Unchallenged authority
A feeble opposition helps India’s humiliated government survive
Even a blatant flip-flop may not damage Narendra Modi
IN A SHORT speech on November 19th Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, made a humiliating U-turn. Barely a year after rushing a trio of laws reforming agriculture through parliament, he announced their repeal. The shame was not only to have handed victory to the horde of tractor-mounted yokels doggedly protesting at the gates of India’s capital since last November. It was to have bungled the issue from the start.
Indian farming does indeed desperately need reform. Yet Mr Modi made no effort to build consensus for his three new laws last year, instead ramming them through parliament without debate. When north Indian farmers, many of whom happen to be Sikh, protested, he doubled their fury by tagging them thugs and traitors. The most powerful Indian leader in a generation then did nothing for months, as if the stand-off were someone else’s problem. That is, not until elections in a couple of important farm states drew uncomfortably near, whereupon Mr Modi crumpled completely.
In another democracy a leader who flouted parliament, broke trust with an influential religious minority and insisted on and then scrapped controversial reforms would pay a heavy political price. But although the farm-bill fiasco is only the latest link in a long and heavy chain of embarrassments under Mr Modi, the white-bearded prime minister remains largely unscathed. Admirers ascribe his staying power to personal charisma. They say he projects the strength and dignity Indian voters crave in their own lives. Detractors point instead to the deep pockets, ruthlessness and military discipline of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), quietly buttressed by a web of allied Hindu-nationalist organisations and noisily amplified by relentless propaganda.
All this surely counts, yet would not suffice without another secret weapon: the opposition. Throughout Mr Modi’s term and a half in power, the BJP’s opponents have remained divided, weak and largely ineffectual. This does not mean they have given the prime minister a free ride. Such misguided policies as “demonetisation”, the withdrawal from circulation in 2016 of high-denomination notes in a delusional bid to chase out “black money”, or the BJP’s gleeful stoking of Islamophobia in a country with 200m Muslims, or Mr Modi’s erratic handling of covid-19, including fierce lockdowns that wrecked small businesses and stranded millions of migrant workers, followed by complacent laxity as India’s second wave became a murderous tsunami—all this has made it easy for opposition politicians to fire up disgruntled constituents. But despite landing the odd blow against Mr Modi, and beating the BJP in the occasional state election, they have so far failed to shift India’s broader narrative. In opposition in the years before 2014, the BJP had by contrast skilfully and relentlessly undermined the sitting government, plucking at every speck of possible evidence to build a damning—and in retrospect largely unfair—picture of weakness and venality.
Despite glaring and multiple failings, Mr Modi remains in the eyes of most Indians a success at home and abroad. According to Morning Consult, an American firm that conducts weekly online polls tracking the leaders of 13 large democracies, Mr Modi is the only one whose approval has never dipped below 60% in the past two years. Some Indian polls differ, noting a marked decline in the prime minister’s ratings during the covid crisis. Still, even the worst numbers put him leagues ahead of any opposition figure. By and large, political pundits concur that barring some big shock the BJP should keep hold of Uttar Pradesh, by far India’s most populous state, in the coming election in February and that Mr Modi is likely to win a third term at the next general election, in 2024.
To be fair, the troubles of India’s opposition did not start with Mr Modi. For three decades two big trends have marked the country’s politics. One is the rise of the BJP, which is itself the spearhead of a century-old movement based on the idea that India’s essentially Hindu nature has been unjustly suppressed for a thousand years. Despite the extraordinary diversity of languages and castes and forms of worship in a country that is 80% Hindu, this idea of victimhood has not just won votes. In many states it has helped to consolidate a “Hindu” vote behind the BJP that then becomes difficult for other parties to challenge without being smeared as less nationalist, or as pandering to minorities. The party has a particular stronghold on the Hindi-speaking and religiously conservative heartlands of northern and central India.
The other trend has been the slow disintegration of the Congress party, which carries the even older political legacy of India’s secular independence movement. Congress was essentially the party of government for the first decades of the Indian republic, but its efforts to keep its tent as wide as possible inevitably led to fragmentation. From running all of India’s states in the 1950s and 1960s, it has been reduced to running just three out of 28 today, compared with 12 for the BJP (which also forms part of coalition governments in another six).
Equally pertinent, the leading rival to the BJP in many other states is no longer Congress itself, but rather local spin-off parties led and largely manned by former members of Congress. In big states such as West Bengal and Maharashtra these parties have largely supplanted the mother party. In other parts of India, such as Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and several southern states, local parties have sprung up on their own and successfully poached Congress’s electorate. Their success has left Congress with barely a vestigial presence across much of India, and helped reduce its share of seats in the lower house to below 10%, compared with 56% for the BJP.
This not only leaves Congress with a narrow platform from which to challenge the BJP but also makes it an unattractive party to invest in. Political power can be lucrative in India, but elections are also very expensive. Under Mr Modi, political funding has been made fully anonymous if given in the form of an “electoral bond”. Only the total value of donations that parties receive in this way must be revealed, and these show that his own party attracts far more than the combined takings of all the 36 other parties with seats in India’s parliament. The BJP’s funders are believed to include top tycoons whose fortunes have, unsurprisingly, soared dramatically under Mr Modi’s rule, unlike those of most Indians.
Nevertheless at state level, all these opposition parties amount to a strong challenge to the BJP across much of India. The country’s diversity means that ethnic or caste or religious sensibilities create perpetual pushbacks against a too-dominant centre, and these have been the typical springboards to local power. The trouble is that compared with the BJP’s simple core message of Hindu pride and nationalism, its scattered and multiple opponents have no shared story to tell. The most recent period of Congress-led government, from 2004 to 2014, may have made things difficult, too. It respected India’s diversity by having a Sikh prime minister and prominent Muslim, Christian and regional ministers, but generated quiet resentment from mainstream Hindus and particularly upper castes that felt excluded from power. With the constant sniping of Hindu nationalists having in many eyes discredited secularism, Congress and other parties, confident of getting most minority votes anyway, have in response tried to out-Hindu the BJP with pious gestures. This looks shallow to many voters, adding to a broader impression that outside the BJP, politicians as a whole do not stand for very much.
But Congress in particular suffers from yet another handicap: the Gandhi family. These are not descendants of Mahatma Gandhi but of his successor Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, via his daughter Indira’s marriage to Feroze Gandhi, a journalist and politician. It was under the dictatorial rule of Indira Gandhi (prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and 1980 to 1984) that the family’s dominance of the party was consecrated. It extends now to her grandchildren Rahul (51) and Priyanka (49), although it is their Italian-born mother, Sonia (74), who remains the party’s official head.
The younger Gandhis are personable and capable, but their pedigree exposes them to the celibate Mr Modi’s well-placed barbs about nepotism. There is resentment from within the party, too, about ideological drift, the lack of internal democracy and the overweening influence of courtiers and loyalists compared with street-level vote-getters. The party has lost a continuous stream of defectors or frustrated workers in recent years, and repeatedly been outfoxed by the BJP—in the small state of Goa Congress got more seats, but woke up to find the BJP had lured its allies into a coalition overnight. The fact that Rahul Gandhi has frequently been proved right—he called loudly for action on covid months before Mr Modi moved, and declared a year ago that the BJP would be forced to scrap farm reform—has impressed Indians less than his seeming lack of gravitas. It does not help that Mr Gandhi twice led his party to defeat in national elections, losing in 2019 the seat in Uttar Pradesh that he had inherited from his uncle, father and mother.
Mr Gandhi seems ill-suited to propping up a big but sagging tent in a raging storm, yet he shows no inclination to hand the role to anyone else. Without a better vote-catcher at the helm of Congress, the opposition’s only other hope for defeating the BJP in 2024 would be to form a broad coalition of regional parties. The trouble is that little unites them except loathing for the BJP—and even this is suspect, given that many regional politicians would be happy to be bought off. It is also a fact that regional leaders, however popular on their own turf, have little national stature. Perhaps it will prove that just as Mr Modi’s best ally has been the weakness of his opponents, so the opposition’s best chance to capture power may stem from the actions of the prime minister himself. But it will take a gargantuan mistake to undo the seemingly unassailable Mr Modi.