Modi’s electoral setback

There was tremendous euphoria, a little bit of which was legitimate, after the Indian elections, which were a setback for the Hindu nationalist BJP and its leader the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The opposition INDIA bloc—led by the Indian National Congress—did not win as big a victory as they had projected, but the elections were a big blow to the BJP and its right-wing allies of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The BJP lost its single-party majority. The NDA as a whole won only a thin majority. Far from being wiped out, Congress bounced back stronger. The party gained seats despite contesting in fewer constituencies compared to 2019, thanks to its alliances and savvy campaign strategy.

Back in 2014, the BJP won a parliamentary majority on its own, taking 282 seats, while the NDA overall took 336 (out of 543). In 2019, the BJP won 303 seats and the NDA 353. In this year’s election, NDA won 293, giving them a majority, but BJP won only 240 seats and will depend on the support of its coalition allies to stay in power.

These elections were the least democratic in Indian history. The state apparatus, including the anti-corruption branch, political police, and tacitly the Election Commission of India (which refused to take action against the prime minister despite his aggressive Hindu-chauvinist campaign), were all pressed into service. The bulk of the mainstream media were likewise all out for the NDA, with particular stress on Modi and how he was going to get an immense victory.

The election results

The Indian political scene can get complicated, with six national parties and dozens of state parties. Alliances shift frequently during election season. Today’s NDA is not the NDA of 2019, and the INDIA bloc is an entirely new formation.

Table 1 gives the election results for parties in the NDA in 2019 and 2024.

• In Punjab in 2019, the Shiromani Akali Dal was a member of NDA, but in 2021, this BJP ally since 1996 broke with them over the farm laws, which were being strongly resisted by farmers in the states of Punjab, Haryana and in western Uttar Pradesh.
• In Andhra Pradesh in 2019, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) was not a member of NDA, but in 2024, the alliance’s parliamentary majority rests critically on TDP support.
• In Maharashtra, in 2019, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) was with Congress, but the BJP engineered a split. A pro-BJP faction retained the official party symbol and recognition. Meanwhile, Shiv Sena, a Hindutva-infused Marathi-chauvinist party, and a longtime ally of BJP, allied this time with Congress and NCP. Here too BJP arranged a split and the Shinde faction got the party symbol thanks to the Election Commission and its blatant partiality.

The newly-formed INDIA bloc was complicated too, thanks to some infighting. (Table 2 shows the 2019 and 2024 results for the twenty parties that came together as the INDIA bloc in 2024. In 2019 these parties did not constitute a common bloc.) The bloc argued that the best chance of defeating the BJP in India’s First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system lay in one-on-one contests. They were right to a large extent, but this had a potentially damaging impact on the Left, which we discuss below.

The biggest blow to the BJP’s project of emerging as the single dominant party in North India came in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and to a lesser extent in Bihar.

• In Uttar Pradesh in 2019, the BJP and its allies had won 64 seats. Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won 10 seats, Samajwadi Party (SP) 5, and Congress won just one seat. In 2024, the BJP got 33 and its allies 3 seats, SP got 37, Congress 6. In another significant defeat for BJP, the dalit (lowest caste) lawyer-activist Azad Samaj Party leader Chandrashekhar Azad won with over 51 percent of the votes cast.
• In Maharashtra, to break up the Congress-Shiv Sena-NCP alliance, BJP used state agencies to target their leaders and tried to split them by offering them plum positions. However, the electoral mandate was a loud rejection, with 30 out of 48 seats in Maharashtra going to the INDIA bloc.
• In Bihar in 2019, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led Mahagatbandhan (Grand Alliance), of which the Congress was a part, had put up candidates in 39 seats out of 40 and won only 1. The Left Front had put up candidates in 17 seats and won none, with CPI(ML)-Liberation putting up a strong fight in Arrah with RJD support. In 2024, the INDIA bloc included most of these parties, including the Left, and the bloc projected itself strongly. In the event INDIA bloc won 9 (RJD 4, Congress 3 and CPI(ML)-Liberation 2), while BJP and allies won 30. Thus, BJP failed to hold on to its 2019 gains.

Two states where the NDA made deep inroads were Odisha, where it trounced the Biju Janata Dal, and Andhra, where the TDP led the alliance.

The Left fared poorly

In West Bengal, the Left Front (CPI-M, CPI, Forward Bloc and Revolutionary Socialist Party) formed an alliance with Congress and opposed both BJP and the provincial right-wing Trinamool Congress (TMC) (which is inclined towards the INDIA bloc outside West Bengal). Out of 42 seats in West Bengal, TMC won 29, BJP 12, Congress 1 and the left parties none. However, a comparison with 2019 shows a distinct improvement in the position of the Left. It is also likely that, given recent popular anger at the TMC, the anti-incumbency vote was pulled quite a bit in the direction of the Congress-Left alliance.

Table 3 shows the results in West Bengal in 2019 and 2024. The seeming drop in left votes, especially CPI(M) votes, needs to be set off against the fewer seats contested. But the other three left front partners fared very badly. Nevertheless, in nearly a dozen seats, CPI(M) votes are above TMC’s margin with BJP. This seems to suggest that had the Left not put up a strong fight, many more anti-TMC votes would have gone to the BJP.

In Kerala, for the second time, Congress and its allies trounced the rival Left Democratic bloc. The Left Democratic Front put up 20 candidates and won only 1: by the CPI(M). In the city of Thrissur, with well over 400,000 votes, BJP won a seat for the first time.

Our perspective

When faced with a strong right-wing party or alliance, the Left is often tempted to form a stable bloc with so-called center-left parties, especially within an FPTP system. But the Congress and several other parties that are currently in or supporting the INDIA bloc are far from even being centrist, as we will discuss further below.

Indian big capital and its hired economists, management specialists, and media persons have been saying that labor laws must change, that industry must get greater flexibility, that big capital must get full access to agriculture. As we have argued in Radical Socialist, Congress had tried all of these with partial success, but in Modi’s second term, the BJP made a decisive push on this same agenda.

We also argued that a fight against fascism in collaboration with bourgeois liberals, many of them quite right wing, would mean dropping even basic democratic demands. A bloc where the focus will be on removing the BJP “at any cost,” while “other things” come later, will be a bloc that silences or marginalizes the demands of workers, peasants, various oppressed groups, ethnic, linguistic, religious, gender-sexual minorities. While the politics of such a bloc moves in a rightward direction, the definition of a “realist” left will correspondingly shift, in order to increase by a few the meager tally of the left parties.

Yet, even with bloc formation, it is significant that out of the nine MPs of the left parties, seven come from areas where the Left has fought on its own for years. The CPI-M won four seats, of which two are from Tamil Nadu in industrial/industrializing areas where the CPI-M and its trade union wing CITU have been seriously active. Amra Ram in Rajasthan, who won the Sikar parliamentary seat, is a prominent farmer leader known for his advocacy of farmers’ rights. The CPI(ML)-Liberation has had a long history of participation in and leadership of mass struggles in Bihar, where it won its two seats. While bloc formation may have helped with votes, the primary factor was the party’s own social base. The two seats of the CPI are likewise from Tamil Nadu and again, while DMK (Dravidian Progressive Federation) support was important, the existence of a real social base needs to be understood.

By contrast, the campaigns in West Bengal do not base themselves on mass struggles as much as on hopes for anti-incumbency, as well as constant claims about what 34 years of Left Front government (1977–2011) had done.

The meaning of the election results

Narendra Modi as BJP leader and the BJP as a key element in the RSS combine had the following agenda:

1. Establish the ideological dominance of Hindutva. Regardless of whether one calls it fascist, neo-fascist, or post-fascist with a strong kinship with Zionism, Hindutva is a far-right-wing nationalism based on hatred directed at certain Others and the quest for a religio-culturally homogeneous “nation.” Achieving this involves imposing firm control over education and the mass media, and institutionalizing Hindutva ideology.
2. Bring under control all other political parties where possible; where not possible, break them apart or destroy them somehow.
3. Control and subvert the judiciary, the civil service bureaucracy, and the military. Empty the content of democracy and federalism while claiming to uphold the Constitution.
4. Push ahead with the RSS agenda of Hinduising civil society with violence against Muslims, atheists, and rationalists.

The election results have demonstrated the limits of the second item on this list. The INDIA bloc has been able to severely shake the apparently unchallengeable power of BJP and of Modi’s personality. It was able to shift the conversation to the Constitution and to aspects of the economy, thereby weakening the appeal of the BJP. As a result, far from crossing 400 (as projected by Modi and Amit Shah in their campaign speeches), NDA lost seats.

Over the last two decades the BJP has used its alliances with regional parties to eat away at their bases and party structures. But now the BJP has to put on hold, or maybe even roll back, its project of further destroying what remains of India’s federal structure, because of its new dependence on the votes of regional parties such as Janata Dal (United) and Telegu Desam Party.

On the other hand, by moving to a more collaborative politics, often giving the regional parties senior status at the state level, Congress has managed to overcome much of the animosity regional parties had towards it.

The elections have shown that the BJP’s drive to a homogenized Hindutva politics faces challenges that are not only federalist but economic and social as well. Economic hardships have grown, and this election saw economic issues become much more important, despite Modi’s recurrent attempts to frame them as “communal”—i.e. religious or ethnic—issues. Unemployment has grown, and has been hitting badly not only the poor, but substantial parts of the middle-income population, especially the youth. Both Modi’s BJP, and his rivals, like the TMC in West Bengal, have been attempting modes of small-scale financial aid, or what can be called compensatory neoliberalism. At times it has been successful, as with the West Bengal TMC’s cash grants for women, students completing schooling, etc. But the central government’s policies overall have massively increased inequality.

Between 2014-15 and 2022-23, income inequality, already huge, became even more pronounced. A research paper by Thomas Piketty and Nitin Bharti said: “By 2022-23, top one percent income and wealth shares (22.6 percent and 40.1 percent) are at their highest historical levels and India’s top one percent income share is among the very highest in the world, higher than even South Africa, Brazil, and the US.” The 10,000 wealthiest individuals own an average of Rs. 22.6 billion in wealth (about $270 million)—16,763 times the country’s average—while the top 1 percent of the population possess an average of Rs. 54 million in wealth. (One dollar is currently equivalent to 84 rupees.)

Against this we must set the mass of the people of the country. ​An average Indian spends Rs. 3,773 per month in rural India and Rs. 6,459 in urban India. The average monthly food spending of an average rural and urban Indian was Rs. 1,750 and Rs. 2,530, respectively. At 2011-12 prices, the average monthly spending by rural and urban Indians has increased from Rs. 1,430 and Rs. 2,630 in 2011-12 to Rs. 2,008 and Rs. 3,510 in 2022-23. Even the top 5 percent of rural and urban Indians spend Rs. 10,501 and Rs. 20,824 on average in a month.

Socially, the Hindutva project repeatedly hits an internal contradiction. While it wants to show the Muslims above all as the Other, it is also a dominant-caste project. Its attempts to minimally “uplift” non-dominant castes paid some dividend in terms of increasing the Hindutva fold, but far from enough. Moreover, it is certain that with Modi stepping up the anti-Muslim rhetoric during the elections, Muslims firmed up in voting for anti-BJP candidates, choosing the one most likely to win. The BJP gets its best support from the dominant castes and faces the contradiction between keeping this base and extending and stabilizing a base among the oppressed castes.

The immediate prospects

While liberal journalists and commentators have made much about the shifting equation between the RSS and BJP, it does not mean much from a secular-democratic and leftist perspective. In the last decade, while pursuing the RSS agenda, Modi has made it clear that he and his immediate circle call the shots, not the RSS. With the decline in his electoral fortunes, the RSS has clearly been trying to reassert itself. But this is a set of tactical moves within the same extreme right camp. We don’t see it having much significance for our work on the Left at this time.

There are areas where the BJP is unlikely to change gears. There are areas where internal conflicts are already developing. There are areas where challenges will mount.

Clearly, BJP cannot eliminate or control all opposition, but the repressive machinery is not going to slow down. Amit Shah remaining in control of the Home Ministry isn’t just a gesture of defiance to the allies but signals continuing repression, as shown by the nod to move against author Arundhati Roy in a case based on the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act—India’s primary counterterrorism law). But any action needing parliamentary sanction will become difficult. These include Modi’s push to impose common elections for Parliament and State Assemblies (One Nation, One Election), or the push for the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Modi’s government has hollowed out the institutions of democracy and curtailed civil liberties, with only sporadic resistance from opposition parties. The Supreme Court has over a decade bent quite a bit in the saffron (Hindutva) direction; the Election Commission has become blatantly partisan; and new criminal laws that make India more of a police state are coming into force this year. They will not be opposed by the new partners of the BJP. We will have to wait and see if the INDIA bloc led by Congress will launch mass mobilizations and public resistance against them.

In the field of education, the drive for privatization and for Hindutva-isation are both likely to proceed. Many of the INDIA bloc parties have adapted to soft Hindutva and are unlikely to fight very strongly in this matter. Also, while central funding for state universities has been drying up, many regional parties care little about education. As these funds dry up, it is the bright-looking new private universities that will step into the breach.

The Indian tilt toward Israel began with the Congress so there is unlikely to be any strong challenge on this domain. India has become a recruiting ground for laborers to replace Palestinians. While reports are already coming in about a big gap between the wages and living conditions promised and those actually given (leaving aside the ethics of supporting Israel) the Modi government is trying to get more Indians to work in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The lining up against Putin also shows that India has decided, given the global situation, that rupee-rouble trade etc. matter far less than a firm alignment with the United States. Moreover, none of the NDA partners have any interest in foreign policy, so here, short of a mass movement (which is not in the horizon), there can be little doubt that the BJP will make all decisions.

The elections have, however, punctured Modi’s aura of invincibility. They have opened up a space, and it is for independent mass mobilisations to show how much we can resist the BJP. We should prioritize mass demonstrations in support of Arundhati Roy and Dr Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a former professor in international law at the Central University of Kashmir, both of whom are being threatened today. Trade unions must mobilize for strikes and work stoppages against the labor laws. The farmers’ movement showed that Modi can be successfully resisted. Combining parliamentary and extra-parliamentary means, the left has to try and push back harder.

Featured image credit: Trump White House Archive; modified by Tempest.

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