India's Narendra Modi and Indian democracy

With the EU Parliament elections going on through Sunday (May 9), there will be a lot of news and speculation around what the results mean.

India just had a national election with the results that Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost seats. Modi will remain as Prime Minister. But he will have to rely on a coalition to form the new government.

Full results from India’s marathon election, which began in mid-April, were released Wednesday. The BJP won 240 seats, well below the 272 needed for a majority in a stunning outcome. Together, the parties in the NDA [National Democratic Alliance] coalition bagged 293 seats in the 543-member lower house of parliament. (1)

Given that Modi’s government has show authoritarian tendencies with his ethnonationalist-Hindu politics, the loss of his seats at least indicates his support is slipping.

CBS News report on the India election (2):

But whatever level of “populist” appeal his ethnonationalist pitch has, his policies have certainly not been focused on reducing the power and influence of India’s oligarchic elites:

A few weeks before the election that weakened Narendra Modi’s grip on India, the rich, powerful and beautiful descended on his home state of Gujarat. The occasion was what one Indian writer described as “likely the most ostentatious pre-wedding ceremony the modern world has ever seen”.

In March, to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of Anant Ambani, the youngest son of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump flew in. So did the entertainment: Rihanna and Akon. The airport near the venue was supposed to be reserved for India’s armed forces but the media reported that the authorities had granted special permission for non-military jets to land.

“When it comes to helping out his rich industrialist friends, prime minister Modi is willing to do anything,” Jairam Ramesh, a leading opposition politician, posted on X at the time.

After a decade in power that has, according to a recent study, left 40% of wealth in the hands of 1% of the population, the inequality that Modi’s favoured tycoons personify may help explain the shock loss of his majority in parliament this week. [my emphasis] (3)

In this case seems to illustrate that economic issues like radical concentration of wealth, those issues for which TINA (There Is No Alternative) are supposed to apply in the neoliberal gospel, may actually matter in India. A lot.

India still obviously has competitive elections in which the ruling party is not guaranteed to win. “About 642 million voters cast their ballots [in the India election] in the staggered seven-phase polling over six weeks, the largest election in history.” (4)

With nearly 970 million people eligible to vote in the 2024 elections, India has once again broken its own record. The 2019 elections had 900 million registered voters, with a turnout of 67% – which means 615 million people cast their ballots in a single election. (5)

Those numbers are worth recalling if the US ever comes around again to seriously considered switching to a nationwide popular vote for President. The difficulty of counting that many votes are one of the arguments always brought up against the idea. But if India can manage with 970 million eligible voters, the US can surely find a way to pull it off with only a fraction of that many voters, around 240 million in 2020 with 66% or so actually voting that year..

Chietigj Bajpaee writing for Chatham House also judges that economic performance issues were central to Modi’s reduced vote this year:

While the BJP government had tried to leverage India’s rising global status and its Hindu nationalist credentials during the election campaign, local livelihood issues ultimately proved decisive for voters.

The BJP’s often divisive Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) rhetoric failed to resonate in large parts of the country, particularly those with a more cosmopolitan and secular outlook, and parts of the country with strong regional identities, such as the south, as well as with India’s religious minorities.

Its messaging on the economy, promoting India as the world’s fastest growing major economy, also fell flat in a country facing high levels of inequality and youth unemployment. Although India is seen as a potential beneficiary of the West’s push to de-risk or diversify supply chains away from China, manufacturing as a share of GDP has stalled while foreign investment inflows have declined. (6)

Shruti Kapila sees Modi's results this year as a real setback for his authoritarian project: "The scale of Modi’s loss may appear meagre – his vote share dropped from 37.4 per cent to 36.6 per cent – but its effect is monumental." And: "Overnight, the pall of suffocation created by a decade of Modi’s strongman style, which demanded total obedience to him and his authority, has lifted." (7)

Despite the current US and European narratives about democracy vs. autocracy on the world scene, the US Democrats have exactly treated Modi as being on the Other Side of that dichotomy from the US. Liza Featherston noted in 2023:

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who is on a state visit to the White House this week, is one of the most significant far-right leaders in the world. His persecution of religious minorities has troubled even the US State Department, which has taken note of the problem in its annual Religious Freedom Report. His administration has passed discriminatory laws against Muslims that have helped lead to a horrifying rise in violence against Muslims in India. Modi has also jailed journalists and activists and attempted to use the judicial system to suppress a BBC documentary critical of him. He was denied a US visa for years because of his role in a 2002 anti-Muslim riot in which more than a thousand people, mostly Muslims, were slaughtered. [my emphasis] (8)

Avantika Chilkoti in the CBS report above also mentions this balancing consideration.

Biden in 2023 praised Modi’s democratic credentials rather enthusiastically:

During their joint appearance Thursday, President Biden not only did not mention any of the human rights problems with Modi’s regime, he heaped explicitly misleading praise upon it.

“Equity under the law, freedom of expression, religious pluralism, diversity of our people — these core principles have endured and evolved,” said Biden, in direct opposition to the evidence about Modi’s record, “even as they have faced challenges through both our nations’ histories.” (Featherstone)

As power-balancing goes, we can give Biden credit for realizing that he needs to have good enough relations with India to be a balancing element against China. The same power-balancing logic would indicate that the US should be working to dial back tensions with Russia. But the Biden Administration hasn’t approach Russia with the same set of priorities.

Still, democracy does matter, however much it may complicate the power-balancing game. And Narendra Modi has not been a great friend of it.

Notes:

(1) Pathi, Krutika (2024): India’s Modi elected as leader of coalition and set to form new government. AP News 06/08/2024. <https://apnews.com/article/india-modi-bjp-nda-lok-sabha-election-parliament-bf7dfcb6149c127892d5201f147fad3a> (Accessed: 2024-08-06).

(2) What India's election results mean for Modi. CBS News YouTube channel 06/06/2024. <https://youtu.be/o05bThzCP_Q?si=WOHeqFdjLPHhO-Yv> (Accessed: 2023-23-06).

(3) Burgis, Tom (2024): Muted election win for Modi may usher in new era for India’s oligarch class. Guardian 06/07/2024. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/07/muted-election-win-for-modi-may-usher-in-new-era-for-indias-oligarch-class> (Accessed: 2023-23-06).

(4) Kiyada, Sudev & Katakam, Anand (2024): How India conducted the world's largest election. Reuters 06/06/2024. <https://www.reuters.com/graphics/INDIA-ELECTIONS/gdpzmqgrmvw/> (Accessed: 2024-08-06).

(5) Jacinto, Leela (2024): India’s mammoth elections: Nearly a billion voters, 44 polling days. France 24 04/13/2024. <https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20240413-india-s-mammoth-elections-nearly-a-billion-voters-44-polling-days> (Accessed: 2024-08-06).

(6) Bajpaee, Chietigj (2024): India’s shock election result is a loss for Modi but a win for democracy. Chatham House 06/06/2024. <https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/06/indias-shock-election-result-loss-modi-win-democracy> (Accessed: 2024-08-06).

(7) Kapila, Shruti (2024): India chooses political instability over Modi New Statesman 06/05/2024. <https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/06/india-election-chooses-political-instability-over-narendra-modi> (Accessed: 2024-08-06).

(8) Featherston, Liza (2023): Why Did Democrats Embrace th eFar-Right Narendra Modi? Jacobin 06/23/2023.<https://jacobin.com/2023/06/narendra-modi-democrats-biden-far-right-bjp-state-visit-human-rights> (Accessed: 2023-23-06).

Tulsi Gabbard and the left

The 2020 Presidential primary race in the Democratic Party effectively started the day after Election Day 2018. The mainstream press seems to be looking for stories to bash the leading progressive candidates Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbert. For the more centrist candidates, not so much. That will come, though, sooner rather than later. Politics is politics.

I've been following some of the recent criticisms of Gabbard from left perspectives. Here is a Jacobin from 2017 (so maybe a bit dated in terms of the 2020 race) article that, as the title indicates, takes a dim view of her record: Branko Marcetic, Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend 05/26/2017. It puts a lot of stress on her anti-LGBT record in the past, which The Young Turks segment below also addresses.

Michael Brooks on his podcast show named for himself, The Michaael Brooks Show, stresses his concerns about her shortcomings form a left viewpoint in a sensible evaluation of her record, Is Tulsi Gabbard Far Right? Chris Matthews Impressions. (TMBS 72) 01/12/2019:

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian looked at Gabbard's record and the criticisms directed at her, with particular reference to her record on LGBT issues. While recognizing real left concerns about Gabbard, they stress here the need for a critical attitude toward the dim view that the corporate media take of progressive candidates. Tulsi Gabbard Attacked For Anti-Gay Past The Young Turks 01/14/2018:

My biggest concern about her from what I know is her fondness for the Indian Prime Minister since 2014 Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist leader in his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). As Marcetic recounts, Modi has promoted Islamophic notions, as has Gabbard:

... most appalling was his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the western state of Gujarat, which left one thousand people dead, nearly eight hundred of whom were Muslims. Modi was the state’s chief minister at the time and has long been accused of allowing the riots to happen, with a former senior police officer testifying in 2011 that Modi said the night before the riots that Muslims needed to be taught a lesson.

Despite all of this, Gabbard has been one of Modi’s most prominent boosters in the US. “He is a leader whose example and dedication to the people he serves should be an inspiration to elected officials everywhere,” she said of Modi in 2014.

For about a decade, the United States refused to give Modi a visa to travel to the US in light of his involvement in the Gujarat riots. For Gabbard, this was a “great blunder,” and she later told the press that “there was a lot of misinformation that surrounded the event in 2002.” She personally congratulated Modi on his 2014 election, and was later involved in organizing his first trip to the US. She also met two BJP leaders who had visited the United States beforehand, and spoke alongside them at an event in Atlanta. [my emphasis; internal links not included]

Marcetic also argues that Gabbard's anti-interventionism in foreign policy may have a lot in common with isolationist-nationalist assumptions, including opposing the Iran nuclear agreement.

Zaid Jilani wrote on The curious Islamophobic politics of 2020 presidential candidate contender congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in AlterNet back on 02/23/2015:

To the media, Gabbard is a curious spectacle. She’s a Hawaii Democrat, coming from one of the nation’s most progressive and dovish chapters of the Democratic Party, but she’s also an Iraq war veteran, and she’s consistently tried to outflank President Obama and the rest of her party to the right on foreign affairs. Last month she openly mocked Secretary of State John Kerry during an appearance on CNN, saying that he thinks, “if we give them [Islamic extremists] $10,000 and give them a nice place to live that somehow they’re not going to be engaged in this fighting.”

To Gabbard, the fact that Syria and Iraq have been through years of brutal civil war, wrecked economies and massive displacement is irrelevant; the only reason they have an extremism problem is because of Islamic theology.

But the case of Tulsi Gabbard becomes less curious and more expected once you look at her links to a different set of ethnic and religious hardliners: the Hindu nationalist Indian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since her election to Congress, Gabbard has tied herself closely to this party, which has a history of condoning hatred and violence against India’s Muslim minority. Many of her stateside donors and supporters are also big supporters of this movement, which disdains secularism and promotes religious sectarianism.

In a current piece, Akbar Shahid Ahmed writes on Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 Plan Threatens The New Left Foreign Policy Of Sanders And Warren Huffington Post 01/11/2019.