Martin Luther King had a dream. Chinese President Xi Jinping had a dream. Going into the campaign for this year’s elections to the Lok Sabha, Prime Minister Narendra Modi too had a dream. He imagined winning 400 plus seats. This week, the dream went sour.
In 2014 Modi’s major political contribution was to revive the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In 2024, his biggest political contribution has been the revival of the Indian National Congress.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Of course, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi came into his own and provided leadership with his Bharat Jodo Yatra and party president Mallikarjuna Kharge provided mature and wise leadership. But the policies in Modi’s second term, and the politics of his divisive and low level electoral campaign, played their part in the revival of the Congress’s fortunes.
Modi launched the 2014 election campaign declaring that he would make India ‘Congress-mukt’. At the end of the 2024 campaign, the party should thank him for doing quite the opposite. A younger, youthful and energetic Congress has re-emerged after a decade of being on the back foot.
Modi may well make history securing a third term as prime minister, but he would not be the head of a Bharatiya Janata Party government.The question now is what a weaker Modi would mean for the stability of a Modi-led National Democratic Alliance government (NDA). More importantly, what would an NDA government, dependent on allies like Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar, mean for policy? Modi’s “guarantees” were for a Modi government. Neither Naidu nor Nitish are ideologically inclined towards that agenda, even if the pursuit of power keeps them on Modi’s side. But, would it?
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June 2024 feels very much like May 2004. Every political analyst had predicted victory for the NDA under then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s leadership. When the results came in, the stock market took a deep dive. Within hours a new alliance, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was cobbled together and, with outside support of the Left Front, a government was formed under the leadership of Manmohan Singh. Modi is not a Vajpayee, even if Amit Shah is a Pramod Mahajan. Vajpayee stepped back. Will Modi and Shah step back? After all, the election campaign was about ‘Modi ki Guarantee’. Is an NDA government willing to honour Modi’s guarantees?
The nation has thrust an important duty on Naidu and Nitish. Neither has proved to be a man of integrity or vision. Both have been self-serving and desperate for power. Yet, history has a strange way of demanding heroism from ordinary people. Recall how former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was assigned that role by fate and politics. On the verge of political retirement, packing his bags to become a pujari in a temple, Rao was not only made the prime minster but tasked to take decisions that changed the course of the country’s destiny. Can Nitish and Naidu play such a role as junior partners of a government dominated and controlled by Modi and Shah? Hardly. They would be kept in check on a daily basis by all the institutions at the Modi’s command.
To avoid that danger to their personal and political careers and, more importantly, in the larger interests of the country and its federal structure, the least Naidu and Nitish should demand is that one of them gets the home ministry and the other gets finance. Modi has been a lifelong hard political bargainer. Recall how he took charge of the BJP – wrestling it away from L.K. Advani, sidelining Sushma Swaraj and co-opting Arun Jaitley. Can Naidu and Nitish be as tough when they bargain?
There is a commonplace view within the commentariat that single party majority governments are better than coalition governments. Facts support the opposite. In many ways, after the first post-Independence decade, the best period for the country in terms of economic development, poverty reduction, employment growth, global profile and domestic social stability was the quarter century from 1991 to 2014. It was a period in which three genial, consensual and wise gentlemen became prime ministers of India – Narasimha Rao, Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh – heading coalition governments. In Rao’s case the Congress itself functioned like a coalition. Vajpayee and Singh headed explicit coalitions. India and Indians did well through their terms in office.
Given Modi’s personality, ideology and ambition, he will not leave any stone unturned in his quest for a third term. What kind of a prime minister would be be while heading a coalition remains to be seen. How he behaves and performs will, however, depend on the wisdom and courage of his allies, his senior colleagues and the bureaucracy, which has often crawled when asked to bend. The Modi-Shah regime have weakened and suborned every institution of Indian democracy. Can a Naidu and Nitish rein them in?
On his flight from Kanyakumari to New Delhi, Modi wrote an essay making three key points. First, that henceforth India would only be Bharat. If is to be made official it would require a constitutional amendment that he may no longer be able to push through. Second, Modi outlined a new definition of the word ‘reform’ by suggesting that the country needs reform in ‘every aspect of life’. Would a diminished Modi command the nation’s regard to be able to provide leadership for that kind of a reform? Third, Modi imitated the Chinese president by referring to the need for the country to have a ‘new dream’. A decade ago, Xi made much of his ‘China Dream’ – mimicking the idea of the ‘American Dream’. These dreams were about people ‘living the good life.’ Modi says India should dream to be Viksit Bharat.
India will be Viksit, irrespective of who leads the Union government next. So, even though Modi’s dream of 400 plus in parliament has not been realised, the nation’s dream of becoming a developed country will be realised, over time. As for Modi and the BJP, their dreams, disrupted by an electoral wake up call, have gone sour.
Sanjaya Baru is an economist, a former newspaper editor, a best-selling author, and former adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
