Last September, in a northern neighborhood of New Delhi, Mohammed Ishaq was lynched for eating a banana. The fruit had been offered up at a shrine to a Hindu deity during a religious festival; when Ishaq, a twenty-two-year-old manual laborer from a local Muslim family, picked it up, a crowd set upon him. He was tied to a pole, beaten—some of his fingernails were pulled out—and left a couple of hundred yards from his home. Hours later, he was dead. A video of his torture, set to music, went viral. Members of the community said that Ishaq suffered from mental disabilities; his father said, instead, that he was “obedient” and “innocent.”
Violence against religious minorities is not new to India. But what has made this crime and many others like it during the past decade so disturbing is the sense that they have the tacit consent of the man who governs the country. Seventy-seven years after independence, India is led by a Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who is dedicated to undermining the officially secular and democratic nature of the republic.
Modi has been called upon many times to denounce communal violence, but he usually retreats into silence, which his most radical supporters interpret as approval. (At times, the violence has been instigated by members of his Bharatiya Janata Party, or by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the extremist Hindu organization that gave him his start and has staffed much of his government.) Owing, in part, to Modi’s personal popularity, India has often seemed to observers of democratic backsliding to be a more serious case than other places—such as the United States and Brazil—where authoritarian right-wing movements have been met by oppositions of equal—or greater—size and intensity. The truly disquieting thought about Modi’s regime was that the cult of personality around him had become suffocating and seemingly impossible to pierce—until now.
Last week, Modi emerged victorious in his third straight election, and will almost surely remain Prime Minister. But the election was also a striking setback for him: his party lost more than sixty seats and its legislative majority, so he must now govern with coalition partners who have a more secular conception of how the Indian state should function. A number of explanations can be offered for this result: the manner in which the opposition Congress Party, which ruled India for most of the country’s post-imperial history, was able to unite with other parties; a severe heat wave, which may have kept voters in Modi strongholds in the north away from the polls; and the Congress Party’s campaign to win over Dalit voters, formerly called untouchables. But Modi was also working with real advantages: a largely pro-government media, after years of B.J.P. crackdowns; an extensive financial network; an obliging electoral commission. And he still came up short.
It would be tempting to attribute this decline to Modi’s particular brand of aggressive nationalism and demagoguery—his Hindutva, or “Hinduness,” project—and to say that the Indian public had grown tired of it. Voters delivered “a setback for authoritarianism,” the historian Mukul Kesavan remarked, “but I’m not sure that was the intent.” Indeed, Modi’s party was able to capture approximately the same vote share as it did in his first reëlection, in 2019. But politics, especially in India, is about what the analyst Mihir Sharma described as “finding the right partner, and pushing in the right places. That’s what matters.” And that’s what the Congress Party—under the much maligned leadership of Rahul Gandhi, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Prime Ministers, whom Modi’s allies tried to have removed from Parliament—was able to do. In competitive seats, the Congress coalition saw huge upticks from 2019, while the B.J.P. faced moderate losses.
That still leaves open the question of what exactly the Modi era has meant for India. The rise of new varieties of hard-edged right-wing politics—often deemed to be of a “populist” variety—are commonly thought to have begun in 2015 and 2016, with Donald Trump’s first campaign and Brexit. But Modi became Prime Minister in 2014. At the time, no one was quite sure how his brand would translate nationally: he had been denied a visa by the U.S. State Department for “severe violations of religious freedom” during a pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat that took place when he was the state’s chief minister. But he ran a campaign that focussed enough on economic discontent to allow commentators and many voters to believe that he would not allow ethnic violence to get in the way of his fiscal agenda; others were simply glad to vote for a man who had put Muslims in what they deemed to be their proper place.
Once in power, Modi’s party rescinded the special autonomy of Kashmir, the only majority-Muslim state in India after Partition, and the scene of harsh repression. His government also passed a citizenship bill that discriminates against Muslims. (It is in the process of being implemented.) Modi’s economic record, meanwhile, has garnered much praise from business élites in India and abroad, but job growth has been disappointing and wages have been stagnant. His rhetoric during this campaign—perhaps he was sensing tighter margins—grew increasingly heated, with talk of Muslim “infiltrators” and false claims that the Congress Party planned to give away Hindus’ personal belongings.
In January, in the northern town of Ayodhya, Modi theatrically inaugurated a Hindu temple built on the site of a mosque that had been destroyed, in 1992, by a mob that included members of the B.J.P. and the R.S.S. The new temple’s opening, which became a media event, was seen by many observers as both a symbolic and a literal victory for Modi’s brand of politics. Last week, however, Ayodhya’s legislative seat was won by a Dalit candidate from a secular party, proving that Modi’s political dominance could be countered even where it had appeared to triumph. A quarter century ago, the Indian scholar Sunil Khilnani wrote that, whereas India was “once a society structured by stable hierarchies,” it had become “the most intensely political society in the world.” He added, “Politics at once divides the country and constitutes it as a single, shared, crowded space, proliferating voices and claims and forcing negotiation and accommodation.” What this election revealed is that this type of politics still survives in India—and remains worth fighting for, in India and beyond. ♦
