New Delhi: The year 2024 has been recognised as the year of critical elections as globally, more voters than ever in history will head to the polls. At least 64 Democratic countries across the globe, representing a combined population of about 49% of the people in the world, with significant economic and strategic importance, are all in election mode, whose results will have severe consequential effects on the future world order, currently affected by heightened uncertainty, deepened political insecurities, rising hyper nationalistic sentiments, and more.
Change is the call announced by the citizenry of most election-ready countries. However, people’s faith in democratic processes – leading up to change – is weakening (where not suppressed).
This is a critical week in Indian politics too.
Between the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the opposition-led INDIA, or Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, one shall be a declared winner in the Lok Sabha (national) polls. Reasonable assessments project a comfortable third elected term for the Modi-led BJP government. Degrees to which the BJP will add (or subtract) to its previous (2019) electoral-win tally remains to be seen. Still, there is little doubt that we could be seeing Narendra Modi (and the incumbent BJP government) continuing for another five years.
Despite the relative certainty around this happening, what remains is the waning popularity of the Modi-Shah-led party-state establishment that has dominated India’s national politics over the last ten years. Economic issues such as persistent price rises, jobless growth, slow private investment, real wage stagnation, widening wealth and income inequality, and poorly designed economic incentive schemes like the PLI, at the expense of decreasing allocations for essential social welfare programmes such as MGNREGA and nutrition programmes, have deeply impacted most people, especially in rural areas.
While the BJP, as a party, may continue making inroads into the eastern and southern parts of the country while securing its base vote across northern India, the disappointment with Modi’s “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas” pro-development agenda is reaching its ceiling point. Growing resentment and disappointment among Modi voters have increased in recent years, even though a closer look at the BJP’s vote share compared to its 2014 and 2019 performance will be key as the 2024 results come out.
Yet, a closer observation of the prime minister’s speeches shows a return to a communitarian (Hindu versus Muslim) agenda, while the government has little to show for its economic governance record over the last ten years. This serves as its own evidence.
Historically, too, any strong national leader in Indian politics, post-independence, has seen their third term to be the weakest overall, ultimately leading to their downfall. This was true with Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1960s, then with Indira Gandhi in the 1980s, and now, may very well be the case with Narendra Modi in the post-2024 period.
A conscious effort to not let Yogi Adityanath – who is often projected to be the BJP’s next big national level electoral face – hog much national limelight in the 2024 polls is further evidence of an internal lack of clarity in the BJP’s top organisational brass about how the post-Modi political scenario may look like for what is currently the ‘invincible BJP’.
Independent of future political scenarios, from an international standpoint, there are some serious challenges for Modi’s India for the next five-year period. India’s economy, while growing at a faster rate, is facing structural issues around widening inequality, heightened economic uncertainty, due to a greater than 40% youth unemployment rate, and a skill-deficiency to compete with other global (emerging) economic powers.
Modi government’s confusing foreign policy agenda, a bungled-up China-policy, a rising border security crisis (on east, west, northern sides), growing government-debt problem, structural consumption demand compression, and an exacerbating brain/skill/investment drain situation amongst top business-educated elites, will further add up to the next government’s concerns and problems to deal with.
Modi’s cabinet ministry and team of executive ministers, especially the finance ministry, isn’t the strongest to deal with some of these issues. Worse, they fail to even acknowledge them.
A neo-Bhakti movement seen under Modi’s regime, in a typical Goebbelsian-style loyalist programme aimed at incentivising those ‘praising the supreme leader’ to gain proximity to power, also has its limits. Mediocrity and insincere incompetency, in this case, around intellectual and progressive means, may crowd out or, worse, triumph over more competent, well-thought-out governance interventions.
At the grassroots level, some of these issues are understood by the voting electorate, even in this election. However, most people still find less fault with Modi or his government for the ‘ills’ that afflict them, such as inequality, joblessness, and price rises. In cases where they do fault Modi, the lack of a suitable opposition leader alternative who can confront Modi and his policies head-on, while also driving an alliance with other regional and national allies, remains an elusive find, at least for now.
A year ago, before the 2024 elections, this author had argued here, on the BJP’s possibility of setting up a direct electoral contest in 2024 with Rahul Gandhi-led Congress, given how well the BJP performs in one-on-one direct electoral contests against the Congress. Yes, Rahul Gandhi may no longer be the electoral Pappu he was made out to be back in 2014 or 2019 and has seen his image improve in the political landscape in India. However, he is nowhere close to being perceived (or conceived) as a direct electoral alternative to Modi – now or anytime in the foreseeable future.
His lack of ownership in taking on the party-leadership – while still continuing to take major decisions or ‘being perceived as the main face of the party’ is also baffling to say the least. When it comes to testing the electoral validity of securing ‘people’s popular vote’, both, him and his sister, also have no clear track-evidence, which makes most of their electoral stunts/speeches part of a rhetorical pitch with an empty, disharmonious tone that fails to ignite any spark for change in the electorate.
In the post-2024 electoral scenario, the Grand Old Party may benefit from either completely removing the Gandhis from the party’s decision-making scene, considering the baggage they tend to bring during elections, or pursuing a Syndicate-style split within the party. Such a split could facilitate a re-evaluation of the party’s organisational structure along electoral lines and provide new leaders with an entrepreneurial opportunity to emerge and lead the party towards change.
Apart from this, a leader who has continued to rattle the BJP and take its politics more head on, including across mainstream media platforms, even though is electorally marginalised as a small, regional, Delhi-anchored politician, is Arvind Kejriwal. How Kejriwal, and those around him, plan their next move after the election results are out will hold the key in the way India’s political landscape shifts away in the next five years from a Modi-Shah dominant electoral bandwagon.
At the same time, more people-led protest movements such as the CAA-NRC, Kisan Andolan, etc., outside political battlegrounds, are likely to rise, as they have been in the last ten years, as a countervailing force to standing against the BJP’s homogenic, ideological agenda, and coercive push on policies, laws and social action.
This may allow for a ‘new’ civil society landscape and a fourth pillar agenda to emerge that can allow and promise change that is more inclusive, sensitive, and holistic for the people’s progressive well-being and development, breaking away from a crony-capitalist, inequality-driven agenda of the BJP, as observed in the last ten years. How the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, respond or recognise this – given their own history in becoming more state-executivised (off late) remains a subject of critical scrutiny.
Deepanshu Mohan is Professor of Economics, Dean, IDEAS, Office of InterDisciplinary Studies, and Director, Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), O.P. Jindal Global University. He is a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and a 2024 Fall Academic Visitor to Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. He has held Visiting Professorships with University of London’s Birkbeck College (UK), University of Ottawa (Canada), Carleton University (Canada), Stellenbosch University (South Africa), FGV (Rio, Brazil) in the past.
