India's political playing field is more even than it has been for years

This week, the Indian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi completed a hundred days in office. Mr Modi, just as any good politician would, has used this occasion to list his administration’s achievements over the past three months. But the reality is that it has been a largely underwhelming period for him and his Bharatiya Janata Party, reined in by feisty coalition partners and confronted by a buoyant opposition. This has raised questions about whether the BJP can find a way to push its agenda in this new political environment, or whether the once-bedraggled Indian National Congress – the country’s leading opposition party – can construct a counternarrative that resonates with a significant portion of the electorate in future elections. That is still unclear, but the fact is that the playing field is more even that it’s been over the past decade. About a hundred days ago, Mr Modi became only the second Indian prime minister, after Jawaharlal Nehru in 1962, to be sworn in for a third consecutive term . As a keen student of history, he appeared to savour the moment, but it was a bittersweet one. For unlike the previous two terms, he was now having to rely on a handful of small parties to stay in power. The fall in the BJP’s tally of seats in the lower house of Parliament after this year’s general election, from 303 to 240, was being viewed by many politicians and pundits as a repudiation from the voters . Mr Modi himself tacitly acknowledged this in his first post-election speech, when he called the incoming administration the “NDA government” – NDA stands for National Democratic Alliance, of which the BJP is the largest constituent – rather than “my government”. It seemed to be a significant departure from 2014, when his most ardent followers would often remind other senior BJP leaders on social media to refer to the newly inaugurated administration as the “Modi government”. Nonetheless, old habits can be hard to get rid of. The Prime Minister’s Office continues to function as it did over the past decade: in a highly centralised, top-down manner. The most important portfolios, including home, finance, foreign affairs and defence, have been allocated to the same ministers who held them for the previous five years. And for what it’s worth, national media outlets call the new administration “Modi 3.0”. It’s as if little has changed – which is the point being conveyed as part of a carefully crafted strategy to show that Mr Modi is still in complete charge. In Parliament, however, it is a different story. The newly elected leader of the opposition , Rahul Gandhi, and his colleagues in the Congress party have countered the government’s agenda every step of the way. Some days, Mr Gandhi would be found on the floor of the lower house, making a compelling case against a government policy. On others, he would be out on the streets, doing retail politics, including meeting the spouses of fallen soldiers and providing succour to victims of casteist and sexual violence. This newfound spring in the opposition’s steps isn’t just cosmetic. It has delivered serious blows to the BJP’s agenda in recent weeks, forcing it to climb down regarding two important bills and one amendment on government jobs. Tellingly, in two of these instances, key NDA partners of the BJP threw their weight behind the opposition’s concerted objections. If the government’s domestic agenda has been curtailed for now, Mr Modi’s gains on the foreign policy domain have been mixed. He can rightly point to the significant agreements his government signed with the UAE and Singapore in recent weeks. But the Prime Minister’s long-held goal to facilitate talks between Russia and Ukraine to end the war in Eastern Europe hit a set back once again after Kyiv reportedly expressed unhappiness with New Delhi’s improved trade ties with Moscow since the start of the war in 2022. The fall of the Sheikh Hasina government in Bangladesh would also count as a concern for India. Back home, even as the government’s legislative agenda remains in limbo, it is worth pointing out that it has cleared a number of big-ticket projects, particularly infrastructure projects, across the country. It has unveiled important missions to improve digital penetration and literacy, and it recently signed a peace deal with separatist groups in the border state of Tripura. However, the challenge for Mr Modi is that he has never before had to collaborate with other parties. During his 13 years as chief minister of Gujarat and the subsequent 10 years as Prime Minister, he enjoyed legislative majorities that allowed him to run the executive with minimal checks and balances. That’s not the case any longer. The current reality is just as novel to Mr Gandhi as it is to Mr Modi. After a decade of consistently falling short against the Prime Minister’s towering persona, the Congress leader appears to finally be catching up to him as recent opinion polls suggest. His age – he is 20 years younger to Mr Modi, who turned 74 today – is a big draw with the country’s youth. But what truly stands him apart from other leaders is his focused struggle to save the ideals enumerated in India’s Constitution, particularly secularism and egalitarianism. He has made his political career an ideological crusade against Hindutva – or political Hinduism – that underpins the BJP’s vision and mission for the country. But as the political analyst Asim Ali writes, Mr Gandhi needs to start talking about some of the bread-and-butter issues that directly affect voters to expand his base. With India’s unemployment rate at 9.2 per cent, providing solutions to help create tens of millions of new jobs every year is a no-brainer. Yet beyond a few stray remarks, he hasn’t come up with a coherent policy to deal with one of India’s greatest challenges. How the next hundred days – and more importantly, the next four years and nine months – pan out will largely depend on two factors: how Mr Modi handles coalition politics, and how well Mr Gandhi fine-tunes his party’s economic agenda for the country.