Modi’s Power Has Peaked

While India’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi appear poised to return to power for a third consecutive term—a feat accomplished by a premier only once before in the country’s history—they are much diminished, having failed to secure a parliamentary majority on their own. In his 10 years in power, Modi has never had to rely on coalition partners. The election marks not only the end of single-party control in the Indian Parliament but also the BJP’s having peaked. Coalition governments—the natural order for India’s democracy since the late 1980s, except for the past decade—are back to stay.

The BJP’s supremacy over the past decade was the result of several factors. In Modi, the party had a once-in-a-generation leader whose charisma and communication abilities placed him head and shoulders above the competition in terms of popularity among voters. Religious appeals, welfare programs (especially those aimed at women and the poor), and organizational capabilities that gave the party a superior ground game all helped. So did a ruthlessness in deploying the dark arts of politics, a disunited and weak opposition, and access to oodles of campaign finance.

The BJP’s manifest hegemony appeared to presage its continued dominance of the Indian political landscape well into the future. But from the summit, the only way is down. Of course, the party may stay near its peak for a while and climb down slowly—but that is not a matter of if, but when.

Although robust political competition is a hallmark of democracies, a surprisingly large number have been dominated by a single political party for long periods of time. Examples include Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, the Christian Democrats in Italy, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, and the Democratic Party in Botswana. India itself was dominated by the Indian National Congress party for many decades, and the communist Left Front ran the state of West Bengal unchallenged for three-and-half decades.

When in power, these dominant parties seemed unassailable—until they were not. In some cases, this happened when economic development and technological change altered the structure of the economy and the relative power of different social groups. The green revolution in India, for example, empowered farmers from middle castes who had long been excluded from the Congress party’s social coalition. Their economic ascendency translated into political power that pushed out the Congress in populous North Indian states. The shift from manufacturing to services and the concomitant decline of unions also undermined a major social base of the dominant left-of-center parties.

In many postcolonial states, the party that led the country to independence enjoyed a special legitimacy. But with each successive generation, societal memories of epochal historical events faded. It took seven decades with the PRI in Mexico and three decades with the African National Congress in South Africa (as last week’s election results demonstrate). India’s Congress party played a pivotal role in the nation’s freedom struggle, but while the halo effect persisted for decades, it inevitably dimmed.

Dominant parties can also fade because of national crises driven by international events—such as an economic shock or a defeat in wars. But for many of them, the longer that they are in power, the more that institutional sclerosis sets in. Call it the law of political entropy. As the French political scientist Maurice Duverger put it in the 1960s, the dominant party “wears itself out in office, it loses its vigor, its arteries harden. … Every domination bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.”

The longer that the BJP was in power, the more that those seeds sprouted within the party. The BJP’s singular strength has been its leader, Narendra Modi. The Congress party also had such a leader in Indira Gandhi, who—like Modi—towered above her contemporaries. The popularity of both leaders far outweighed that of their parties.

But that very strength became their Achilles’ heel as a personality-driven style of party and politics emerged. For the BJP, increasing centralization, declining intraparty democracy, and the cutting-to-size of regional leaders who were not subserviently loyal to national the leader all took their toll. Efforts to engineer defections from opposition parties (through both blandishments and coercion) meant that gradually, the party became a magnet for opportunists rather than those with deep ideological commitments.

Under Modi’s rule, such coercion often took the form of dropping corruption cases against opposition party members who defected to the BJP. But this did not mean that the defectors became less corrupt; a leopard doesn’t change its spots. There’s little wonder, then, that even though the BJP had ridden an anti-corruption wave to power in 2014, preelection polls published in April this year found that more than half of respondents (55 percent) believed that corruption had increased in the past five years. Committed party workers have begun to lose interest as party hoppers brought in for short-term gains crowd them out in coveted positions. A favorite goal of the BJP’s leadership was to create a Congress mukt Bharat (“An India free of the Congress”). Ironically, in attempting to do so, the BJP became the embodiment of that very Congress culture.

If the art of victory is learned in defeat, for the BJP, the opposite is proving true. Each new victory brought a validation of the party’s strategies, whether muzzling critics, coercing opponents, or marginalizing religious minorities. The premium on loyalty increased, and voices of dissent become more quiescent. The initial self-confidence that allowed for risk-taking became an overconfidence spilling over to reckless behavior—exemplified by allegations of India’s intelligence agencies seeking to silence overseas critics in Canada and the United States.

The arrogance meant that the party overlooked three countervailing forces.

First, the manifest reality that no party in India wins with a majority of the votes. For a party to win in India’s first-past-the-post system, it needs a plurality of votes—which requires a fragmented opposition. The more hegemonic that the BJP became, the more authoritarian that it became, putting pressure on opposition parties and their leaders. But instead of weakening them, it brought them together. Nothing concentrates the mind like a fight for survival, and, while imperfect and incomplete, the opposition’s decision to join forces in the so-called INDIA coalition limited vote fragmentation.

Second, while successful political parties embody a set of ideas and ideologies that are yoked to policies and programs, all ideas have their life cycles. Postwar Keynesianism had its day for a quarter-century, and neoliberalism subsequently had its own for about three decades. Both are passé today. Political Islam rode high for around three decades after the Iranian revolution, but its energies have since flagged. In India, the secular socialist idea had a run for nearly a half-century, but its increasing opportunism tripped it up, and it was gradually pushed out as the BJP tapped into the plentiful waters of the anxieties and resentments of the Hindu majority.

But the Hindutva ideology has its limits, too. Even though the BJP did deliver on its promise on constructing a Ram temple on the site of a historic mosque, the expected political payoffs did not materialize. In this election, the BJP failed to win even the constituency where the temple was built. Populism can—and does—secure votes for a while. But India’s complex social mosaic cannot be easily pigeonholed into binary categories.

Third, ideologies do not address the quotidian challenges facing voters. The wellsprings of voter discontent run deep, and addressing them is—and will be—difficult.

The foremost challenge is the economy, which has simply been unable to supply decent jobs in adequate numbers. More and more Indians have formal education credentials but meager skills, a sad testimony to the poor quality of the country’s education system. Rising aspirations are hitting the brick wall of precarious jobs as India continues to struggle to strengthen its manufacturing sector. At some point, the millions of disgruntled youths will find ways to voice their frustrations.

These challenges will be greater given the extraordinary technological changes that are upending labor markets—not just in manufacturing, but also the tech services that have been India’s one categorical success. Even robust growth is unlikely to produce the sort of labor demand that one might have expected in the past. And a febrile politics will be rocked even more in the future, as technological change in the form of artificial intelligence is poised to further political turmoil. Managing this will be hard in the best of circumstances. In a polity where polarization is actively encouraged, it’s hard to be sanguine about where this may lead.

India’s election was held under a searing heat wave, a vivid reminder of the inexorable impacts of climate change, whose afflictions are mounting. Indian agriculture is particularly vulnerable as temperatures climb and rainfall patterns change. A bedraggled urban India will face further pressures as the recent water shortages in India’s booming information technology capital, Bengaluru, illustrate. And this is just the beginning.

These are all exceedingly difficult challenges no matter which political party is in power in India. But for now, the one silver lining is that while commentators and experts have been deeply apprehensive about India’s democracy, its voters clearly seem to be less so. Just ask the BJP.