, 141 opposition MPs were suspended for demanding a debate about a recent security breach in parliament, where two men who had been given visitors’ passes by a BJP MP jumped into the lower chamber and opened canisters that sprayed out yellow gas.

The suspensions had the unintended effect of bringing the opposition closer together. For some months, around thirty parties had been trying to form an ambitious electoral front called INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), but there were obvious obstacles. Some of the parties were mired in bitter rivalries: the alliance included both the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the populists of the All India Trinamool Congress, who in 2011 had ended the Communists’ 34-year reign in West Bengal. Other parties with conflicting ideologies now kept company: for instance, the Dravidian Progressive Federation, which has roots in the militant anti-Brahmanical movements of southern India, and the Hindu ultranationalists of the Shiv Sena. The quarrels around seat-sharing arrangements were made more difficult by the diminished stature of the Congress. In the previous two elections, the ‘grand old party’ of Indian politics had won just 44 and 52 out of 543 seats in parliament, failing to achieve even the official status of ‘opposition’ (the threshold is 54 seats). Yet given its illustrious history, the Congress still expected the regional parties to coalesce around it. This met with some resistance: in a number of states, including West Bengal and Punjab, INDIA candidates resolved to run against one another. Despite these differences, however, INDIA managed to devise a programme focused on social justice, inclusivity and developmentalism. In the end, the parties were united not by shared political convictions but by the growing threat posed by the BJP.

Over the years, the BJP had used its parliamentary majority to pass a slew of laws that privatised the education sector, facilitated the takeover of agriculture by multinational corporations, discriminated against Muslims seeking citizenship, and revoked the ‘special status’ that had given Kashmir autonomy. Some of these measures were rushed through in midnight sessions. Others were announced abruptly on television by Modi. In keeping with his carefully cultivated persona – one part incorruptible strongman, one part otherworldly ascetic – these proclamations were often described by the media as Akashvani, or celestial announcements. But towards the end of Modi’s second term, the BJP’s centralisation of political power acquired an extra-parliamentary dimension as it began to deploy government agencies to implicate opposition politicians in corruption cases. In the lead-up to the elections, the Enforcement Directorate arrested the chief ministers of Delhi and Jharkhand, and the Income Tax Department froze the Congress’s bank accounts. The Election Commission turned a blind eye when Modi and his flunkies repeatedly referred to Muslims as ‘infiltrators’. With the BJP enjoying an unprecedented monopoly over the state machinery, a third victory seemed all but guaranteed. Political analysts forecast a supermajority of more than 400 seats (the party had won 282 and 303 seats in the last two elections), potentially enough for it to rewrite the constitution. Shortly before the polls closed on 1 June, Modi gave an interview to the news channel NDTV in which he claimed that he was not ‘born biologically’: after his mother died, he said, ‘I was convinced that God had sent me … Once the purpose is achieved, my work will be done.’

When the results came in three days later, the BJP had inexplicably failed to secure a majority, let alone a supermajority, winning just 240 seats. INDIA was close behind with 232, defying all expectations; 99 of those seats went to the Congress, which nearly doubled its tally. Pollsters wept on live television, news anchors had meltdowns, and share prices fell by 6 per cent in a day. In his own seat, the holy city of Varanasi, Modi’s majority fell from 480,000 votes to just over 150,000 – the smallest margin of victory for a prime minister since 1977. The BJP performed particularly badly in the state of Uttar Pradesh, the heartland of the Hindu right, where it lost nearly half its seats, including Ayodhya. In the eyes of many liberal commentators, the party had suffered a ‘moral defeat’.

What explains this reversal? One key reason is the backlash against the BJP’s sustained assault on long-standing welfare schemes – in healthcare and primary education among other things – that have provided a crucial, if increasingly ragged, safety net for large swathes of India’s rural population. Since 2014 the BJP has redirected state investment towards subsidising private goods such as plumbing and building materials and connections to cooking gas. These subsidies weren’t legally enshrined, which meant the BJP could withdraw them at any time. But they did supply the BJP with a useful source of propaganda. Election posters presented Modi as a benevolent patron dispensing items to submissive recipients, who expressed their gratitude with folded hands.

The BJP’s withdrawal of public services has been accompanied by large-scale investment in infrastructure projects: roads, ports, airports, mines. A key feature of this turn towards infrastructure is that a handful of conglomerates now monopolise entire economic sectors: Reliance, owned by Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in Asia, controls petrochemicals and telecoms; Tata controls steel and IT services; Gautam Adani controls ports and power. The BJP enabled the rise of this new oligarchy by instituting special economic zones, granting environmental clearances and providing cheap development loans, while overturning basic labour protections like the right to an eight-hour work day. The case of Adani is exemplary, not least because Modi’s interventions on his behalf have helped secure lucrative deals for his companies in Australia, Bangladesh, Israel and elsewhere.*

Contrary to the usual argument, this cronyism isn’t simply a sign of the corruptibility of the BJP leadership. Rather, it represents a new phase of Indian capitalism. The rise of the oligarchs has mirrored the rise of single-party rule, each reinforcing the other. The oligarchs have profited immensely: the top 1 per cent now hold more than 40 per cent of India’s wealth. A recent study by the World Inequality Database concluded that the ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie ‘is now more unequal than the British colonial Raj’. The BJP has taken its cut too, of course. In 2017 it launched an ‘electoral bond’ scheme that allowed for anonymous funding of political parties. By March 2023, 55 per cent of all money donated (65.7 billion rupees, or around £650 million) had flowed directly into the BJP’s coffers. The Congress received less than 10 per cent of donations.

The BJP’s commitment to the new class of oligarchs helps explain the dynamics of its particular form of welfarism. On the one hand, it has served its cronies with policies that have intensified India’s endemic poverty: the bottom 50 per cent own only 6 per cent of wealth. On the other, it has continued to dole out goods to the working classes. But unlike social policies that give an employment guarantee or a minimum wage, this new welfarism doesn’t improve the bargaining position of workers. It’s one thing to offer a free electricity connection and another to provide the recipients with the means to pay their electricity bills. The BJP has integrated Indians into the market economy, and taught them to be grateful for any handout from the state.

Despite INDIA facing large-scale repression, its programme appears to have struck a chord with much of the electorate. The widely discussed Congress manifesto promised radical reforms: a national caste census to tackle discrimination, an expansion of public healthcare, employment guarantees and more progressive taxation. Rather than mobilising the electorate with promises of targeted personal benefits, the Congress has framed its welfare policies in terms of a new struggle against inequality. Under the guardianship of Rahul Gandhi, the 54-year-old scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, the party has critiqued crony capitalism, exposing the BJP’s invocations of Hindu supremacy as meagre compensation for the poverty that now afflicts more than half of Indians.

There is reason for optimism. The opposition owes its success to the rise of a new intersectional bloc that includes representatives from the Dalits, the working classes and religious minorities. For now, though, it’s not clear what kinds of opening the unexpected electoral gains might create for political organising outside parliament. By contrast, the RSS has managed to construct a robust political architecture that can withstand electoral setback. Apart from boasting around sixty thousand local branches, the party has hundreds of affiliates, including trade unions, NGOs and one of the biggest student organisations in the country. It’s also worth remembering that, for all the talk of ‘moral defeat’, the BJP still achieved the third best result in its history and Congress its third worst. But the election has already had one significant outcome: after a decade of single-party rule, the BJP has had to rely on its regional allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to form the new government. And, given the newfound parliamentary strength of the opposition, it seems unlikely that Modi’s party will be able to push through laws with its accustomed ease or persist with its brazen weaponisation of state agencies. Yet it remains to be seen what this means for the relationship between Hindu nationalism and capitalism. Will the crony capitalism fostered by the BJP continue to flourish? Or will the likes of Adani and Ambani face resurgent competition from the regional capitalists represented by the other parties in the NDA? Among them are the Telugu Desam Party, which in the 1990s and 2000s propped up an entire generation of infrastructural entrepreneurs from Andhra Pradesh, and the Bihar-based People’s Party (United), neither of which subscribe to the ideology of Hindu supremacy. So will the BJP still be able to target religious minorities, Muslims in particular, with quite such a free hand?

On their own, electoral pacts and promises of top-down reforms won’t stem the groundswell of the Hindu right. During the campaign, Rahul Gandhi undertook two yatras, travelling around the country to bring the party closer to the realities on the ground. But beyond their symbolic importance, these journeys didn’t spark any political mobilisation, much less unite the sectoral movements of recent years – agrarian struggles, citizenship protests, anti-caste movements, the nascent organising of gig workers. The Congress is riven with ideological contradictions: it continues to offer soft Hindutva and dynastic politics, to say nothing of its own legacy of neoliberalism. The electoral setback to the BJP is a clear sign of discontent with mass precarity. But decades of grassroots organising have helped the Hindu right acquire a momentum that transcends the rhythms of general elections. Three weeks after the polls closed, the saffron flags are still flying in New Delhi.