Instead of Asking How Long Modi's Government Will Last, INDIA Needs to Get Its Act Together

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s failure to win an absolute majority of the seats in the Lok Sabha, and Narendra Modi’s refusal, so far, to descend from the high pedestal on which he had seated himself before the elections raises a crucial question: how stable will the present National Democratic Alliance government be?

Our experience of previous coalition governments – the Janata government from 1977 to 1979, the United Front government from 1996 till 1998, and the United Progressive Alliance from 2004 till 2014 – suggests that it will depend upon the major party’s, in this case Modi’s, willingness to compromise with his partners and make their concerns his own. 

Nothing that Modi has done in the 22 years that he has been the chief minister of Gujarat and Prime Minister of India, suggests that he will be able to do so. On the contrary Modi’s reaction to his sudden return to political vulnerability has been a combination of disbelief and rage. The disbelief is writ large in the composition of his new council of ministers, for its composition has shown no sign that he intends to change either his goals, or his methods of achieving them. Despite having secured only 240 seats and therefore being dependent for his government’s survival upon N. Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), Modi has not given even one of the four most important portfolios in the Union government – home, defence, finance and external affairs – to either of them. 

Few observers had expected him to go so far, but many had expected him to offer the speakership of the Lok Sabha to one or the other of them. Modi has done no such thing either. The TDP ended with just two ministers. JD(U) also got the same number. By contrast Modi appointed 51 of the 78 ministers and deputy ministers in his government from within his own party. 

Also read: Modi’s Embrace Leaves Allies Weak and Voiceless

Modi’s reluctance to change his strategy almost certainly stems from the continuing strength of the BJP’s vote share. The BJP lost 60 seats, but its share of the vote fell by a bare 0.8%, from 37.36% in 2019 to 36.58% in 2024. On the other hand, although the Congress almost doubled the number of seats it won from 52 to 99, its share of the vote rose by a bare 1.7% from 19.49% in 2019 to 21.19% in 2024. Modi therefore probably believes that it is only a matter of time before the INDIA alliance disintegrates and leaves him free to continue ruling the country as he has so far. 

The other evidence of his refusal, or inability, to face an unpalatable reality has been his undiminished rage. As has happened over and over again in the past several years, whenever he has faced a threat , or a situation that he is not able to control, Modi has hidden his anger in silence. But the anger has been mirrored by the way that he has stepped up his vendetta against those who have dared, or continue to dare, to challenge his absolute power over the nation. The primary target of his vengefulness today remains the Aam Aadmi Party and its chief, Arvind Kejriwal. 

Kejriwal was the very first leader whom Modi had tried to destroy as far back as in 2015. His primary reason was that AAP had virtually destroyed the BJP in the 2016 legislative assembly elections in Delhi, winning 67 of its 70 seats, barely six months after the latter had won all the seven Lok Sabha seats from Delhi. Modi took this as a personal affront, for in addition to launching a relentless attack on Central and All-India service officers in Delhi who were carrying out the instructions of the new government, he lost no time in getting a complaisant judge of the Delhi high court to virtually overturn Article 239 AA of the Constitution and declare Delhi to be nothing more than another Union territory in which final executive power rested – as it did in all other union territories except Puducherry – with the Lieutenant Governor appointed by the Union government. 

It took Kejriwal almost three years to get this decision reversed by the Supreme Court, but what was even more galling for Modi was that barely a year after that AAP trounced the BJP again in the 2020 Vidhana Sabha elections, winning almost the same share of the votes and seats. 

No aspiring dictator would have taken such a double defeat lying down, but Modi’s grudge against Kejriwal runs far deeper and is more personal. It arises from the fact that while other political parties have taught their followers to fear Modi, Kejriwal has been inviting them to laugh at him. He did this 15 months ago through a 20-minute fairy tale recounted to the Delhi Vidhan Sabha, about the fumbling antics of a Chauthi-pass Raja. He did this with such good humour that even some of the BJP MLAs present in the hall were unable to conceal their amusement. 

In the year that followed, the Youtube video of Chauthi-pass Raja went viral. All, or parts of it, were replayed by a score of video channels, and collectively registered several million hits on the net. Not only did Modi find this intolerable, but he realised that Kejriwal was doing what the great comedian Charlie Chaplin had done to Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator, 80 years earlier. When Chaplin was asked why he had lampooned Hitler so, he had replied that the only way to defeat a dictator was to make people laugh at him. Given Modi’s exalted opinion of himself, it is hard not to conclude that this video turned political animosity into virulent, personal hatred. 

The yardstick of Modi’s hatred of Kejriwal is the extent to which the executive branch of the Central government is prepared to bend, or break, the law in order to carry out his diktats. The Enforcement Directorate and the CBI have dropped even the pretence of impartiality in their hounding of Kejriwal. The way in which the ED rushed to the Delhi high court to stay the bail granted to Kejriwal by the Rouse Avenue trial court shows that for it there is now no law but The Law as decreed by Modi. 

Nor, apparently, is there any other ‘law’ for the Delhi high court either, for it allegedly complied with the ED’s wishes even before reading the Rouse Avenue court’s decision. This illustrates the shameful extent to which both the executive and the judiciary have been turned into tools of fascist control by the BJP during the past decade. Both the ED and the CBI have ignored the fact that when the Supreme Court had granted Kejriwal bail from May 10 till June 2 to enable him to fight the election, it had directed him to go to the trial court, (i.e. the Rouse Avenue court) for further relief. So when the Delhi high court stayed the Rouse Avenue court’s decision, it tacitly overturned a sanction by the highest court of the land. More than any other single action of the executive under Modi, this is what shows how far, and how willingly, he, his ministers, and his bureaucrats and his judges, have turned India’s democracy into a shadow without substance. 

The Modi government’s move to charge writer Arundhati Roy now for a statement she allegedly made in a public forum in Kashmir 14 years ago, shows that Modi has also not lost his taste for persecuting members of civil society who have fearlessly opposed his government’s creeping advance towards tyranny during the past 10 years. Even if what Roy said in 2010 was accurately reported by the Hindu zealot who filed a case against her a decade ago, the fact remains that through decision after decision the Supreme Court had by then established that mere verbal statements or exhortations criticising the State do not constitute sedition. All previous Supreme Court judgements have been unanimous that only actions designed to destabilise or overthrow the state can be considered seditious. 

The Modi government only changed this through a spate of amendments in 2019. So it is now considering prosecuting her under a law that did not exist when she allegedly made her supposedly ‘anti-national’ statement. This is a huge perversion of the very concept of law. But that seems to matter little to Modi and his home minister Amit Shah. 

Unlike his vendetta against Kejriwal, Modi’s intention to punish Roy through a retroactive application of law is not personal. It is a message to the country that as far as he is concerned nothing has changed and he will continue to harass and imprison all those who oppose him at will, as he has done so far. 

His continuing assault on civil society, is also a veiled warning to Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu that despite their 28 seats they too do not matter because, should either of them decide to oppose his policies and actions, he will do to them what he has done to the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra, and earlier to the Congress in Bengal and Assam. 

That is to get the CBI or ED to fabricate cases against them or their MPs and give them the option of going to jail like Kejriwal and Hemant Soren, or joining the BJP as Suvendu Adhikari, Eknath Shinde, Ajit Pawar and others have done in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Assam and elsewhere in the past 10 years. 

His party’s task, of terrorising its opponents into submission has been made hugely easier by the ban Indira Gandhi imposed on company donations to political parties in 1970. Since her government created no alternative legal way of financing elections, it went a long way towards criminalising political financing in the ensuing decades. That has made it easy for Modi to justify whip up cases against political leaders. Nitish Kumar got this message seven years ago. If Naidu has not, he soon will. 

The INDIA alliance. therefore, needs to learn that the task of saving India’s multi-ethnic democracy has only just begun. To complete it, the alliance needs to acknowledge, and learn from, the mistakes its members made during the formation of their coalition. Their very first was not to agree upon a basis for choosing candidates for the Lok Sabha elections at their Varanasi meeting itself. The obvious way was to offer the seats won by the BJP in 2019 to the party that had been the first runner up in those constituencies. This would have limited the number of seats in which disagreements could still have arisen because of changed circumstances, to a handful in each state. Their settlement could then have been left to the state party leaders. 

Doing that would have given the national leaders the time and leisure they needed to frame a common set of policies on critical national issues like inflation, rapidly rising unemployment and growing rural distress that Modi, despite all his grandiose promises, has not been able to resolve. 

With the elections behind us and Modi once more in power, the alliance needs to reflect on the tactical mistakes that made it miss seizing power by a hair this year. The one that jumps immediately to mind is the Congress party’s decision to launch Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra from Bengal, and take it through Bihar despite the entreaties of its powerful alliance partners, chief ministers Mamata Banerjee and Nitish Kumar, not to do so.

The Congress ignored these requests, most probably because of the impact that Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra had had on the state assembly elections in Karnataka. But its planners chose to forget that in Karnataka it had happened in the legislative assembly elections, while this was an election for the Lok Sabha. As happened in Karnataka, any gain in Congress votes in these states would only take place at the expense of an alliance partner, and therefore benefit the BJP. 

Despite being ignored, Mamta Bannerjee did not leave the broad alliance, because she relied on Bengali sub-nationalism to win the elections in Bengal and the Congress had long ago been reduced to insignificance. But Nitish Kumar faced a far more difficult challenge in Bihar, so decided to play it safe and go back to the BJP. 

How expensive this decision has been for the INDIA alliance, and may prove to be for Indian democracy in the future, can be judged from the fact that had the alliance stayed intact in Bihar, the BJP would not have been even asked, let alone been able, to form the next government. 

Regrettably the Congress seems to have neither learned anything nor forgotten anything from its mistake, for today its party leaders in Delhi have joined the BJP’s chorus of accusations against the AAP on the alleged Delhi liquor scam, with gusto. They seem unable to realise that doing so will not only weaken, but eventually destroy the INDIA alliance, for other parties will learn not to trust the Congress and to look for safer havens. 

The only way to stabilise the INDIA alliance is to accept the dominance of each of its members in its own territory. Only thus will it be able to create a stable, secular and democratic all-India alternative to the BJP. If the Congress, which is, and will remain, the senior party in the alliance, continues to let its local minions make decisions that will become, by default, the national policy of the party, then Modi and his BJP will be the only gainers and, sooner rather than later, democracy will become a fading memory.