Indian farmers’ protest at Singhu, outside Delhi, January 9 2021. Photo by Ajay Pal Singh used under CC licence

Setback for Modi in India’s elections

Narendra Modi’s right-wing government suffered a severe setback in the recent elections in India. Tanroop Sandhu looks at the reasons for this reverse, in an edited version of a talk delivered to East London rs21.

 Like most people I was pessimistic about the outcome of India’s recent election; and like most people, I was quite surprised by the result. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was handed a result much worse than anyone, including the exit polls, and he himself in all of his hubris, predicted.

To contextualise the election, and the state of Indian politics today, we need some historical background. That should begin with the Indian National Congress (Congress for short). Congress were the main leaders of the independence movement against British colonialism, and the virtually undisputed hegemons of India for the first five or so decades of the country’s existence- from about 1947, until the early 1990s. It was a ‘big tent’ party that contained all manner of social forces in it: landlords, the working classes, intellectuals, the middle classes, industrialists and peasants. To a degree, all of these competing interests were reconciled through common subordination to the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty (Jawaharlal Nehru and his descendants). To this day, the Gandhis are the leaders of Congress. They relied on their leadership of the party, and the prestige from leading the revolt against the British Empire, to hold on to power.

Congress also, in the first few decades of India’s independence, ran a protectionist state. There was a protective umbrella around native industries and state control of what was called the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. This economic model nurtured the growth of a native capitalist class, while also promising some minimal – and I stress minimal – provision for the poor, in a social compact that lasted for about four decades. But in the early 1980s, Congress began to embrace neoliberalism, and in the early 1990s they opened India to the world market.

This was a process happening not just in India, but also in much of the former Third World, where the adoption of neoliberalism dismantled many post-colonial protectionist regimes. As international capital was flowing into the Indian economy, and it became increasingly intertwined with the world market, many local capitalists, who couldn’t compete on the world stage, began to break away from Congress and organise independently. This was particularly true of agrarian capital, and led to the increasing regionalisation of Indian politics. More and more of India’s various states had parties that were powerful on the local and state levels, but were not necessarily national players. This process quickened the pace of the fracturing of the Congress’s hegemony.

The BJP and Hindu nationalism

Into that void stepped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which is a front for the far-right Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS is a mass movement, founded in the 1920s, and deeply rooted in Indian society. It has a paramilitary wing, charities, publishing houses, schools, trade unions, student groups, women’s organisations and, perhaps most importantly for us in Britain, diaspora organisations. The Hindu far right is very influential in the Indian diaspora in the US, Britain, and elsewhere. The RSS were explicitly inspired by European fascism. One of their leading intellectuals in the 1920s, M.S. Golwalkar, once wrote

Race pride at its highest has been manifested [in Nazi Germany]. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.

Their guiding ideology of Hindutva, or ‘Hindu-ness’, seeks to create a monolithic Hindu nation (eliding deep and oppressive caste hierarchies) hostile to those whom Golwalkar called their three ‘internal enemies’ – Muslims, Christians and Communists. In recent years, Muslims have become their main targets. Since the 1920s, the followers of Hindutva have been penetrating deeply and quite methodically into Indian civil society. There are RSS-affiliated judges, police officers and professors, and they also now have a stranglehold on much of the Indian media. The man who has been India’s Prime Minister for the past decade, Narendra Modi, has been a member of the RSS since he was a young boy.

Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of an Indian state, Gujarat, from 2001 to 2014. The Gujarat model, as one analyst put it, was a ‘developmentalist state: midwifing new industries, repairing bureaucracies, and making huge electricity and infrastructure investments’. Crucial to this strategy was a network of both deeply personal and political interconnections with key capitalists like Gautam Adani, boss of the construction and infrastructure giant Adani Group, and Mukesh Ambani of the Reliance Industries energy and telecoms conglomerate.

It is the ‘New Capitalists’, as the Indian historian Jairus Banaji puts it, those who emerged during the neoliberal period, that are ‘the most fervent supporters of Prime Minister Modi’. Another part of his political model was virulent Hindu nationalism. Modi oversaw the 2002 Gujarat riots in which almost 2,000 Muslims were killed, for which he was  banned from the US and Britain until he became Prime Minister. When Modi became PM, he brought both the intertwined forces of rampant hate-mongering and violence, and a deep alliance with sections of the capitalist class with him into office.

Why Modi fell short

The BJP had a majority government on their own in 2019, but fell to 240 seats this time around (out of 550), and thus will have to reply on two regionalist parties to form a government. One key reason for this change is that the opposition got its act together and formed a grand coalition called the INDIA Alliance. This opposition coalition is a remarkably wide tent that includes some of the regional parties formed since the advent of neoliberalism, as well as more established parties such as Congress, the various communist parties, and the secular left-populist Samajwadi (Socialist) Party. The Samajwadi Party, through outreach to oppressed caste and Muslim voters, won a majority of seats in Uttar Pradesh state, hitherto considered to be the BJP’s heartland. The far-right, then, lost an electoral majority but they also lost the sheen of seeming political invincibility that was attributed to figures like Modi by allies and critics alike.

Modi had campaigned on the call for the BJP to win 400 seats, and exit polls initially predicted a two-thirds majority for the ruling party (the amount needed to make changes to the constitution). Instead, he’s been saddled with two notoriously unreliable coalition partners. The stability of his third term in office cannot be taken for granted. Modi’s relative failure isn’t just a result of the opposition getting its act together, however; another key part of the explanation is the economy.

There were hopes that Modi might bring his vaunted ‘Gujarat model’ to the national stage, and that it would deliver. In a sense, it has. India is now the fifth largest economy, and business papers like the Financial Times wrote about how the country, with its ‘national growth story’ is seen as an increasingly attractive investment destination for capital. There have been big infrastructure projects – railways, roads, and ports. But if one looks closer, the real picture is bleak. Not only is the growth-model incredibly cronyist, corrupt, and unequal, it is also shallow. Urban unemployment is so bad that some workers have decided to return to the crisis-ridden agrarian sector. The labour participation rate of women in cities is lower than in Saudi Arabia. Unemployment for those under 25 is 45 percent.

 As the author and journalist Pankaj Mishra wrote,

…the number of Indians who go to sleep hungry rose from 190,000,000 in 2018 to 350,000,000 in 2022, and malnutrition and malnourishment killed more than two-thirds of the children who died under the age of five last year.

No wonder that economic commentator Menaka Doshi, writing in Bloomberg, said the election result was ‘a reminder that although India is home to two of Asia’s top billionaries, it also has 800 million Indians who rely on free grain.’

For quite a while, Modi was trying to paper over these glaring contradictions with direct cash payments, fuel and fuel subsidies to the poorest of the poor. And this aid was often very personalized – food packets would have his face emblazoned on them, so the poor were aware of who they had to ‘thank’. Yet such glaring inequities can only be swept aside for so long. The staggeringly unequal model of development under Modi, the fear that he would reduce public employment – one of the few paths to a stable and secure livelihood in the country – and the fears of Dalits (the lowest stratum of Hindu castes) that a BJP with a two-thirds majority might undo constitutional safeguards that provide them with reservation, set the stage for the election. The Opposition made use of all of this.

In many rural constituencies, and among the poor and the Dalits, there was a move away from the BJP and a swing towards the opposition. To the INDIA bloc’s credit, in this election cycle they ran a campaign that focused on material issues and on the threat a BJP majority would pose to India’s imperiled democracy. Akhilesh Yadav, leader of the Samajwadi Party, warned voters that the BJP would end reservation, and that they wanted to keep the ‘underprivileged segments of society ‘as their slaves.’’ They promised a caste census (a nation-wide census has not been held since the British left India) as a prelude to more effective wealth redistribution and social justice.

It remains to be seen whether the opposition can offer a credible alternative development model to the current dispensation, but they effectively capitalised on the failings of the government on meaningful ‘development’. In urban areas, on the other hand, and among the middle classes especially, voters remained largely loyal to the BJP. (The old theory that the middle classes provide one of the social bases of fascism has something to recommend it, it seems.)

It is crucial, however, to remember that the political situation in India changed before the elections because of mass movements against Modi. While the electoral opposition was in disarray, there were huge mobilisations, beginning in 2019, against proposed changes to the Constitution which discriminated against Muslims, in the form of the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens. There were (and still are) the huge farmers protests that began in 2020 which became famous around the world. Activists, students and organisers, hounded by the state, have been organising for years on the ground, and some of that oppositional energy got translated into electoral gains. For example, Amra Ram of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who helped lead the farmers’ protests in his capacity as the head of the All India Kisan Sabha (Farmer’s Union), is the first Communist MP to be elected in the north of the country in more than 20 years.

Down but not out

Of course, we still need to be mindful of the limits of this election. While many people were ecstatic about these results, Modi is still going to be the prime minister for the foreseeable future. The institutional rot, and the deepening communal hatred in Indian society will not dissipate through elections. Initial optimism has dampened as the authoritarian tendencies of the state seem set to continue: it was just announced that the famous author-activist Arundhati Roy, and a former professor named Sheikh Showkat Hussain, will be prosecuted under the deeply authoritarian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act over speeches they gave on Kashmir fourteen years ago. Eleven homes belonging to Muslims in Madhya Pradesh state were recently demolished after the police claimed to find them ‘storing beef in refrigarators’. The rot runs too deep for it to be excised after one election.

The Opposition coalition is full of its own contradictions, too. There is no indication they would fundamentally transform Indian politics or society. They would not challenge the brutal and unjust Indian occupation of Kashmir. Congress members were involved in the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, and one of their defeated candidates in this past election was the son of Kamal Nath, a man complicit in those massacres. And if there is continuous hunger, unemployment, and poverty in the country there is no one party that is to blame – the problems are, of course, far more structural. What many people were celebrating was less the prospect of salvation through the INDIA bloc, and more the slowing of India’s rapid decline into fascism, the denting of the myth of the invincibility of Modi, and the rejection by many voters of what was, even by BJP standards, a deeply hateful campaign.

Finally, let us consider the wider significance of this specific election and of India more broadly. In recent years, there has been an increasingly sickening, uncritical, embrace of him by Western leaders like Joe Biden. A big part of this is the anti-China pivot amongst the Western countries. India, of course, is China’s neighbor, and the two countries have fraught relations despite the increasing intertwining of their economies. As the new Cold War progresses, and as the United States attempts to economically de-link from China, many in Washington see India as a crucial ally. As Pankaj Mishra put it, ‘the mollycoddling of yet another exponent of crony capitalism and ethnic-racial supremacism is increasingly driven by the imperatives of the new Cold War.’

India and Israel are also increasingly close allies. A fantastic book by Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel explores how, over the past few decades, the relationship between India and Israel has become an increasingly structural, diplomatic, military and economic alliance. Gautam Adani, one of Modi’s favourite billionaires, has a ‘joint venture partnership’ with the Israel weapons company Elbit Systems, and thus helped supply the IDF with weapons during its genocidal onslaught in Gaza.

Essa also explores the ways in which much of the Indian diaspora – itself inflected with a virulent strain of Hindu nationalism and adoration for Modi – has been consciously learning from Zionist advocacy and lobbying groups in the United States. Some of the far-right in India, like the commentator Anand Ranganathan, openly say that ‘India needs an Israel-like solution to Kashmir.’ The same way accusations of antisemitism are used cynically to shut down criticism of the Israeli state, we must ready ourselves to counter cries of ‘Hinduphobia’ when calling out the Indian state’s crimes.

Make no mistake- the politics there will reverberate here. A Canadian Sikh activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was murdered on Canadian soil, and the Canadian government claimed that they had intelligence revealing the Indian state was involved. In the 2019 UK election BJP-linked groups actively sought to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign, and right-wing diaspora groups even forced the Labour Party to backtrack on its call for the Kashmiri people to be given the right of self-determination. As the economic weight of India and its diplomatic importance on the world stage increases, it’s important for leftists everywhere to start learning about Indian politics, and just what a serious threat the BJP and the RSS represent.

Four lessons from the election

Firstly: people’s politics aren’t immutable. Many people, including myself, had become convinced that the creeping Hindu fascism in Indian society had become hegemonic, a ‘common sense’ way for understanding the world, and that the struggle against it would have to be conceived of in terms of decades. In a sense, much of this still holds true. Yet the swing away from the BJP in this election demonstrates that people’s views are not set in stone, and that the powerful are never quite as dominant as they may seem. That does not mean, of course, that everyone who voted for the opposition has suddenly changed their minds about minorities or has abandoned Hindu nationalism.

Yet, it is an important signal of what can be achieved if a political opposition organises, and addresses material concerns, distinguishing itself from those in power rather than attempting to mimic them. The election also shows that seemingly moribund political parties, like Congress, have more life in them than their critics (again, myself included) might think.

The second point is that the far right – in India, but across the world more broadly – is an unstable coalition, precisely because of this accommodation with neoliberalism that they often come to once in power.  They seek to capitalise on people’s frustrations and their material anxieties, but because they so often ingratiate themselves with capital, they are unable to fundamentally challenge the root causes of the rage they seek to capture. The sustainability of their support base should not be taken for granted.

The third point is that mass movements can have a huge impact on politics in any country. And they can also find themselves reflected within the electoral system in interesting ways. Many of the movements against Modi weren’t explicitly tied to any specific political party. But they have changed the conversation. Something to keep in mind, in our own context.

The fourth and final point is, essentially, to remember the second half of Gramsci’s famous dictum: optimism of the will. The despondency that many people felt going into this election is hard to communicate. As mentioned above, some of the limitations of the result need to be kept in mind. Still, I hope that the sense of jubilation, no matter how short-lived, that so many of us felt on election day can be the fuel we need to continue to struggle.