Modi’s third win a chance to restore India as a leading democracy

Narendra Modi has joined India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in winning a record third term of office and, if his victory was less of a landslide than many predicted, the alarmist policies he promulgated in office and enunciated during the campaign are now a definite cause for international concern.

Both popular and populist, he led his party to win an astounding 303 seats in India’s 543-seat Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, in 2019. But, this time out, his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) only managed 238 seats, effectively losing the single-party majority enjoyed since Modi was elected prime minister in 2014. For the first time he will have to share power with coalition partners.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is greeted by supporters as he arrives at his party’s headquarters in New Delhi.Credit: AP

That said, the results were not uniform. About 970 million people, or more than 10 per cent of the world’s population, were eligible to vote. Sixty-six per cent of those did, helping the BJP to win its first-ever seat in the left-leaning state of Kerala in the south.

Curiously, however, Modi’s party performed unevenly across the Hindi belt and suffered perhaps its biggest loss in Uttar Pradesh, where the prime minister inaugurated a Hindu temple in the city of Ayodhya recently, cementing his Hindu-nationalist legacy.

Modi was once banned from entering the US and Britain for his association with sectarian violence, but the West has sidestepped such human rights concerns since then to cultivate a bulwark against Chinese assertion.

The BJP has claimed proudly that, under Modi, India had finally achieved its rightful global place after the historical subjugation of the country and its majority Hindu faith, first by the Muslim Mughal empire and then by British colonialism.

During the six-week election campaign, Modi initially stood on his record, but he quickly swerved from economic management to sectarianism. He focused on perpetuating the BJP’s agenda of Hindutva or Hindu, targeting India’s 200 million Muslims, comprising about 15 per cent of the country’s population, calling them infiltrators or terrorists.

He and his ally, federal home minister Amit Shah, reportedly pledged to take India to war with neighbouring nuclear rival Pakistan over Kashmir.

The Kashmir threat, a hardy perennial over the years from both sides, resonates particularly for Australia. We sent troops to the disputed Himalayan territory for 35 years as part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission soon after Partition in 1947 ended 300 years of colonial rule with the creation of India and Pakistan (comprising West and East Pakistan, present-day Bangladesh).

It remains to be seen if Modi’s bellicosity toward Pakistan will be ameliorated by being forced into coalition with politicians who do not necessarily share his strident Hindu nationalist beliefs. But the result of the election certainly suggests he has lost some of his shine.

The opposition campaigned on welfare programs for vulnerable communities and saving India’s democratic values. It said institutions, including intelligence agencies and the governance structure, had all regressed under Modi’s years of rule, and he had little effective counterargument to such claims.

Despite his setback in the world’s biggest democracy, Modi promised it would be business as usual, telling supporters after the result that he would not shirk from pushing his agenda and advance India’s defence production, jobs for youth, raise exports and help farmers, among other things.

An unexpected number of Indians no longer bought what he is selling, and the reality is that Modi has led his nation away from being a stronghold of democracy to a new reality where press freedom, civil liberties and human rights activists are routinely sacrificed to sectarian hegemony. In such circumstances, Australia and other allies need to tread lightly, but India is obviously at a tipping point, and we can only hope the election result is a way to restore equilibrium.

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