There are, in news terms, three types of elections: the real cliffhanger, a contest which matters where no one can be sure of the outcome – such as the coming US presidential election; the ‘no surprises here’ polls which nevertheless signal a new political era – as with the all-but-certain Labour victory when Britain votes; and then there’s the ‘government-set-to-get-re-elected-with-another commanding-majority’ type of contest which has been unfolding in India.
You don’t need to be an editorial savant to realise that this last category is the hardest sell for news outlets in other parts of the world. On the Richter scale of news stories, India’s election is so far barely measuring a two – while the Middle East is a six even on quieter days, and a full-on seismic eight when salvos of drones and missiles fly across international borders.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Much of the news coverage in the UK linked to the election has been indulgent of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. An editorial in The Times mentioned the ‘darker side’ to the prime minister’s popularity: the disadvantaging of Muslims, the intolerance of opposition and the ‘heavy pressure … imposed on India’s once lively press to toe the government line’. But it also described Modi as ‘probably the most significant Indian leader since independence’ whose image as a strongman plays well with rich and poor alike. ‘Mr Modi’s assertiveness abroad will be a factor the West must accommodate’, it argued. ‘After the election, expect a reinvigorated Mr Modi to push for a much higher profile for India.’
There was a similarly fulsome tone in Britain’s foremost business newspaper, the Financial Times, which reported how over the past decade, India has become a ‘global sweet-spot’ for investment and new consumer markets. ‘Narendra Modi has lapped up acclaim from the country’s business elite,’ the paper reported, ‘with many hoping for further easing of stifling investment restraints’.
A more probing opinion piece in the Financial Times by Ruchir Sharma, chair of Rockefeller International, suggested that India’s democracy is developing East Asian characteristics: ‘what we are seeing is a kind of tacit deal, in which swing voters accept a democratic recession under Modi as long as he delivers economic progress’. Sharma suggested this trade-off will only last while the economy performs well and is specific to Modi, but offered no reflection on what might happen if the economy, or the current prime minister, falter.
The Economist, as you would expect given its global agenda and audience, has been an exception in both the quality and breadth of its campaign coverage. Its correspondent reported at first hand on the BJP’s determined attempts to gain ground in Tamil Nadu, spending three days on the campaign trail with K. Annamalai, the BJP state leader. This ‘careening across Tamil Nadu at white-knuckle speed’ – what a tough life foreign correspondents lead – included a jallikuttu contest featuring a bull named in honour of India’s prime minister which, needless to say, emerged untamed.
The article explored the widening economic, social and political divide between north and south, and why Modi is so determined to break through in Tamil Nadu. It concluded with a warning – that if the BJP ‘fails to convince southern voters, [Modi] may rely on delimitation, financial pressure and other less democratic means to get his way’. And that in turn could ‘ultimately backfire, reviving separatist sentiment in the south’.
The single most newsworthy aspect of the campaign has been the manner in which India has borrowed from its neighbour’s playbook, by locking up a key opposition leader in the run-up to voting. The most liberal of Britain’s daily papers, the Guardian, gave prominence to opposition complaints of the ‘weaponising’ of the Enforcement Directorate which had turned the election – in the words of Trinamool Congress’s Derek O’Brien – into ‘the BJP versus democracy’.
Yet the poor prospects for the main opposition parties are, perhaps, because those parties are lacking in ideas, energy and new faces. The Times ran one of the more thoughtful articles about the elections, looking at the obsolescence of the party that for decades dominated Indian politics. ‘It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Congress deserves the obscurity to which it is headed because of its acute intellectual shortcomings’, columnist Philip Collins argued. ‘The future of India will need good inclusive growth to fund good public services. It will also need a government that can be trusted with democratic freedoms. Congress is the only option to offer both, but at the moment it is no option at all.’
Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC India correspondent.
London Calling: How does India look from afar? Looming world power or dysfunctional democracy? And what’s happening in Britain, and the West, that India needs to know about and perhaps learn from? This fortnightly column helps forge the connections so essential in our globalising world.
