India Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarkable electoral triumph has brought India to a turning point in its 71 years as a modern Republic not least because he is more firmly in charge than during his first term.
That turning point is reached for at least two reasons. First, the power has been shattered of the political and intellectual elites that gained most from India’s rise since the secular democratic foundations set by the late Jawaharlal Nehru. Second, Modi is now a leader to be reckoned with in Asia with political significance equal to if not more than President Xi Jinping of China.
About the first point – Modi’s alliance won an unequivocal 350-seat victory despite virulent criticism because many Indians are finding their voices and asserting their presence to reverse decades of being left behind by the former elites. His electorate stems from the nearly one billion people who are from villages, small towns, slums and poorer sections of big cities.
Far above their heads, the major Indian and foreign media are still drumming on Modi’s personal flaws, muddled economic policies, authoritarian behavior, and alleged religion-based intolerance. Modi’s reign may entrench another greedy elite intent on its own betterment rather than empowering the people. But that remains to be seen.
Nehru established an inclusive Republic with equal rights for all minorities. The Indian Constitution provides protections for Muslims, who are now 14% of India’s 1.25 billion people, and Dalits who make up about 25% of the population. Dalits belong to the 80% Hindu majority of India but have been downtrodden for centuries by other richer Hindus.
Nehru’s insisted on equal treatment of everyone but he and his successors divisively used the Muslims and Dalits as vote-banks to win elections until Modi’s arrival on the national scene in 2014. Now, Modi’s party, the BJP, has a significant majority in the lower house of parliament and the majority is still greater with his political allies.
He achieved this expanded power with help mainly of the majority Hindu population and almost no support from Muslims. Nehru’s grand old secular party, the Congress, managed only 50 seats.
India’s Constitution guarantees secularity – meaning federal and state governance without interference from any religious or other group. But many analysts from the previous elites fear that Modi will now try to claim India as a Hindu state, similarly to Benyamin Netanyahu’s decision that Israel is a Jewish state although almost 20.95% of its citizens are Palestinian Arabs (according to 2019 estimates by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics).
In his victory speech, Modi said, “People have given a new narrative in this election. The mandate is against all those who divide people…” Critics claim that these fine words mask his cynical devotion to accumulating power by fuelling religious divisions and fear of the other.
Equally, his personal ethos of Hinduism could be inclusive, humane and truthful as is and has been the ethos of most Hindus. To insist that Modi’s rise is propelled by Hindu zealotry rather than a cry of “enough is enough” from the poor runs counter to centuries of tolerance demonstrated by India’s people towards all comers.
About the second point – Modi is now a more convincing Asian leader than Xi because his power comes directly from the people in an open economy and a nation unfettered by systematic censorship of freedom of expression or the Internet, social media and other information sources.
In contrast, Xi derives power from the Communist Party that includes only about 7% of the country’s 1.4 billion population. The party’s power is held in place by tight control over all of China’s people through censorship and opaque judicial processes. Democracy according to Indian or Western norms is not practiced in China. Even within the Communist Party, inner democracy is severely limited.
India is far behind China as an economic and military power. But it is far ahead as a democracy where argumentative people live and breathe freedom every day. A first signal of positive reactions to Modi’s victory would be a respectful hearing at the G20 Summit on 28-29 June in Osaka, Japan. Many of those leaders will want to know whether he is another ultra-nationalist like Xi or President Donald Trump, or a thoughtful democratic strongman or a covert Hindu theocrat.
The paths for India that Modi chooses in coming months will greatly impact on whether democratic capitalism wins the political argument against Chinese socialism as the better way in Asia.