In the run-up to India’s 2014 elections, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, campaigned on the slogan, Achhe din aane waale hain—“The good days are coming.” Led by the charismatic and popular Narendra Modi, who now serves as prime minister, the BJP stormed to power that year, decimating the long-ruling Indian National Congress party. Then, in the 2019 elections, the BJP improved on its previous electoral performance, taking more than 300 seats. It was the first time in 30 years that a single party had won a majority of the 543 seats in India’s legislature in back-to-back elections.
Yet today, with a faltering economy, rising fuel prices and widespread anger over the government’s poor response to the coronavirus pandemic, the good days seem further away than ever. While the BJP’s grip on power remains firm, recent events have exposed chinks in its political armor.
Since taking office seven years ago, Modi has consistently been one of the world’s most popular leaders, as the BJP has invested heavily in building and maintaining his image as a transformational leader. Indeed, the ability to directly communicate with voters through its dominance of both traditional and social media is a critical component of the BJP’s political success. Despite a slip in popularity as COVID-19 cases have spiked in India, survey data continues to find Modi as much more popular than most other world leaders. Yet the aggressiveness with which the government continues to project his infallibility betrays a certain nervousness about Modi’s image.
As the BJP has consolidated power, it has become increasingly consumed with the need to saturate India’s media landscape with the government’s narrative, while stanching all criticism and vilifying its critics. This has led to some bizarre episodes. For example, after global celebrities like the pop star Rihanna and the environmental activist Greta Thunberg tweeted about the massive farmers’ protests in India that began last fall, the Foreign Ministry released a lengthy statement slamming the remarks “by celebrities and others” as “neither accurate nor responsible.” Under Modi, the government has also ramped up efforts to stymy political dissent through the filing of sedition and anti-terrorism cases against local activists. This atmosphere of repression has contributed to recent assessments by a number of international organizations, including the influential V-Dem Institute in Sweden, that India is no longer a democracy but an “electoral autocracy.” Even setting those claims aside, the signs of India’s democratic breakdown have been apparent at least since 2019.
To understand how we got here, it is useful to revisit the politics of India over the past 18 months or so. In early 2020, protests over the government’s controversial proposed amendment of India’s citizenship laws and national tabulation of citizens—which were widely criticized as disadvantaging Muslim Indians—came to a head, sparking the deadliest riots in New Delhi in over 30 years. Then, in March 2020, the coronavirus pandemic profoundly shifted the country’s national discourse, as Modi sent the country into a hastily announced nationwide lockdown. Surveys from the time found that Modi reached the apex of his popularity in April and May 2020, as the country rallied around its leader amid the crisis.
In September 2020, as the number of cases from the first wave of COVID-19 started to decrease, the government sought to push its political advantage by proposing a number of policy reforms that would effectively decrease subsidies for farmers while facilitating the entry of large corporations into India’s agriculture sector. Farmers, primarily from the rural states of Haryana and Punjab, the regions that would be most affected by the measures, organized mass protests. Survey evidence found that these demonstrations resonated widely, with many upper-class Indians and even some BJP members opposing the proposed reforms. The protests were particularly effective because their narrative went beyond the intricacies of Indian agricultural policy to a larger critique about the shrinking space for democratic engagement and the concentration of wealth by corporate actors seen as close to the BJP.
In April, the BJP sought to reset the political narrative through its campaigns in key regional elections in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Among these, West Bengal was seen as the key prize. Though the BJP had never been competitive there, it performed well in the state during the 2019 elections, leading many party leaders to believe they could win control of the state government.
While the BJP’s grip on power remains firm, recent events have exposed chinks in its political armor.
The BJP sought to stake its prestige on the West Bengal election for three key reasons. First, the chief minister of West Bengal, the charismatic Mamata Banerjee and her party, the Trinamool Congress, or TMC, have been among the harshest critics of Modi and the BJP, as well as of Hindu nationalism more broadly. Defeating Banerjee in her home state would have a chilling effect on vocal criticism from opposition political leaders. Second, the BJP had been curiously underperforming in state elections after sweeping the 2019 national polls. A win in West Bengal would show that the BJP can win any state when it uses its prodigious resources. Finally, the BJP has been seen as a party that has its support concentrated in the north and the west of India. By winning the most populous state in eastern India, it would show that the BJP had expanded its geographic footprint despite political headwinds. In fact, West Bengal is the birthplace of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the BJP’s predecessor party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.
The BJP invested unprecedented levels of political capital in the election. The party’s chief electoral strategist, Home Minister Amit Shah, even audaciously claimed a strategy to win at least 200 of the 294 legislative assembly seats in the state. The party also poured significant financial resources into the race, organizing visits from virtually every major national leader in the BJP. Modi and Shah took time off from their busy national schedules to campaign in the state a combined 38 times between February and April. Moreover, some observers raised concerns that the Election Commission acted in a biased manner to give the BJP several advantages during the campaign in West Bengal.
Yet despite all of this, the BJP was routed, winning only 77 seats to the TMC’s 213 seats. More troubling for the BJP, the results pierced its image of invincibility and showed the BJP was susceptible to an opposition narrative that focused on the concerns of women and the poor. In response to the defeat, the government arrested several ministers in the newly elected TMC government based on five-year-old corruption allegations.
As the electoral campaign was drawing to a close, India experienced a severe surge in coronavirus cases and deaths. As the country’s health infrastructure collapsed, people across the world saw images of mass cremations and Indians dying for want of oxygen, while Modi declined to address the nation for weeks. The government was also widely criticized for acting irresponsibly and exacerbating the extent of the surge. For example, Modi prematurely declared victory against the coronavirus in a video address to the World Economic Forum in January. The government permitted—and even advertised—a crowded Hindu religious festival with more than 9 million attendees, while the BJP carried on with large election rallies.
In keeping with the BJP’s obsession with its image, it has responded to messages of criticism by trying to punish and/or silence the messengers. Prominent party members have tried to have the social media accounts of their critics suspended. The party even threatened action against hospitals that reported on their waning supplies of oxygen. And in late July, authorities raided the offices of Dainik Bhaskar—the largest newspaper in India by circulation, which has covered the coronavirus pandemic extensively—on charges of tax evasion.
While Modi and the BJP remain popular and must still be considered the odds-on favorites in the 2024 national elections, the flurry of bad news has sparked concerns in the ruling party. Recently, Modi’s government carried out a massive Cabinet reshuffle, notably replacing both Health Minister Harsh Vardhan and Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. These moves were undoubtedly in response to major criticism of the government’s handling of the pandemic and a misguided battle with Twitter over new, restrictive rules governing online speech.
The BJP will look to get back on track with a big win in upcoming state elections in 2022 in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, which is currently led by Yogi Adityanath, a gun-toting monk-turned-politician. But for the first time, Indians are perceiving what was unthinkable a year ago: Modi and the BJP are vulnerable.