Celebrated abroad, Modi’s woes strike closer to home

The Indian prime minister, hailed two years ago as the founder of a “second republic”, is now feeling sorry for himself, writes Kapil Komireddi

Illustration by Pep Montserrat for The National

When Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party to victory in India’s general elections two years ago, a former adviser to the outgoing prime minister Manmohan Singh described the moment as the birth of a “second republic”.

He meant that the inclusive secular republic founded by the Congress Party in 1947 had run its course; and now Mr Modi, who had spent his youth as a propagandist for a militantly sectarian Hindu organisation, would seek to recast India in the mould of his majoritarian ideology.

Congress, once a pan-Indian colossus, had shrunk to an irrelevance in parliament; the BJP, once a provincial pariah, had achieved an absolute majority. Mr Modi seemed invincible as he assumed office, the most formidable prime minister since Indira Gandhi.

Two years later, Mr Modi, far from remaking India in his image, looks bruised by repeated rejection at the hands of voters across the country.

In the seven statewide elections held over the last year, the BJP prevailed only in one state – hardly a party poised to take over the country. In the recently concluded elections in four states – Assam, West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu – and one federal territory, Puducherry, the BJP’s cumulative share of the vote was smaller even than Congress’s. In Assam, the lone state in which the BJP won a majority, it received fewer votes than Congress. In West Bengal, home to 90 million people, the BJP won three seats in a 294-seat legislature. In Kerala, India’s most diverse and literate state, the BJP made a grand haul – despite aggressive canvassing by Mr Modi himself – of one seat.

In Tamil Nadu, the largest state in peninsular India, the BJP did not win a single seat and received a pitiful 2.8 per cent of the vote. In Puducherry, where Congress retained control of the legislature, the BJP was once again pulverised: 2.4 per cent of the vote and not a single seat.

Mr Modi’s soaring oratory in foreign capitals can scarcely cloak the unbelievable coarsening of public life under his rule at home.

Anti-minority rhetoric that once lingered on the fringes has gone mainstream. Respectability has been conferred on bigotry. Senior ministers in Mr Modi’s cabinet have expressed the wish to tear down memorials to India’s pre-colonial Muslim rulers. Jalaluddin Akbar, the tolerant 16th-century Mughal emperor, is likened to Hitler. Hindus, in a country that is home to an overwhelming Hindu majority and is governed by a Hindu-supremacist political party, are portrayed as victims.

Hindu self-pity, stoked by members of the government and its affiliates, finds release in violence against vulnerable Muslims and Christians. Mr Modi, who has an opinion on virtually every matter, refuses to say a word to comfort or allay the fears of terrified minorities. The tormentors of minorities are, after all, his core constituency.

The unintended consequence of all of this has been the reinvigoration, across India, of forces of decency that had been dormant for too long.

Last year, dozens of India’s most distinguished filmmakers, writers and academics returned their national honours to the government in protest at the “climate of intolerance” fomented by the votaries of Hindu nationalism. This extraordinary rebuke was followed by the BJP’s comprehensive defeat in the local elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state. Mr Modi’s party was wiped out in his own parliamentary constituency.

A week after that, the BJP was decimated in the elections for the 243-seat legislature of Bihar, India’s third-largest state.

These spectacular setbacks, instead of inhibiting Mr Modi’s overbearing instincts, only intensified his belligerence. His government directed its rage at – of all people – desperately poor but independently minded university students on research grants. At the start of this year one doctoral student, branded “anti-national” and expelled from his dorm for confronting a Hindu student group, killed himself. Subsequent attempts by the government to suppress dissent at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University led to an eruption of mass protests, turning obscure critics of Mr Modi into national figures. A formidable opposition to Mr Modi – and all that he represents – is crystallising across India.

Mr Modi has sought to avert attention from his rapidly spiralling fortunes by incessantly emphasising the Congress Party’s decline. There is no way to mask Congress’s failure: it is now in an advanced state of decay. Yet its collapse is not a sudden phenomenon – it is the culmination of a long journey.

The appeal of a political party created more than a century ago to wrest power from a colonial government – a party that, having secured India’s independence, governed and misgoverned the country for long decades, and in the course of those decades allowed itself to be appropriated by a dynasty – has progressively abated.

Congress’s loss, however, isn’t the BJP’s gain. The voters who are abandoning Congress are not flocking to the BJP; they are migrating to other centrist and left wing parties.

The revelation of last month’s elections isn’t the Congress Party’s failure to stage a comeback; the real story of the elections is the velocity with which voters in major states are recoiling from the BJP just two years into Mr Modi’s term in office.

Congress has been rescued by defeat, and the BJP has been defeated by triumph. A major victory might have induced in Congress a suicidal sense of complacency. Defeat may yet prompt it to search for its purpose.

The BJP’s victory in Assam, on the other hand, has temporarily concealed its unpopularity – and lent plausibility to the myth, propagated breathlessly by the party’s top echelons, of Mr Modi’s invincibility.

Barely a week after the results of the statewide elections were declared, Mr Modi put on a lavish spectacle at New Delhi’s India Gate memorial to celebrate the second anniversary of his election in 2014.

A billion rupees, drawn from the public purse, were spent on advertising the event. Film stars, industrialists and rent-a-quote intellectuals were conscripted to voice paeans to Mr Modi’s leadership. The nominally impartial state broadcaster was given the full-time task of broadcasting this tawdry party-political pageant to the nation.

Midway through his typically self-exalting speech at the ceremony, Mr Modi said: “Some people say to me, ‘Mr Modi, you put so much effort into your job, you work so hard. Why do people oppose you so much?’”. The man hailed two years ago as the founder of a “second republic”, clearly coming unstuck by the tenacious democracy fostered by the founders of the first, is already feeling sorry for himself.

Kapil Komireddi is a journalist in London