India’s rural left-behinds take revenge on Narendra Modi

Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives at the Bharatiya Janata Party headquarters in New Delhi. Picture: AFP.

The word trending on Indian social media on Tuesday as the vote counts rolled in and showed a dramatic fall in seats for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party was “overconfidence”.

The Prime Minister went into the election seeking a third term and a victory well north of a two-thirds supermajority, with the slogan “Abki baar 400 paar” (This time surpassing 400).

The BJP won 303 seats in 2019, securing a majority even without the support of allies. Now Modi faces the prospect of a third term reliant on coalition partners.

The Congress party saw its seat share rebound from a dismal 2019 tally of 52 to close to twice that number; with its allies, it was on course to capture about 230.

The BJP had scoffed at Congress’s claims that the Modi wave had receded, and exit polls, many published by compliant firms and media outlets, predicted a healthy majority, if not the 400 that Modi sought.

However, on the campaign trail the lack of enthusiasm among ordinary voters was palpable, with the BJP’s actions in support of its Hindu nationalist ideology, including the erection of the Ram temple at Ayodhya and Modi’s road-building projects, taking a back seat to concerns such as jobs, inflation and water and power supplies.

The backlash from the lowest caste was apparent. Votes from the Dalits, or “untouchables”, plummeted, reflecting disenchantment with growing inequality under Modinomics, which has further enriched the very wealthy but left the poor static. Migrant workers have yet to forgive Modi for shutting down the country mid-pandemic with just a couple of hours’ notice, sending them home on foot for hundreds or thousands of miles. Most have never returned to their jobs.

Loss of Dalit votes slashed the BJP count in the largest state, Uttar Pradesh, which contains Modi’s seat, with Congress and its allies in the lead on Monday.

Congress’s India (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) bloc campaigned on a promise to conduct a long-stalled caste census that would reveal the true number of Dalits, a key metric for determining quotas for government jobs, education and local legislatures, mandated in the constitution to try to raise up the most marginalised and impoverished Indians.

On the campaign trail Modi insisted Congress wanted to strip Dalits of such rights and give them to Muslims. Dalits, previously supportive of Modi, did not buy it. Their desertion prompted a haemorrhage in BJP support across the party’s northern Hindu heartland.

With its own exit polls, from six weeks of voting, the BJP may have guessed what was coming.

On the eve of the results, mainstream media, tamed to repeat the Modi narrative, pumped out stories about foreign interference that amounted to international reports on the caste census issue.

With voting over, it was too late to prevent what had already taken place: the revenge of India’s millions of rural left-behinds, whose lives have stayed stubbornly the same through the “miracle” of Modinomics.

The Times