The Indian stock market crashed as the results trickled in. But markets can be wrong. This could well turn out to be good news for India politically and even economically.
Why did Modi lose so much ground? One important reason was that many opposition parties came together and projected one common candidate as the face of their alliance, which meant the anti-BJP vote did not splinter. The BJP’s share of the total number of votes in this election, 37 percent, was roughly the same as in the last one. Yet this time it translated into 63 fewer seats in parliament.
Voters also appear to have wanted to personally rebuke the prime minister. At least 20 of his ministers lost their elections. Modi’s own victory in his parliamentary constituency was surprisingly narrow. His race ranked 116th out of the 240 BJP victories by margin, among the lowest ever for a sitting prime minister. The party even lost in Ayodhya, the town where Modi had built a massive new temple (on the site of a mosque that was torn down) and inaugurated it with great fanfare, months before the election.
The results are most remarkable considering the advantages Modi had. He is the incumbent prime minister. His party massively outspent the opposition, using an election-financing scheme so blatantly one-sided that even India’s often compliant courts eventually shut it down. The agency charged with promoting government policies spent millions on ads with Modi’s face on them, reminding Indians of “Modi’s guarantees” — that the economy would soar and that their lives would be improved. Many government benefits in India, from vaccine cards to bags of grains, come with Modi’s beaming smile, as though they were personal gifts from a generous benefactor.
In addition, opposition politicians were investigated by tax authorities, the leader of the opposition was unseated from his parliamentary seat, two chief ministers (the equivalent of U.S. governors) were jailed, and opposition party funds were frozen to make it virtually impossible for them to travel or operate.
And yet, India’s voters — many of them still poor, poorly educated and vulnerable, 1 in 4 of whom are illiterate — voted for checks and balances, for limits to power and against the excessive cult of personality.
Modi campaigned with the pomp and ceremony of a monarch, even claiming that his birth was not a biological event, implying that it had spiritual origins. India’s voters seem to have reminded him that he is human.
Under Modi’s rule, India’s economy has boomed, but its democratic institutions have suffered badly. All three independent and widely respected nongovernmental organizations that assess countries’ democratic levels have downgraded India dramatically, documenting abuses of authority, decline in independent media, and politicized judiciary and independent agencies. (The fact that so many Indians appear to have lied to pollsters tells you they probably feared reprisals.) But now, Modi faces an emboldened opposition, state governments ready to stand up to him more strongly, and a media and civil society that might be willing to push back against governmental abuse.
Investors and business executives have been most worried by the election results. They see the prime minister as pro-business with a good track record on the economy. And they love the idea of a strong leader that they are sure a developing country needs to prosper. But they are wrong. The country that first broke out of the ranks of the developing world and became rich was postwar Japan. It did so under a series of colorless prime ministers. Two other economies that have had breakneck growth over the past six decades — greater than even China over that long run — are South Korea and Taiwan. For most of that time, they have also had bland leaders who muddled through.
India’s own seismic economic reforms took place under a coalition government, headed by an internationally unknown prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, who only got the job because the Congress Party leader, Rajiv Gandhi, had been assassinated. The prior BJP leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who presided over strong growth, also headed a coalition. In fact, since 1989, coalition governments have been the norm in India, one to which it appears to be returning. Average income growth under the last coalition government, headed by Manmohan Singh, was actually slightly higher than during Modi’s tenure years in office.
Many sophisticated observers of the world often laud strongmen who run poorer countries, who can build roads and get things done quickly. But the average Indian voter seems to instinctively understand that in the long run, pluralism, cooperation and diversity are India’s distinctive features and its enduring advantage.
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