Prime Minister Narendra Modi seemed subdued when India’s election results were declared on June 4. His Bharatiya Janata Party still had the most seats in Parliament; however, with 63 fewer than in the previous election, it had failed to secure a majority, meaning it will have to work with others in order to govern. This not the triumphant spectacle that Modi and many of his Hindu-nationalist supporters had anticipated; rarely had a victory felt more like defeat.
In January, Modi launched his campaign for a third term by inaugurating the newly constructed Ram Temple in the city of Ayodhya, on the site where a 16th-century mosque stood before it was violently erased by a mob of Hindu nationalists in 1992. Bollywood stars and business moguls attended the glitzy ceremony; military choppers showered rose petals from overhead. Earlier that month, the BJP adopted the slogan “Ab ki baar, 400 paar,” which means “This time, we’ll cross 400 seats.” Such a supermajority would have allowed the party to reshape India in an explicitly Hindu-nationalist direction, further along the lines of centralization, authoritarianism, and ethnonationalism.
Instead, Indian voters opted to arrest Modi’s growing autocratic excesses and force the BJP to govern with secular allies in a coalition; two of those allied parties are led by notoriously transactional political actors who will control the prime minister’s fate and do not share his Hindu-nationalist ideology. The Modi who became prime minister for the third time, on June 9, did so as a weakened and diminished figure—one who had failed to take the true measure of the country he hoped to continue governing, and was now paying the price.
During the campaign, some BJP candidates made the mistake of beginning to talk openly about changing the Indian constitution. The Hindu-nationalist movement is normally very disciplined about avoiding such divisive intimations, but in a moment of hubris, the mask inadvertently slipped.
Allowing this to happen was a serious tactical error. Constitutionalism remains an immense force at the grassroots level in India. B. R. Ambedkar, a so-called untouchable at the bottom of India’s caste pyramid, was the architect of the country’s constitution, and lower-caste Hindus revere him, not least because he enshrined affirmative-action policies in the constitution. Statues of Ambedkar grace villages and towns across India, many of them erected not by civic authorities but by residents themselves. For millions of India’s least privileged citizens, the constitution is a potent emotional symbol as well as the bulwark protecting the dignity and rights that were denied them for centuries.
India’s opposition parties seized upon these sentiments. At his election rallies, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress party, began waving a pocket-size copy of the constitution. Once the scale of the popular backlash became clear, Modi and other top leaders of the BJP leapt into damage-control mode, insisting that they had no intention of meddling with the constitution. But the suspicion lingered, in no small part because the Hindu-nationalist movement has a very long history of hostility to India’s constitutional arrangements. When the Indian constitution was adopted, in 1949, Organiser, the preeminent journal of the Hindu right, published an editorial proclaiming that “the worst thing about the new constitution of India is that there is nothing Indian about it.”
Adding to all this was a problem with Modi himself: His charisma was beginning to wane. During his decade in power, the prime minister had created a cult of personality. His visage adorned gas stations and subways; his pronouncements monopolized airwaves and the front pages of broadsheets. But after years of uneven economic growth and record levels of unemployment, voters were no longer inclined to buy into the grandiosity. They recalled the unfulfilled promises of prosperity that had propelled Modi to power in the first place. And rather than responding to voters’ economic concerns, Modi seemed to have been carried away by a God complex. During one interview, he claimed to be not biologically born, but instead an incarnation of divinity sent to Earth to do the Lord’s work. At other times, he spoke of a 1,000-year vision for the nation. Like many autocrats and would-be autocrats, Modi appeared to have lost touch with reality and become a prisoner of his own myth.
Under these conditions, the opposition put up a surprisingly spirited fight, and the election became far more competitive than Modi or the BJP had thought to expect. On April 21, as reports trickled in after the first round of voting, the prime minister gave an incendiary speech denouncing Muslims as infiltrators and suggesting that they produce too many children. In other speeches, Modi falsely asserted that the opposition intended to strip lower castes of affirmative-action benefits and hand them over to Muslims. The barrage of xenophobic provocations and insults only quickened as Modi attempted to regain dominance and energize his Hindu-nationalist base. Instead, the BJP’s share of the vote dropped in key battleground states.
The BJP lost in the parliamentary region that includes Ayodhya, the site of the lavish Ram Temple. In Banswara, where the prime minister had given the speech characterizing Muslims as infiltrators, his party was defeated by nearly 250,000 votes. And the ancient Hindu city of Varanasi, Modi’s parliamentary seat since he’d arrived in national politics, in 2014, sent him a warning: His winning margin shrank by more than two-thirds, to 150,000 votes—the second-lowest ever for a sitting prime minister. The victory margin placed him at a rank of 116 among the 240 elected candidates of his party.
This election was among the most consequential in India’s history. The opposition alliance won 232 seats, only 61 short of BJP’s winning coalition—an enormous achievement, considering the election was also the least free or fair in the country’s history. The opposition parties not only faced a serious asymmetry in spending power; they were also arrayed against partisan media and state agencies that functioned as handmaidens of the Modi regime. Dissidents and political rivals languished in prison as the campaign began.
The verdict had the effect of an electrifying upset, not least because every exit poll had predicted a supermajority for Modi. Perhaps voters had been reticent about speaking to pollsters, given the authoritarian climate. In India, ordinary people and political analysts are comparing this election to the one in 1977, when voters ejected Prime Minister Indira Gandhi after she’d imposed the 21 months of dictatorial rule known as the Emergency.
In the week since the verdict, India has already in some ways begun resembling the country it was before Modi. The country’s opposition parties, which television networks had previously rendered invisible, were back on the airwaves. Political discussions in public spaces, such as tea stalls and kebab shops, have cast off their anxious hush as citizens have once again begun airing critical opinions without lowering their voices. A column in The Indian Express, echoing many others, ran under the headline “The Idea of India Reborn.”
The pent-up frustration of the Modi years is erupting in startling ways: A security official at an airport slapped a famous Bollywood actress, seen as an acolyte of Modi’s for her past disparaging comments about protesting farmers. The powerful media baron Aroon Purie, whose approach to Modi has swung between critical and servile, wrote an editorial denouncing the climate of fear that the previous government had fostered. Another prominent commentator, the husband of the current finance minister, said that the verdict was “a very clear, tight slap on the face of the prime minister.”
In 2014, India was the first major democracy to succumb to the populist right. The country suffered an institutional collapse on a scale not seen in any Western democracy, as its previously robust institutions, such as the courts and the election commission, caved to a buccaneering executive. In its annual report earlier this year, the V-Dem Institute, which tracks democratic freedoms, called Modi’s India “one of the worst autocratizers.”
Yet India may once again prove to be a bellwether: By humbling Modi, the country has shown that the tenacity and patience of civil society and prodemocracy parties can reverse the populist tide.
