Democracy, resilience and India’s elections

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi predicted his BJP party would win a commanding victory in recent elections.

But India's 969 million voters had something entirely different in mind.

Today, On Point: Democracy, resilience, and India’s elections.

Neerja Chowdhury, contributing editor at The Indian Express. Longtime journalist and political commentator.

Pavithra Suryanarayan, assistant professor in the Government Department at the London School of Economics.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This week, we're doing a bit of elections globetrotting on the show. In the U.S., of course, we're all focused on the November elections here, but pivotal elections are happening now elsewhere around the world. So call it a kind of informal world democracy series On Point.

Now, yesterday we talked about the far right's gains in this month's European parliamentary elections. Later this week, we'll head to Mexico, which just elected its first female president. But today, India.

NEWS BRIEF: In the colorful, colossal exercise of Indian democracy, all that remains now is the counting. Held during some of the hottest weather India has ever seen, the commission that oversaw the six week vote took what amounted to a bow.

RAJIV KUMAR: We have created a world record of 642 million proud Indian voters.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Rajiv Kumar, Chief Election Commissioner of India speaking there, and you heard him correctly, a record 642 million voters turned out this year. That's double the size of the entire United States. India is the world's largest democracy with more than 960 million eligible voters in a total population of some 1.2 billion citizens. And in this year's parliamentary contest, Prime Minister Narendra Modi predicted his BJP party would sweep the elections to win Modi a third term as Prime Minister and give him and the BJP an even greater majority in the country's parliament.

(MODI SPEECH) 

CHAKRABARTI: That's Modi back in February, speaking to members of the Lok Sabha, Indians, or excuse me, India's lower house of parliament, roughly equivalent to the House of Representatives in the United States. Modi told lawmakers that he could, quote, "see the mood of the country." And that quote, "the BJP will definitely get 370 seats out of 543 total seats."

Now some observers worried that a landslide BJP would advance the party's authoritarian Hindu nationalist grip on India. But India's voters had something else in mind.

NEWS BRIEF: Victory celebrations at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi returning to power for a record third term. The victory bittersweet.

Modi's aim of crossing 400 seats, unfulfilled. And after 10 years of the BJP's absolute majority, India will be returning to coalition politics.

CHAKRABARTI: That report from the BBC. Now, as you heard, Modi did win a third term as Prime Minister, the second person ever to do so in India. But, crucially, his BJP party did not win enough parliamentary seats to sustain that outright majority.

Meaning Modi will have to build a coalition government with different parties. So how might India's new coalition government run the country? And what will that mean for democracy in India? And is it indicative of anything regarding the mood of democracy or democracies around the world? So we're going to begin today in Delhi and Neerja Chowdhury joins us.

She's a contributing editor at the Indian Express, a longtime journalist and political commentator as well. Neerja, welcome to On Point.

NEERJA CHOWDHURY: Thank you. Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: As I just explained, or as we heard, India's elections take many weeks, given the number of voters that have to be reached. But as the results were actually announced, regarding the new makeup of the Lok Sabha, can you give me some of the initial reactions that happened across the country?

CHOWDHURY: Most people were quite surprised. Many had thought that Narendra Modi's party will make it with a very comfortable majority. And particularly, since the prime minister himself and his party leaders had created this hype that you spoke about, getting more than 400 seats with the alliance and 370 out of 543 for his own party. So I think the exit polls also reflected this. So there was an expectation that they will make it very comfortably. And when they lost the majority, this came as a surprise. Of course, there were some people who predicted that they will not make it beyond the majority mark. So I think the people of India have voted not just for the government they wanted.

They have also voted for the opposition they wanted, and they wanted a strong and vibrant opposition, and that is going to be in Parliament. It is an alliance of 28 parties called I-N-D-I-A, acronym, India, and it is going to be a very interesting 18th Lok Sabha that we are now going to be facing, and it's going to meet in a few days.

And, of course, very soon, the budget will be passed by the new government. But yes somewhere, implicit in the mandate, if I may say so, and many now see it that way, is a desire by a large number of people, while they wanted Modi to come back and rule, they did not want him to exercise power.

CHAKRABARTI: Neerja, hold on for a second because that's a very important point. But there are a couple of things that you said that I'd love a little bit more information on. Because I was going to ask, what was giving the prime minister so much confidence in advance of the beginning of India's elections where he predicted that major sweep for the BJP?

I suppose one of those things is the 10 years of complete rule of the Lok Sabha that the BJP had. However, you also said that exit polling was indicating that perhaps Modi might have been correct and yet the ultimate outcome was not thus. Is that unusual in India for there to be a big difference between exit polling and final election results?

CHOWDHURY: The exit polls have got it right in the past, and they have got it very badly wrong, as happened this time, except one exit poll, which was closer to what happened than the truth.

CHAKRABARTI: It sounds rather familiar. It happens here in the United States as well.

CHOWDHURY: Yes. There's a problem with exit polls and many people are looking at this whole phenomenon of exit polls.

But in India, unlike the United States of America, people don't always tell you how they feel, the way they want to vote, or even how they have voted. When they've come out of the booth, because they don't know what you want to hear. They don't know whether they're going to be harassed, what will happen to the information that they're giving you.

So while increasing number of people do tell you the way they have voted, many don't. So people, unless you spend time with them, you don't necessarily, with a yes and no answer, get the truth.

CHAKRABARTI: Makes a lot of sense. And in addition, just, I think the logistics of getting exit polling that represents those 600 million plus voters seems to be, everything about India is colossal.

But Neerja, the other really important thing that you said is that there seemed to be a definitive vote for the kind of opposition that many Indians wanted. So who's in that opposition coalition? Because my understanding prior to the elections was that the historically headlining Congress party had been significantly weakened.

So who is the opposition now?

CHOWDHURY: There are 28 parties. The Congress has almost doubled its number. Its vote share has gone up, and it seemed, many commentators and analysts have said this. It seemed that the people were fighting the election. It's not necessarily the opposition parties, their organizational structures, may not have been perfect.

They didn't get their act together. They could have done much better. But somewhere, the 400 plus slogan of the Prime Minister fueled fears in sections of the people. There were people, middle class intelligentsia, who felt, what does this mean? Are we heading towards a one-party rule? And they were worried about this.

Then there were the Dalits who are at the bottom of the caste heap in India, formerly called as the untouchables. They felt, does this mean the constitution is going to be changed and the rights that have been given to us by the constitution, for instance, reservation in jobs and educational institutions, is that going to be taken away from us?

And that caught on very quickly. While I was traveling in the villages in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, I found Dalit youth discussing this. So I think that clicked and somewhere, and of course there were the minorities who have been very, who felt insecure and beleaguered and didn't know what the future was for them.

There has been Hindu, Muslim conflict which the BJP in the past has used to consolidate the vote of the majority Hindus behind it. Very successfully. They did that and the Prime Minister and his party this time also tried that, but this time it did not have the traction that it had in the last two election.

Somewhere, there was fatigue that had set in. It's not that the Hindus are not proud of being Hindu or conscious of their identity, but there was a fatigue with Hindu-Muslim conflict. And many people I heard say, after all we have to live as brothers, live as neighbors. So that was the shift in mood in some parts of India, which was responsible for the tally of the BJP coming down.

CHAKRABARTI: That is so interesting. So quite a few different desires playing out here, as you're saying, and I just want to note when you mention the Dalit caste in India or the so-called scheduled caste, that is a large percentage of India, overall, about 25% as I understand. Is that correct, Neerja?

CHOWDHURY: I would say 15%, 16%.

CHAKRABARTI: For Dalit, specifically.

CHOWDHURY: There are the scheduled tribes which is 7%. So they add up to 22%.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Let's just listen for a second, or a couple of seconds, to be perfectly frank, to BBC correspondent Samira Hussain, who in May, interviewed some young Indian voters in various Indian states about the election, including in Kerala in Southern India.

And here's some of what those young voters said. And just as a note, the BBC did not include those voters names.

BBC CORRESPONDENT: Are you talking with your friends about the election, and what are you guys talking about?

VOTER #1: Decrease in the constitutional rights of Indian people.

VOTER #2: Major issue facing in this election is confusion. To which party I need to vote. This is my first vote, so I don't want to waste that vote by giving a corrupted party a vote.

VOTER #3: Yeah, everything is corrupt. Everyone is doing that. They're working for their own benefit.

CORRESPONDENT: What is something that you want to see changed? In your country.

VOTER: Due to the lack of, what's it financial structure the wealth distribution is unequal.

VOTER: The right to vote is a constitutional right for me. I don't want to waste that I need to change caste discrimination from the country.

CHAKRABARTI: That was again from the BBC back in May. I'm joined today by Neerja Chowdhury. She's a contributing editor at the Indian Express and a long time journalist and political commentator.

She's joining us from Delhi. Now I'd like to introduce Pavithra Suryanarayan, she is the assistant professor in government, in the government department at the London School of Economics, and she joins us from London. Professor Suryanarayan, welcome to On Point.

PAVITHRA SURYANARAYAN: Hi, Meghna. Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay tell me a little bit about whether you think, in the United States, we often consider elections as not just a referendum on various parties, right? But it's a referendum on the current president in the White House as well. Is that how it works in India, as well? That when voters went to the polls, they were thinking not just about whether or not they wanted to return the BJP to power, but specifically Prime Minister Modi as well.

SURYANARAYAN: So I want to say a couple of things.

The first is, this was not an election as usual. The odds were really stacked against the opposition, because the ruling party for the past 10 years has slowly been centralizing and consolidating power and has exercised it by muzzling the opposition, throwing a couple of sitting chief ministers into jail.

And using, it's real range of institutions at the center to try and consolidate power. So to see the election results that we saw, was somewhat of a feat. So now we have to wonder what exactly the voters were trying to tell us. And so in my view, having studied elections in India, these elections take us back to a way of elections being fought, during the coalition politics. More than ever, it seems these elections were fought state by state and it really mattered who the people saw on their ballots. In their respective states, and we also saw a sort of disciplined opposition making those alliances across the states, so that voter you just heard who said, I don't want to waste my vote.

I want to make sure I give it to the right person. That was made possible in a much clearer way. And you made the right comparison to the U.S. because just like the U.S., India is what we call a first past the post electoral system. The winner in a particular constituency or district wins the race.

There's no consolation prize like it would be in a PR system where you allocate seats by the number of votes. So making sure you really know who you want to vote for is a very important thing. And I think the opposition did a much better job of the new India Alliance presenting itself as a clear alternative to the sitting party, state by state, race by race.

And what would you say the unifying factors are across this new India alliance. Is it that they're just expressly opposed to many of the BJP's policies? Are they providing a different vision for India? What is bringing them together?

SURYANARAYAN: I'm surprised that the opposition had such a degree of clarity in how it was fighting these elections.

What I heard a lot about were issues of unemployment, inflation and the rallying cry of social justice. So you have people from The Congress, the new Congress leadership of Rahul Gandhi to Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state, to M. K. Stalin of Tamil Nadu, and Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, coming together to say, we stand for the marginalized people, we care about rising unemployment, we want greater redistribution and welfare for those at the bottom of the economic scale, but also more fair access to the sort of largest of development.

And one of the rallying cries that emerged this cycle was for a new cost census so we can understand exactly what kind of socioeconomic inequality exists in contemporary India along cost lines and in my view, this sort of put the BJP on the back foot, because it didn't really have a clear response to an election being fought so openly about welfare politics.

And I think that worked to the advantage of the opposition and why it did so well.

CHAKRABARTI: When was the last time a caste census was done in India?

SURYANARAYAN: In 1931 was the best caste census we have. The 1941, which was again done in pre independence era, included caste, but not to a very good degree. Because by this time, independence related, politics had already taken hold and that census was not of a very good quality.

But ever since India gained independence in '47, we do not collect caste information other than for schedule castes and schedule tribes. And these are the former Dalit, the former untouchables of India or the Dalits. And we do that so that they can then be given political reservations according to their size in every state.

But for all other caste groups, we do not really know what the enumeration is, since 1931.

CHAKRABARTI: Just to emphasize, for folks who don't really know that India history that well, what the professor just said is the last time this particular form of a census was done in India was under British colonial rule, prior to India being an independent nation.

Neerja Chowdhury, let me turn back to you here. Because, look, there's an idealized wish that whenever any leader is delivered, this isn't an electoral defeat for Modi, but it's an electoral humbling. Let's call it that. That the leader might channel that lesson in his or her immediate marks post-election.

But I'm seeing here that Modi has made some adjustments in his tone, making fewer references to himself or, let's say, Hindu nationalist issues exclusively. He emphasizes that the BJP and its governing coalition still have a clear mandate. He's already attacked this opposition coalition we talked about, calling them venal.

And he's saying he's going to crack down on corruption more forcefully. Which is quite interesting, because as we heard some of those young voters before, it was extant corruption under BJP rule they were already concerned about. So what are you hearing from the initial things that the Prime Minister has been saying since the beginning of this month?

CHOWDHURY: Look, I think I would say here you asked about the question, was it a referendum against Narendra Modi? I would say, let us not over-read the mandate. Because he has come back to power for a third term. He's the only Prime Minister after Jawaharlal Nehru, who won for the third time in 1962 election.

He's the only one since then to have made it to the third term. And the Vote share of the BJP has also dropped marginally, less than 1%. It is, last time, our last elections, the BJP had got almost 38% of the vote, and the entire opposition was 62% of the vote. So if you united a chunk of that opposition, it would have given a fight to the BJP.

Today the BJP is just under 37% and the opposition on the other side. A good chunk of it managed to unite and put up a fight in certain parts of the country. Having said that, it is also true that Narendra Modi's BJP held its own in several states of India. They did not lose ground.

They also made inroads in a state, improved in a state like Telangana. They have captured Orissa. They are in power in Orissa, very handsomely. To rule the state, as well as they've got 20 out of 21 seats in the Lok Sabha. So you cannot say the entire country rejected Narendra Modi.

But yes, in Uttar Pradesh, which has always been very decisive in our election, in 2014 it gave Narendra Modi 71 seats.

In 2019, it gave BJP 62, see that's a whopping number. Now it's down to about just about 30, 33. It is because of Uttar Pradesh, really speaking, that the majority has come down and that is the effectiveness of the opposition and the fight they put up as mentioned, Rahul Gandhi's Congress and Samajwadi Party led by Akhilesh Yadav, where their unity translated at the ground level.

So I think it's a challenge now for Narendra Modi, you're absolutely right. One of the first things he said after the results was that we must run the country through a consensus. And he told his ministerial colleagues also at one of the first meetings that we will run the country successfully as a coalition.

He's crafted the cabinet with, it's gone through very smoothly. The heavyweight portfolios are retained by the BJP. The allies have accepted that situation. There were one or two murmurs that we should have got full-fledged cabinet ranked minister, but overall, that's happened. So he's trying to give the impression of business as usual, continuity.

Political stability. And politicians are a breed by themselves. They're very quick to read the writing on the wall and to adapt. And I suspect Narendra Modi is going to be no exception. And it will be very interesting to see how he stoops to conquer.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Okay. So let's talk about his unveiling of this new government, Neerja, that you just mentioned.

Professor Suryanarayan the key thing I think Neerja said was that in his new government, the major message was, conquer. Continuity. So if the people who voted for those opposition parties expected quick change, they're not going to get it, right. There are some coalition partners in this new government.

But as Nirja just said, in defense, finance, foreign affairs, those are all being still run by BJP members. There's a 71-member Council of Ministers in the government that is now more geographically and caste diverse, but there's still not a single Muslim on this 71-member Council. And then I'm reading here reports that says a key figure, Amit Shah, who was a close confidant of Prime Minister Modi's, and a political strategist still is overseeing domestic agencies, including some of the investigative units that have been used to jail those opposition leaders that you had mentioned earlier.

So this doesn't, when we say continuity, it doesn't really seem like there's going to be any acknowledgement, at least amongst ministerial leaders, for the kinds of things that you had said voters who voted for the opposition were seeking.

SURYANARAYAN: So then the next six months is going to be a tricky period to watch because I don't think Prime Minister Modi, even in his earlier incarnation as the Chief Minister of Gujarat, which is where he gained early power, has ever really had to share power or deal in this coalitional way.

So this is new territory for him. And coalitional politics has brought down a number of leaders in India in the past. And he is very reliant on two players, one from the state of Andhra Pradesh and another from the state of Bihar, who have been known to turn out to be unreliable coalition allies.

So it'll be really interesting to watch how much of business as usual can continue when the reality is that your government depends on making sure your coalitional partners stay happy. Having said that, this has been a period of backsliding for a number of India's institutions. The BJP is and continues to be one of the wealthiest parties in the country, thanks to the electoral bond scheme that it had introduced.

It is very possible that this party uses those resources to bring in new players in the system who competed against it into its fold to give it more strength in the future. Anything is possible. But I agree with the other panelists that we mustn't overread what the mandate is here and what Prime Minister Modi himself is hearing from these results.

They may decide to do more of the old, thinking they hadn't gone far enough in centralizing power. And maybe that's the lesson they take from this, but whatever it is, they have to deal with the realities of coalitional politics and not sharing power by sharing ministries is going to be tough to sustain in the future.

CHAKRABARTI:  ... We only have about a minute or so before our next break, but I failed to ask a little earlier, who is in coalition with the BJP now?

SURYANARAYAN: So in coalition, the two parties that they depend on, are the Telugu Desam from Andhra Pradesh [and] N. Chandrababu Naidu.

And then there's Nitish Kumar from Bihar, who was another important player. And these are very different states. Bihar is relatively underdeveloped in India. Andhra Pradesh is one of India's most developed states, and they all have very different needs. And the first things these guys asked for was special privileges for their states.

So we are going to see some horse trading going on in terms of economic policy, at least, in the months to come.