Indian Elections: A Massive Mandate for BJP's Modi

20 May 2014

The Indian election results of 16 May are a tsunami in home politics on various counts. Consider some of the dimensions of BJP and Modi’s remarkable success:

·      With over 66% of the electorate voting, this is the highest turnout in any Indian election. Democracy faces no loss of credibility in India, despite all that doomsayers speak about us.

·      No one imagined that a single party could gain a majority in the midst of an extraordinary diversity of national, pseudo-national, regional, linguistic, caste-based, and individual-oriented political parties, ally vying for the same space. That is in itself the result of a ‘Modi Tsunami’ though this phrase is not current in India. One individual fired the imagination of people across regions and diversities, not with ‘Yes you can’ type of rhetoric, but with a simple message, that growth and governance were the need of the hour.

·      Across the country, the BJP vote was just 31% of the total, but in a ‘first-past-the-post’ system, that was enough to win 282 of 542 Lok Sabha seats. And Congress, with around a 20% national vote share, could get only 44. That is the cruel logic of the system. True, a proportionate vote system might be fairer, say as in Germany, but it would need to be coupled with a ruthless minimum threshold, again like the 5% qualifying mark in Germany; any party gaining less than that would be automatically excluded. But such discussion is pointless in India, because it would be impossible to craft agreement for such change.

·      What helped Modi? Many elements. A leading factor was the AAP party, who had a major contribution to making India aware of the need for change. Also, they helped to split the vote of those that had huge allergy to Modi. Did they eat into the Congress Party’s votes, or did they also hurt the BJP? I guess experts will debate this for long.

·      Columnist Swaminathan S Aiyer, who writes a weekly column for TOI, noted that the migrant laborers from UP and Bihar played a role; on return home to their villages they brought back stories of how Gujarat villages have 24/7 power, and how officials do not lord it over those villagers. Such word-of-mouth is always more credible than any other form of propaganda.

·      To a point, BJP is becoming a party with a national footprint, in that they now have a presence, albeit small, in the South and East. This is good for this party. The Congress party has shrunk, with not a single seat in ten states, and with not more than nine seats in any state. Other major parties, like Mayawati’s BSP and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s SP, both strong in UP, have suffered too – in the latter case, all the five seats won have gone to Yadav’s family. But one should not count out anyone, least of all Congress. There is no sign that it will implode, and the next election will be a new game. The Indian wheel always turns.

·      Modi has 60 months to show result, but his honeymoon period will be just 12 months or so, during which he will have the credibility and strength to do almost all he wishes. Can he tackle hard issues in this time, say labor law reform, a task that has remained untackled now for 23 years of Indian Economic Reforms? But he can only do so much, and prioritizing actions will also be vital. How well can he do this?

·      Another open question is how well he carries with him those that are not his supporters. It is a plain fact that there is not a single Muslim – and strangely not a single Sikh either – among the 282 BJP members of parliament. That is a significant weakness. The total number of Muslims in the Lok Sabha is just 24, again the lowest in any of the 16 Lok Sabhas we have seen in India. How these deficits are tackled will also be important.

With his allied parties, the BJP has 333 in the 542 strong Lok Sabha, and already two parties with some 12 MPs are lined up in support. The BJP will face a hard time in the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, where it does not command a majority, but that is a kind of built in check in the Indian system -- the dominant party in the national elections gets to elect its upper house MPs after a lag of 2 years, given the 6 year term of these MPs, who retire in cyclic fashion every 2 years. The Constitution provides the formula of a joint sitting of the two houses, to overcome legislative logjams. Here again, Modi will need to show inclusiveness.

The new government is to take office on 26 May. These next few days will see much lobbying and jostling among those seeking high office, ministers and officials alike. Some had expected this event a couple of days earlier, but I do not see any indecisiveness in this. That is not the Modi style. I do share the view: good days lie ahead for India.